About America's Top Mugshots

Most people arrive here for one of a few reasons, and the site is shaped around them. Families and friends come looking for someone who has just been booked, trying to learn where they are and what comes next; for them we keep a dedicated guide to finding a relative and checking custody, court dates, and bond. The person named in a record comes to understand what is showing publicly and how to correct or remove it. Members of the public and the press come to look up a specific local event that is already a matter of record.

What the site is not for matters just as much. It is not a background-check service, and it must not be used to decide who gets a job, an apartment, a loan, or insurance. Those uses are governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and we are not a consumer reporting agency. Treating a booking photo as a verdict about someone’s character is exactly the misreading these pages are written to prevent.

Every listing begins as a public record. Sheriffs’ offices, county jails, and other government bodies release booking information — names, dates, the offense recorded at intake, and in many places the booking photo — and we gather that material and organize it so it can be searched by name, state, county, and date. We are downstream of those sources, not the origin of the data, which shapes both what we can show and how current it can be.

Because the information passes through several hands before it reaches us, it can lag, contain transcription errors, or reflect a moment that a court later changed. For that reason we always treat the original government source — the county roster or the clerk-of-court file — as the authority, and we encourage anyone verifying a detail to check it there. When a record here disagrees with the official record, the official record wins, and that is precisely the kind of mismatch our correction process exists to fix.

A correction is for a listing that should stay up but has something wrong with it — a misspelled name, the wrong person, an offense recorded inaccurately, or an outcome that has since changed. You do not need to prove a case was dismissed to ask for a factual fix; you need to tell us what is inaccurate and, where possible, point us to the official record that shows the correct information. A family member can raise a correction on someone’s behalf.

Every correction request is read by a person, weighed against the source record, and answered — there is no fee, and you do not need a lawyer to start. The step-by-step requirements and the timeline live on our removal-and-correction page, which is the single place we keep that process documented so it never drifts out of sync with what we actually do.

Removal is different from a correction: it takes a listing down entirely. We prioritize removals where a court has expunged or sealed the record, where charges were dismissed or ended in acquittal, where the listing is a case of mistaken identity, or where keeping it up would do clear harm out of proportion to any public interest. Valid legal documentation — an expungement order, a certificate of dismissal, or similar — is the fastest path, and identity verification protects against someone removing a record that is not theirs.

As with corrections, removal is free, a real person handles each request, and the detailed criteria, the documents that help, and how long review takes are all spelled out on the removal-and-correction page rather than summarized loosely here. Pointing both processes to one canonical page is deliberate: it keeps our promises consistent everywhere they appear on the site.

The single idea this platform is built around is that a booking record documents an accusation, not a result. An arrest means an officer alleged an offense; it does not mean a prosecutor pursued it, a judge agreed, or a jury decided anything. Charges are routinely reduced, declined, or dropped once the case is examined, and a great many listings reflect events that never became convictions at all.

We say this on the record, in the records themselves, and on a guide devoted to what a listed charge actually means and how it tends to change between arrest and court. If you take one thing from this site, take that: read every listing as a starting point to verify, never as a settled judgment about the person in the photo.

How information is framed changes how it is read, so we hold the writing to rules. We describe offenses in neutral, factual language and avoid words that imply guilt or invite ridicule. We do not rank people by how “bad” an allegation sounds, attach mocking labels, or dress public records up as entertainment at someone’s expense. Where a page explains the law or a process, we aim to be accurate and current rather than padded.

We also keep our commercial interests away from our editorial ones. We do not charge for removal, and we do not let the promise of a fee shape whether a record stays up. These standards are not decoration; they are the difference between a useful public-record resource and a site that profits from humiliation, and we have written elsewhere, at length, about why we refuse to be the second kind.

Because the site lets the community rate listings, the features around that have to be designed against abuse. Rating requires an account and is limited to a single vote per person per record, which takes the air out of coordinated pile-ons and vote manipulation. We do not run open comment threads on individual records, removing the most common vector for targeted cruelty, and we provide a clear way to report anything that crosses a line.

Targeted harassment, doxxing, or any attempt to use a listing to threaten or intimidate a real person is treated as grounds for removal and, where appropriate, escalation. The goal of every safeguard is the same one that runs through this whole page: keep public information accessible and useful while refusing to let it become a weapon against the people it describes.

Is America’s Top Mugshots a government or law-enforcement site?

No. We are an independent platform that organizes booking information already published by county jails and other government sources. We do not arrest anyone, file charges, or decide cases, and we are not affiliated with any police department, court, or agency. We simply make public records easier to find and read, with context attached.

Do you charge people to remove their record?

No. Reviewing and, where warranted, removing or correcting a record is free, and we never ask anyone to pay to take a listing down. If a record about you is inaccurate, out of date, sealed, expunged, or from a case that was dismissed, you can submit a request at no cost and without hiring a lawyer to begin.

Can I use this site to screen a tenant, employee, or date?

No. We are not a consumer reporting agency, and the information here may not be used for employment, tenant, credit, insurance, or any decision covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Booking records are a starting point for understanding a public event, not a background check, and an arrest alone says nothing about whether a person did anything.

Where does the booking information come from?

It originates with public records released by sheriffs, jails, and other government bodies, which we aggregate and present in a searchable form. Because we depend on those upstream sources, the original record — the county roster or court file — is always the most authoritative place to confirm a detail, and we point people there whenever accuracy matters.

How do you keep the platform from being used to harass people?

Ratings require an account and are rate-limited to one vote per person per record, which blunts pile-ons and manipulation. We do not host open comment threads on records, we provide a reporting path for anything inappropriate, and we treat targeted harassment as grounds for removal. Our editorial rules are built to inform, not to humiliate.

• Understanding Criminal ChargesWhat a listed charge means, how it is classified, and how it can change.
• Help for Families & FriendsFind someone in custody and confirm court dates, bond, and charges.
• Request a Removal or CorrectionThe criteria, documents, and timeline for reviewing a record — free.
• Why We Don’t Shame AnyoneThe dignity stance behind how we publish public records.
• All ResourcesThe full index of guides and tools on the site.