The Irving Police Department must hand over mug shots and jail records to a magazine that exists on such things.

The department in suburban Dallas had asked for some clarification of the law in a letter to the state Attorney General’s office noting that in previous letter rulings the office had held that records be withheld when a requestor sought incident reports relating to an individual or in general over a certain period. The magazine, Mugly, which features the just-arrested look of misbehaving unfortunates, asked for mug shots and jail logs for three week-long periods in late March and early to mid-April.

The department felt that “the privacy interests of those persons unfortunate enough to have been arrested within random time periods outweigh any generalized interest of a requestor who cannot even provide any particular name or offense.”

The AG's office in a letter late last month declared that the information is public and that the information requested is "either not intimate or embarrassing or is of legitimate public interest." The Dallas Observer's Unfair Park reported the news Monday.

We’ve seen departments in other states resist handing over arrest reports. Chicago Police Department routinely rejects requests for probable cause warrants and arrest reports to outsiders (although we are told a further appeal in the form of a letter citing the pertinent statute usually frees loose the open records).

Mugly sells for a buck a pop -- it's sort of a localized take on The Smoking Gun minus the celebrities. It relies on public records for its material, then adds editorial comment when, ah, appropriate.

Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org.

Photo of handcuffs by flickr user Txspiked, used via a Creative Commons license.