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In the EU, there's a concept called the "right to be forgotten", intended to recognise the idea that a crime or misdemeanour which one committed a long time ago and for which one has served one's sentence should not haunt one forever. There is a legal precedent that you can appeal to Google to remove articles containing your name from search results, and in some cases they will honour this request (funny story: several years after leaving school, a guy who was the year ahead of me in secondary school was convicted for possession of large amounts of illegal drugs which could not possibly have been solely for personal use, and in his trial his actual defense was that he was not a drug dealer, but simply a "sucker for a good deal". At some point after his conviction was spent he must have requested all articles about the case be purged from Google search results, because I can no longer find them.) As with anything else, this has its limitations: in the UK, sex offenders are forbidden from changing their names via deed poll. If an adult was convicted of a sexual offense involving children, I do think it's reasonable that this information be made publicly available, especially if they're seeking employment involving children. Likewise if someone was convicted of a severely violent offense and they're seeking employment in a job that involves safeguarding.
But broadly speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, if a person has a mental health episode in a public place, or if a university student has too much to drink and makes a fool of themself, that incident should not follow them around for the rest of their life. It should not be the first thing you see when you Google their name. I agree with Jacobin that police officers uploading bodycam footage of this sort of thing to their official YouTube channels is an improper use of bodycam technology, but really, police bodycam footage is only the tip of the iceberg. Whenever anyone has a mental health episode in a public place, you can be assured that smartphone footage of it from at least three angles will be uploaded to TikTok and Instagram within the hour. Videos like "Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired" being uploaded to official police YouTube channels are only a symptom of a broader cultural problem: everything is just #content now. Woman having a mental health episode in a supermarket? #content. The building you're inside catches fire? #content. Man gets struck by car? #content. Soldier stabbed to death by Islamist nutters? #content.
The canonical example of the casual sociopathy of bystanders is Kitty Genovese, a case which was widely misrepresented by sensational journalists. In light of this, it ought to be retired in favour of any of the above examples.
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