For years, the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office has used its official Facebook presence, branded as “TEAM SHERIFF,” as more than a public-safety bulletin board. Under the public-facing voice of Public Information Officer Lori Myles, the department has built a social-media style that critics say crosses the line from law enforcement communication into taxpayer-funded humiliation: mugshots packaged as entertainment, wanted notices written like taunts, and arrested people branded as “thugs” before a judge or jury has ever heard their case.
The clearest example came in December 2020, when the Sheriff’s Office posted a doctored Christmas tree image decorated with mugshots as ornaments. The office called them “THUGSHOTS” and said the tree showed how many “Thugs” had been taken off the streets. The post was part of the office’s recurring “Thug Thursday” campaign, which featured mugshots and wanted suspects on Facebook. The backlash was immediate and national. The Mobile NAACP called the post “inappropriate, shameful, disrespectful, despicable, disgusting and embarrassing,” while the ACLU of Alabama condemned the messaging as “divisive and cruel.”
Myles defended the post at the time, saying the mugshots were Photoshopped onto the tree and were not actually hanging inside the office. But that explanation did little to answer the larger problem: why a law-enforcement agency believed it was appropriate to turn accused people into holiday decorations. According to Associated Press reporting, Myles said the “Thug Thursday” campaign highlighted people wanted for crimes and argued that cooperation between police and the community on social media helps solve cases.
That argument misses the point. Public safety information is one thing. Public ridicule is another. A sheriff’s office has enormous power: the power to arrest, detain, accuse, investigate, and shape public perception. When that office uses mugshots as punchlines, it is not merely “engaging the community.” It is using the government’s platform to brand people as disposable before the legal system has done its work.
The presumption of innocence is not a technicality. Many arrests never lead to convictions. Charges can be dismissed. Cases can collapse. Witnesses can recant. Evidence can fail. People can be wrongly accused. Yet a mugshot blasted across Facebook can remain in search results, screenshots, and community memory long after the court file tells a different story. The Sheriff’s Office appears far more eager to publish the accusation than to publicize the correction.
That imbalance is the real scandal. If the department is willing to make an arrest famous, is it equally willing to make a dismissal famous? If someone’s mugshot is turned into content on “Thug Thursday,” does the office later post with the same energy when charges are dropped or a person is cleared? The public deserves an answer, because reputational punishment without conviction is still punishment.
The controversy looks even sharper in light of Myles’s own public advocacy after the death of her son, John “Harrison” Myles, from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2022. In later public messaging, Myles spoke about reducing stigma around addiction and honoring families affected by overdose. Mobile County’s own coverage of the INTO LIGHT exhibit quoted Myles saying the exhibit helps “break the long-standing stigma surrounding addiction.”
That message is compassionate. It is also difficult to reconcile with years of sheriff’s-office social media that mocked other people caught in the machinery of drugs, warrants, arrests, poverty, addiction, and criminal accusation. The same public official who now asks the community to see overdose victims and families with humanity helped defend a communications culture that stripped humanity from people in mugshots.
There is no public evidence in the linked reporting proving that Myles used her position to shield her son from arrest or prosecution. But the contrast still raises a legitimate public question: why does compassion appear so selective? Why are some people framed as loved ones with complicated lives, while others are blasted to the public as “thugs” for clicks, shares, and laughs?
That is the danger of propaganda dressed up as public information. It teaches the public to see the Sheriff’s Office as the hero of every story and the accused as villains before trial. It turns law enforcement into a social-media performance. It rewards cruelty as engagement. And it gives government officials a bully pulpit with very little accountability for the damage done.
The “Thugshots” Christmas tree was not an isolated lapse in taste. It was a symptom of a deeper institutional problem: a Sheriff’s Office comfortable using humiliation as a communications strategy. For Mobile County residents, the question is no longer whether the post was offensive. That was settled the moment it became national news. The real question is whether the department learned anything from it, or whether it simply deleted one post and kept the same mindset.
A public information officer should inform the public. She should not act as a prosecutor, judge, jury, and online heckler. The Mobile County Sheriff’s Office owes the public a communications policy that respects due process, avoids dehumanizing language, and treats dismissed cases with the same visibility as arrests. Until then, “TEAM SHERIFF” will look less like a public-safety page and more like a government-run shame machine.