Iowa House panel advances bill limiting release of police mugshots

Police mugshots would not be immediately released to the public in Iowa under a bill passed Tuesday by a subcommittee in the Iowa House.
House File 47 would restrict the dissemination of booking photos from law enforcement agencies after a person has been arrested until they have been convicted of the crime for which they were arrested. There are some exceptions to this restriction, largely centered on when releasing the photo would serve a public safety interest, like when an individual in the photo is a fugitive, if the release would help law enforcement apprehend the person or if they pose a threat to another specific person or to the public.
Proposals curtailing the public posting of mugshots have been brought up in previous legislative sessions. In 2024, the House Public Safety Committee passed a similar measure that did not receive a hearing on the House floor. Rep. Bill Gustoff, R-Des Moines, said he came back with the bill this session because it would ensure people who are arrested are judged “in the court of law, not the court of public opinion.”
Several lobbyists spoke in favor of the legislation, saying that many people who are arrested for crimes face major problems because of the release of their mugshots, even if they are not ultimately convicted of the crime. Lisa Davis-Cook with the Iowa Association for Justice gave the example of her daughter’s former classmate who was arrested for public intoxication and who had his mugshot photo distributed and shared on social media.
“Here you have a 19-year-old kid, and that photo is going to follow him for a really, really long time,” Davis-Cook said. “Because what happens is these photos get published on the web, then you have data mining companies who come and pick them up, publish them on Facebook, publish them on other websites. And you have someone who may pay one website to have their photo taken down, and then it pops up on another site. So they’re playing Whack-a-Mole with trying to get these photos taken down.”
While speakers all supported the intent behind the bill, there were specific changes recommended. Lobbyists suggested requiring that photos are released when the specified exemptions occur, rather than leaving it up to the discretion of a judge or another authority, and questioned whether there was a need for photos to be released post-conviction for non-violent, lower classes of crimes or drug offenses.
Several lobbyists also said the bill’s language was unclear on when booking photos could be shared within the law enforcement or courts systems — such as whether law enforcement agencies would be allowed to share mugshots with other jurisdictions, or if photos could be used for identification purposes in charging documents.
Doug Struyk, representing RELX Inc., the company that owns LexisNexis, also said the language could pose an issue for law enforcement agencies by limiting their ability to use third-party services like LexisNexis, a legal research and database service. Booking photos are included in LexisNexis’ database, he said, and asked for a carve-out in the language to allow for third-party vendors working with law enforcement to retain access to booking photos.
“(We want) to make sure that this language is not unintentionally broad to get in the way of law enforcement sharing that information with a third-party data provider that, again, is only providing that information to law enforcement agencies behind that wall … not sharing it publicly,” Struyk said. “This is for law enforcement, people who are especially credentialed to be able to get in and access it.”
The bill passed unanimously out of subcommittee. Gustoff said that he was amenable to the amendments suggested as the measure moved forward for consideration by the full Public Safety Committee.
“I think probably, most of those issues — if not all those issues — we can probably address,” Gustoff said.
