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It’s a difficult balance. On one hand, privacy is important. On the other hand, visibility into the system is an important check on the power of law enforcement. It’s especially important for arrests; you really, really do not want the police to be allowed to secretly jail people. But it’s important for other things too. In this example, if the police were using rollerblading citations as a way to harass a certain group of people, it’s good to have access to that information to be able to discover this.



The solution is to make summary statistics available to the public but no names.

Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for rollerblading without listing the names of those affected.


So you're saying I should have paid the fine and had the charge recorded, creating a criminal record for myself?


Not in the least. I’m just saying there are good reasons for everything that did happen to be public record. (And some good reasons for privacy. There’s a conflict and a balance to be found.)




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