A single booking photograph became one of the most talked-about images in Mobile this week, not because of the charge it carried, but because of the charge it did not. On Tuesday night, June 24, 2014, a mug shot pulled from the Mobile County Metro Jail began circulating on social media accompanied by a claim that the man pictured had been charged with practicing optometry without a license.
The image, shared on a Facebook page that reposts local arrest photos, drew a rapid response. By 12:45 p.m. Wednesday, more than 100 comments had piled up beneath the post. Yet of those 101 remarks, only two noted a crucial detail: the caption did not match the county’s own records.
What the records actually said
According to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, the man in the photo, 24-year-old Lamar Ronell Brown, had in fact been booked on a single count of second-degree possession of marijuana. There was no optometry charge. Nothing in the jail’s paperwork referenced the unlicensed practice of medicine or eye care of any kind.
Commenters, unaware of the discrepancy, reacted to the fictional charge with a mix of alarm and amusement. Several joked about never letting the man near their eyes, while others wondered aloud whether a person could really be arrested for what one described as playing doctor. The smiling expression in the photo only fueled the online chatter.
A case of ‘screen scrubbing’
Lori Myles, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, explained that the mistake almost certainly originated with the way the third-party page gathered its information. The site, she said, had been screen scrubbing the agency’s website, a practice in which an outside operator uses automated tools to pull booking data directly from the county’s public pages and republish it elsewhere.
The problem, Myles said, was that the automated grab did not reliably capture what the sheriff’s office was actually posting. As a countermeasure, the agency had begun scrambling some of the information on its site to discourage the practice.
“What they’re grabbing isn’t what we’re putting out there,” Myles said. “We warned them that when they kept doing this to our website we were going to scramble things. If you’re taking our information, you need to go back and make sure the information you’re getting is correct.”
She encouraged residents who wanted accurate, up-to-date information on recent arrests to consult the sheriff’s office directly rather than relying on secondhand reposts. “If you want to look at it all day, look at it all day,” she said of the official records.
The charges, and the penalties
The distinction mattered legally as well as reputationally. Under Alabama law, practicing optometry without a license is a misdemeanor that can carry a fine of up to $1,000. Second-degree possession of marijuana, the charge Brown actually faced, is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a maximum jail sentence of 12 months.
The episode offered a small but pointed lesson about the speed at which misinformation can travel online, particularly when it is stitched to a real photograph of a real person. A booking image lends an air of authenticity to whatever text accompanies it, and in this case the text was simply wrong.
By the time the correction filtered through the comment thread, the mislabeled post had already been seen by a wide audience. For the sheriff’s office, the incident reinforced a message it had been repeating to residents and to the operators of automated arrest pages alike: verify before sharing, because the caption is only as reliable as its source.