In what I would call “a sign of the times” the people of Boscawen, NH are calling Police Chief Sean Sweeney “foul” for posting their mugshot photos on the world’s largest social networking site Facebook. But the Chief isn’t backing down because He says:

all arrest records, including mug shots, are public records.

Would you want your arrest photo to appear on Facebook, literally for the world to see?

FOX News Story

We wrote before about how New Jersey was charging upwards of $0.75 for each printed public record. Well they have seen the light to where the top cost for a letter sized document is $0.05 and $0.07 for legal sized documents. Bringing the proposed cost of a 100 page report down from $100 to less than $5 for the same amount of pages. Found it here.

So you know the PhotoFinder application you use on Facebook to tag yourself and friends in pictures? Well Facebook has been using face recognition technology to keep track of you and your friends, no big surprise. Here comes the surprise they also send this information to USA government databases and state police. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the next 2 – 3 years as Facebook and Face.com continue to compile the 500+ million users of the social network giant. Story found here.

The Chicago Tribune has a good story on how to start your search for public records. Among the story two good resources for sending letters to your state’s public records official.

My favorite one is first, clean interface & easy to use.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

The Student Press Law Center

The state of Conneticut has implemented a sex offender registry that allows the general public to look up sex offenders in their community. It came about when it was exposed that certain CT universities weren’t even asking prospective students if they had been ever convicted of a felony or crime. The problem is the students list Gateway Community College as their addresses which is required of sex offenders. Should colleges prevent students who have sex offender violations from attending university? Let me know in the comments.

Original Story

It seems as though there are alot of relatives in the Newark Police Department, Essex county prosecutors are looking into matters where police academy graduates who failed background checks were allowed to join the police force anyway. A unit who conducts the background checks recommended not hiring applicants with criminal histories some with felony convictions, although these individuals were still hired probably because of their relation to some of the higher authority officers.

But we’re not done, follow me along on this one so Newark west ward councilman Ronald Rice Jr heads a committee that tackles various police matters held a closed door session where he spoke with people that are familiar with the police graduates and their criminal records. Why closed door ? the witnesses in question were fearful of retaliation.

I encourage everyone to read the entire blog post as I only touched on some of it, and share it with a friend so we can all be a little more aware of who we put our trust in.