Over one-third of W.Va. police departments post people’s mugshots on social media. People say the practice has ruined their lives.
A Dragline survey shows 38 percent of departments in the state put images of people they’ve arrested on their social media accounts. Critics say it's a return to government-backed public shaming.
Aug. 25, 2022 • Written by Kyle Vass
When Jacob Napier was a little boy, he was full of energy but “very respectful and courteous to people,” said his mother, Teresa Napier.
“He was always offering to help,” she said. “Whenever I’d get home from the grocery store, he’d be waiting outside to help me unload the car.”
Around the time he began middle school, Teresa said Jacob started showing signs of social anxiety. By high school, the issues had gotten worse. So, he began taking medication and going to therapy.
Some days were better than others, Teresa said. But by 21, he was drinking to self-medicate, which she added, only made his mental health episodes more intense.
One night at his parents’ house in June 2021, Jacob picked a fight with his brother and threatened to kill himself. Teresa said it wasn’t the first time he talked about suicide. But her husband, who she said normally was the one to calm Jacob down, was out of town. Feeling helpless, Teresa called 911.
When Milton police arrived, the situation had calmed. But officers told Teresa, her other son and his girlfriend to write down everything that happened that night. Then, the police arrested Jacob on three counts of battery and began to take him away.
“I don’t want to file charges against my son,” Teresa remembers telling police. “I want to get him help. Please drop those charges.” She said police told her Jacob would be taken to Western Regional Jail and then transferred to a nearby hospital for help with his mental health.
But Jacob’s detainment was prolonged, she said, by the timing of the holiday weekend. “We couldn't get him out of jail because it was Fourth of July weekend. There was no one down at the courthouse. I left messages and messages, but no one called me back at all.”
During his time in jail, Jacob was never taken to a hospital. When reached for comment, a spokesperson with the WV Division of Corrections, which oversees all jails and prisons in the state, said the agency is “not the appropriate authority to decide if and when an inmate needs to be transferred from our custody to a mental health facility.”
According to a former mental health worker at the jail who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the protocol for anyone threatening suicide is to put them in solitary confinement for the duration of their stay. Jacob spent five days in solitary before being released to his parents.
Teresa said it is unclear whether Jacob received his psychiatric medicine while in jail. At the time of publication, Wexford Health, the private healthcare company that holds Jacob’s medical records, has not provided the family with his records despite multiple requests.
“He came home and he kind of apologized for doing all that,” Teresa said. “He and my husband got home late that evening because Jacob insisted on giving a ride to someone who got out of jail around the same time he did. He barely knew the guy but saw he needed help. That’s just who Jacob was.”
When he got home, Jacob took a shower and went to his room. When he came back out, he looked at his mom and dropped to the floor in shock. She asked him what was wrong. “Did you see my picture on the Milton Police Facebook page?” Jacob asked. She told him she had.
Sitting on the hallway floor, Jacob looked at his mom and told her, “My life is over.” Within six hours, it was.
Jacob’s father stayed up with him until 3 a.m., trying to keep his son calm. But “At 3:30 a.m. our other son came screaming and beating on our door saying, ‘There's blood everywhere. There's blood everywhere in the [garage].’”
His family had removed any guns and sharp objects from the house. But Jacob used his father’s crossbow to kill himself.
“We don’t blame the police for our son killing himself.” Teresa said, adding: “But I do have a problem with them posting these sorts of pictures on their Facebook account. This wasn’t something where the community was at danger. It was a family issue, not a public one.”
She said the police department posted her son’s mugshot on their page where anyone could comment, despite knowing Jacob was having a mental health crisis. To her, posting these pictures “is just a pat on the back for [the police].”
Teresa said a few weeks later, Milton Police Chief Joe Parsons deleted the post and called her to apologize. Too upset to speak with him, Teresa gave the phone to her husband who told the chief, “Okay. You deleted it. But what happens when it’s the next person?”
The Milton Police Department wouldn’t provide comment for this story. Chief Parsons did confirm that he runs the Facebook page and that his department is still treating the death as an open investigation and, as such, still hasn’t returned the crossbow to the Napier family.
The practice of posting pictures of people after they’ve been arrested is fairly common in West Virginia. Dragline surveyed 124 departments across the state and found 38 percent post these pictures to their social media accounts. The posts usually include a description of the arresting officer’s efforts and any confiscated property.
Dragline reached out multiple times to the 47 departments that were found to post these mugshots on their social media accounts. Seven responded with comment. But none of the departments that responded were able to provide or cite a written policy outlining the practice of sharing these images to social media.
Among the responses was Summers County Sheriff Justin Faris who defended the practice. “A lot of these are drugs cases we’ve posted. I’ve got people dying left and right from drug overdoses and I got family members wondering what we’re doing to combat this. So, I feel like this is an appropriate measure,” Faris said.
Faris said his department “usually only posts [mugshots of people arrested] for major felony offenses, adding that “it’s usually after confession.”
