zlacker

> is in violation of the law

It's not clear to me that this is true for all data about an arrest/charge.

Courts have upheld that arrest mugshots and fingerprints taken at jail intake time both can be retained by the law enforcement system even if the arrested person is exonerated (acquitted, charged dropped, etc).

>>thephy+(OP)
Retained, sure, but publicly-disseminated in a PII database? There are laws about handling sensitive data like that.

>>bsanr2+F1
There is also the need to not have secret arrests, so arrest records are public.

>>thephy+(OP)
Each jurisdiction differs on this dramatically. But the law enforcement system is quite different from some random GitHub repo.

>>srouss+z2
Each jurisdiction has very distinct regulations on this. It is not some trivial thing to handwave away. You are likely in violation of the law for retaining and publishing this info regardless of subsequent court actions. And anyone who is harmed by this info could rightfully sue you for defamation.

>>chrisc+e3
I unaware of any legal authority one could use to remove public information from GitHub, even after expungement of the public record itself. These are not works covered under copyright that a DMCA takedown notice would apply to.

You’re still correct that datasets such as these might need to be globally distributed, instead of hosted with a single commercial provider.

>>toomuc+y3
Criminal records are owned by the jurisdiction which served the case. These are governed by state and federal laws. You are also subject to severe defamation lawsuits and anyone contributing to this repo can be held personally culpable. This is not about copyright.

EDIT I'm not going to do your legal homework for you, but this is South Carolina, for example. As stated above, each of the 50 United States has various laws and regulations with regards to arrest and criminal records. Violate those laws at your own risk, but if a lawyer is not being involved in this project on an ongoing basis, I highly recommend anyone to avoid: https://www.scjustice.org/criminal-records-come-back-haunt-e...

That's just about respecting expungement (30 day notice must takedown). If you improperly record or transcode the data from the scrape and that results in someone being attributed to something that the record never showed, you are subject to full weight of defamation lawsuits. If you unwittingly expose someone's private information that is involved in witness protection, for example, you can be subject to legal and civil penalties: https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-privacy-program/rules-and-...