In law enforcement jargon, a suspect is a known person accused or suspected of committing a crime. Police and reporters in the United States often use the word suspect as a jargon when referring to the perpetrator of the offense. However, in official definition, the perpetrator is the robber, assailant, counterfeiter, etc.—the person who committed the crime. The distinction between suspect and perpetrator recognizes that the suspect is not known to have committed the offense, while the perpetrator—who may not yet have been suspected of the crime, and is thus not necessarily a suspect—is the one who did. The suspect may be a different person from the perpetrator, or there may have been no actual crime, which would mean there is no perpetrator.
The Smoking Gun is a website that posts legal documents, arrest records, and police mugshots on a daily basis. The intent is to bring to the public light information that is somewhat obscure or unreported by more mainstream media sources. Most of the site's content revolves around historical and current events, although it also features documents and photos relating to out-of-the-ordinary crimes and people.
A rogues' gallery is a police collection of mug shots or other images of criminal suspects kept for identification purposes.
Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified by name or photograph. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting.
A wanted poster is a poster distributed to let the public know of a person whom authorities wish to apprehend. They generally include a picture of the person, either a photograph when one is available or of a facial composite image produced by the police.
A perp walk, walking the perp, or frog march, is a practice in law enforcement of taking an arrested suspect, usually right after arrest, out in public, usually from the police station to the vehicle to the courthouse and then after the court hearing back to the vehicle, creating an opportunity for a media frenzy to take photographs and video of the event. The defendant is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is sometimes dressed in prison garb. Within the United States the perp walk is most closely associated with New York City. The practice rose in popularity in the 1980s under U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, when suspects charged with felonies were perp-walked.
A film still is a photograph, taken on or off the set of a movie or television program during production. These photographs are also taken in formal studio settings and venues of opportunity such as film stars' homes, film debut events, and commercial settings. The photos were taken by studio photographers for promotional purposes. Such stills consisted of posed portraits, used for public display or free fan handouts, which are sometimes autographed. They can also consist of posed or candid images taken on the set during production, and may include stars, crew members or directors at work.
A mug is a large cup with a handle.
Anthropological criminology is a field of offender profiling, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. Although similar to physiognomy and phrenology, the term "criminal anthropology" is generally reserved for the works of the Italian school of criminology of the late 19th century. Lombroso thought that criminals were born with detectable inferior physiological differences. He popularized the notion of "born criminal" and thought that criminality was a case of atavism or hereditary disposition. His central idea was to locate crime completely within the individual and divorce it from surrounding social conditions and structures. A founder of the Positivist school of criminology, Lombroso opposed the social positivism developed by the Chicago school and environmental criminology.
Forensic science holds the branch of forensic photography which encompasses documenting both suspected and convicted criminals, and also the crime scenes, victims, and other evidence needed to make a conviction. Although photography was widely acknowledged as the most accurate way to depict and document people and objects, it was not until key developments in the late 19th century that it came to be widely accepted as a forensic means of identification.
Eric J. Etheridge is an American journalist and photographer who was the initial editor, in 1995, of George, the magazine co-founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr.
The Barrow Gang was an American gang active between 1932 and 1934. They were well known outlaws, robbers, murderers, and criminals who, as a gang, traveled the Central United States during the Great Depression. Their exploits were known all over the nation. They captured the attention of the American press and its readership during what is sometimes referred to as the 'public enemy era'. Though the gang was notorious for the bank robberies they committed, they preferred to rob small stores or gas stations over banks. The gang was believed to have killed at least nine police officers, among several other murders.
Guerrillero Heroico is an iconic photograph of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda. It was captured on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba, at a memorial service for victims of the La Coubre explosion. By the end of the 1960s, the image, in conjunction with Guevara's subsequent actions and eventual execution, helped solidify the leader as a cultural icon. Korda has said that at the moment he shot the picture, he was drawn to Guevara's facial expression, which showed "absolute implacability" as well as anger and pain. Years later, Korda would say that the photograph showed Che's firm and stoic character. Guevara was 31 years old at the time the photograph was taken.
Myra is a 1995 large painting which is a reproduction of the mugshot of Myra Hindley shortly after she was arrested for her participation in the Moors murders and was created by Marcus Harvey in 1995. It was displayed at the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy of Art in London from 8 September to 28 December 1997.
Faces of Meth is a drug prevention project, run by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office in the U.S. state of Oregon. The project uses mug shots of repeat offenders to demonstrate the harmful and damaging effects of methamphetamine on its users. The idea for Faces of Meth began in 2004, when deputy Bret King of the Corrections Division Classification Unit used mug shots to identify individuals with a history of using methamphetamine. King and his co-workers collected images of people charged with crimes related to methamphetamine addiction to document the change in physical appearance over time due to the use of the drug. The project uses before and after mug shot photos to show the physical deterioration of the user as a result of using methamphetamine. The images were originally used in educational slideshow and video presentations delivered to students in Oregon high schools. This Faces of Meth drug prevention strategy has since become popular across the United States.
The three tramps are three men photographed by several Dallas-area newspapers under police escort near the Texas School Book Depository shortly after the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Since the mid-1960s, various allegations have been made about the identities of the men and their involvement in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The three men were later identified from Dallas Police Department records as Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Gedney.
Thirteen Most Wanted Men was a large 1964 mural created by Andy Warhol for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York. The mural was painted over with silver paint before the fair opened, probably due to official objections, but other reasons have been suggested.
Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders is a 2008 book by Eric Etheridge. The book features the life stories of over 80 of the Freedom Riders who fought to desegregate interstate bus transportation in the Deep South, and includes both their original mug shots and contemporary photographic portraits taken 45 or more years later by Etheridge. The mug shots had been stored for decades by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state "government agency formed in 1956 to oppose the Civil Rights Movement and the federal government". The preface was written by Roger Wilkins and the foreword by Diane McWhorter.
The mugshot publishing industry is a niche market of tabloid journalism in the United States. The industry consists of companies that publish mugshots and booking details of individuals arrested by law enforcement agencies. These companies publish the arrest information in tabloids, through local and multi-jurisdictional search websites. The related reputation management industry profits when individuals pay a fee to have their mugshot removed from one or more websites; often the same entity owns both the publishing site and the removal service, which has led to allegations of and lawsuits for extortionate practices and arrests of mugshot business owners on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and extortion. In 2018 the journal of the American Bar Association called the industry an "online extortion scheme."
On August 24, 2023, after being indicted on racketeering and related charges, Donald Trump, former president of the United States, voluntarily surrendered himself to authorities at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, where a mug shot of him was taken. In the photograph, Trump, wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and a red tie, glowers at the camera in front of a gray backdrop. His face is lit from the side and from above. It is the first and only police booking photograph of a U.S. president. After its publishing, the mug shot was used on merchandise by Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, in Internet memes, and featured on various media reports worldwide.
