Cell Phone Photos on Craigslist--The New Shaming?

It’s been a busy first week of teaching—which, incidentally, has been tremendously fun—but I’ve been able to keep an eye on this story out of the NY Daily News, where a woman on the R train in Manhattan used her cell phone camera to record a subway flasher in the midst of his act. After the flasher fled, the woman published the photo online, generating much publicity for the guy. At least one other woman has come forward to say she recognizes the flasher as the same guy who flashed her in a subway station.

New York may have a unique history of these public flashers, who frequently do a lot more than just flash.

Michael Daly in today’s Daily News briefly surveys the unsavory history of subway flashers in New York, dating back to the origination of underground travel in the Great City. In my 11 years of criminal practice in New York, I represented plenty of these offenders and I’ve heard about nearly as many from female friends who unfortunately have encountered them in person. Some, like the guy photographed on the R train, look for victims isolated in places like empty subway cars and subway stations; others effectively employ New York’s human congestion in the subway system and elsewhere for easy and anonymous physical contact. Either way, these offenders cause serious harm to their victims. And Daly's sources are largely correct, I think, that many are otherwise “normal” men with jobs and families, and that traditional laws enforcement techniques often may do little to deter them.

Will public exposure and scorn through the internet succeed? It’s hard not to enjoy thinking of this guy, whose photo has been splashed all over the internet in apparent mid-stroke, sweating out every encounter with someone who might have seen him on-line and wondering whether his family has seen or heard of his ignominious photo. But the NYPD, commenting on this case, encouraged woman to use their cell phone cameras whenever safely possible. Apart the obvious evidentiary value of such photographs to the police—especially with an offender who remains at large—is victim-initiated public shaming through the internet good policy that should be encouraged?

Daly thinks it is. According to the original Daily News article, the woman who published the photo said, “He made me feel creepy … I want to embarrass him.” Certainly an understandable response. And, Daly encourages other women to do the same with their cell phone cameras, arguing that the threat of public exposure is the best way to deter these offenders. Does victim-initiated public shaming have a special retributive or deterrent force that government-sponsored shaming cannot achieve, particularly with crimes like public flashing? Or is it too vulnerable to abuse and inaccuracy in a public forum—the internet—that may produce irrevocable harm to anyone who is falsely accused?