“Everybody’s presumed innocent until proven guilty. But, when I have an audio recorder and a confession, -- I mean, what are you going to dispute there?” he said.
According to a Marshall Project survey of exonerations, confessions given in police custody are often falsified, especially among people who suffer from mental illness. The report found there was a false confession of guilt in 72 percent of exonerations for people with a mental illness, including substance use disorder.
When asked about the potential consequences people face from having their mugshot posted on his department’s social media account, Faris said “I understand. But we keep ours short, sweet, and to the point. We don’t go into elaborate detail.”
But for every department that posts these mugshots, there are roughly two that don’t. Multiple chiefs of police interviewed for this story expressed disgust with the practice.
“When you get arrested, that's a low point.” Dunbar Police Chief Brian Oxley said. Chief Oxley said he doesn’t want to contribute to the problems a person faces when they get arrested.
“Some people make mistakes, and some people do stupid things during parts of their life,” he said. “What if you saw your picture on there and had to read those comments? That could send a person into a deep hole.”
When presented with an overview of Jacob’s story, Oxley said: “That’s one of the reasons I take the stance that I do about what we post and what we don't post. I don't want to be a part of a situation like that.”
Any organization publishing people’s pictures without their consent raises ethical and legal concerns for Ohio attorney Scott Ciolek.
“Using other people's picture to sell your services, whether you're in governmental services, or private sector services, you should be respectful of other people's rights,” Ciolek said.
Ciolek has successfully sued websites that posted mugshots and charged removal fees in Ohio. The key to that win, he said, was the fact that mugshot websites were profiting off other people’s likeness without their consent. To him, that’s what police departments are doing with these mugshots.
“If this law didn't exist, I could just go down the street and take a picture of a good-looking woman and throw it up on a billboard to market my restaurant,” he said. “Just because you took the picture doesn’t mean you have a copyright for that person’s likeness.”
Unlike Ohio, West Virginia doesn’t have laws protecting people’s right to publicity in its state code. But common law still grants people basic protection to prevent other people – including government agencies – from using someone’s likeness without their consent to advertise their services, he said.
“The purpose of [certain social media posts] is to garner attention. Whether you're running a small coffee shop and trying to get people to be aware of the new coffee you're selling. Or, if you're running a printing business or a law enforcement office. You want to create awareness about your services,” he said.
The responses offered by departments across the state – that they post these pictures to let the public know what they are doing – confirms for Ciolek that these social media posts are explicitly garnering publicity. Beyond recognition for a job well done, he explained, there are more practical reasons for these posts.
Municipal police departments, he said, rely on this publicity to justify ever-growing budget requests. Sheriffs rely on it for reelection. “What other purpose could they have for letting people know that they've arrested somebody?”
For Tyler Goodpaster, the shame that came with the Milton Police Department posting his mugshot cost him his job, several friends, and his position on his local volunteer fire department. “I used to have six to seven people that I talked to and hung out with nearly every day. Now, I’m down to like two or three people.”
Goodpaster was unaware that his former employer had filed charges against him until a former co-worker informed him months after the fact. When he found out, he called the Milton Police Department to see if he had any warrants out for his arrest. They confirmed he did, and Goodpaster arranged to turn himself in.
At the time he turned himself in for arrest, Goodpaster had a new job. He was working at an auto parts store and said he was in contact with his former employer about repaying the money he had taken from her. “But the police said the charges couldn’t be dropped.”
When he arrived at the station, he asked the arresting officer not to take his picture. After filling out some paperwork, “The officer pulled out his phone and told me to get up against the wall for a picture. I knew right then where that picture was going.”
He asked the officer again if he could avoid having his picture taken and posted on their Facebook page. “He told me [the pictures] are taken and posted at the discretion of the Chief.”
The moment his mugshot went up on social media, his life began to fall apart, he said. When he showed back up to work at the auto parts store “[my co-workers] already had the post pulled up and started showing me.” His manager read it aloud shortly before firing him.
Since losing his job, multiple businesses have turned him down for employment. “A few companies called back to tell me they weren’t hiring, “yet they got postings out on [a job listing website].” He added, “[One company] straight up told me I have a felony charge of forgery so they wouldn’t hire me, despite the fact I haven’t been indicted yet.” He attributed their knowledge of his arrest with the Facebook post.
To Scott Ciolek, the civil rights attorney, the publicity these departments garner is built on the backs of people like the Jacob Napier and Tyler Goodpaster who face a life of shame without ever being convicted or formally charged with a crime. This trend among police departments, he said, is a return to darker days of crime and punishment.
“Being publicly embarrassed has been outlawed in most states as a form of punishment since the 1800s,” he said. “It used to be a very popular form of punishment where people would have to sit in the stocks for a day and be embarrassed.”
With the fallout from this embarrassment ranging from the loss of friends to the loss of life, the legality of this practice ought to be made clear by the state legislature, said Ciolek. “Otherwise, there is a separation of powers issue. What authority do these departments have to embarrass people on their social media pages?”