California offers some of the strongest arrest record sealing protections in the country — and those protections translate directly into leverage for removing your mugshot from aggregator websites and Google. Here is every tool available to California residents, in order of strength.
SB 731 (Penal Code § 851.92, effective 2023) is the most powerful tool — it creates automatic sealing of arrest records where no conviction resulted, making your arrest legally "as if it never occurred" and giving you the strongest possible basis for mugshot removal demands.
Penal Code § 851.87 lets you petition to seal arrest records when no charges were filed or charges were dismissed — this is the petition-based route if your arrest predates automatic SB 731 sealing or was excluded from it.
Expungement under § 1203.4 is NOT the same as sealing — a common misunderstanding that leads many Californians to send ineffective removal requests. Understand the difference before you write a word to any mugshot site.
The CCPA provides a separate deletion right against mugshot aggregator sites that monetize your personal data — particularly those operating as data brokers who charge fees for removal.
California does not have a mugshot-specific removal statute — unlike states such as Utah and Georgia that have passed laws requiring mugshot sites to remove images upon request. What California has instead is a set of overlapping legal tools that, in combination, give residents more practical leverage than almost any specific mugshot law elsewhere in the country.
The core of California's approach is arrest record sealing. When a California court seals an arrest record, the legal effect is that the arrest is treated as if it never occurred. That language — "as if it never occurred" — is not rhetorical. It is statutory. It means that mugshot aggregator sites displaying your arrest photo are, in the most literal legal sense, displaying information about an event that the state of California has declared did not happen. That is an exceptionally strong editorial and legal argument for removal.
Beyond sealing, California residents can also invoke the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) against mugshot sites that operate as data brokers — collecting, compiling, and selling personal information. RemoveNews.ai helps California residents navigate all of these pathways with professional support, particularly in cases where mugshot sites are unresponsive to direct requests.
Three distinct legal tools are available to California residents seeking mugshot removal: (1) arrest record sealing under Penal Code § 851.87 (petition-based) or § 851.92 (SB 731 automatic); (2) CCPA deletion rights against data-broker-style mugshot sites; and (3) Google de-indexing requests, which are strengthened significantly by a sealing order. Each operates independently, and combining all three gives you the strongest possible position.
California Penal Code § 851.87 is the foundational arrest record sealing statute. It allows a person to petition the court to seal their arrest record in two primary situations:
The petition process under § 851.87 requires filing in the court where the arrest occurred (or where charges were filed, if charges were filed). There is no mandatory waiting period — you can petition immediately after charges are dismissed or after a case closes without charges. The court will consider whether granting sealing would "serve the interests of justice." Given that the statute was written specifically to address situations where arrests did not lead to convictions, courts routinely grant these petitions when properly presented.
Penal Code § 851.87 does not apply if you were convicted in connection with the arrest. If you were arrested, charged, and convicted — even if you later completed a diversion program or received probation — this statute is not the right tool. If your conviction was later expunged under § 1203.4, see the expungement vs. sealing section below for what that does and does not accomplish for mugshot removal purposes.
Once a § 851.87 sealing order is granted, the court instructs law enforcement agencies to seal their records. The arrest record becomes inaccessible to most employers and members of the public. And critically for mugshot removal purposes, you now possess a court order stating that your arrest is sealed — a document you can attach directly to a removal demand sent to Mugshots.com, BustedMugshots, JailBase, BustedNewspaper, or any other aggregator site displaying your image.
Senate Bill 731, effective January 1, 2023, added California Penal Code § 851.92 and fundamentally changed the landscape for California arrest record sealing. Where § 851.87 requires you to file a petition and appear before a court, § 851.92 makes sealing automatic — no petition, no court appearance, no attorney required — for arrests that meet the criteria.
Under § 851.92, arrest records are automatically sealed when:
SB 731 automatic sealing applies prospectively: arrests occurring on or after January 1, 2023 that meet the criteria will be sealed automatically. If your arrest predates 2023, you will likely still need to petition under § 851.87 — but it is worth confirming with the court whether automatic sealing may apply to older records in your specific county, as implementation varies.
California law states that when a record is sealed under § 851.92, the arrest "shall be deemed not to have occurred." This is among the strongest statutory language protecting privacy in any US state. When you send a mugshot removal demand to an aggregator site and attach a copy of your sealing order — or documentation that your record was automatically sealed under SB 731 — you are informing them that they are displaying information about an event California law says did not happen. Many reputable sites will comply with this, both out of legal caution and because the editorial argument is airtight.
The most common mistake California residents make when pursuing mugshot removal is conflating expungement with sealing. These are different legal procedures with different effects, and understanding that difference determines how you approach removal requests.
California Penal Code § 1203.4 expungement (sometimes called "dismissal after probation") allows a person who completed probation to petition the court to withdraw their guilty plea or verdict, enter a not-guilty plea, and have the case dismissed. It primarily benefits employment background checks — under § 1203.4, a private employer who asks whether you have been convicted of a crime, your expunged conviction generally does not need to be disclosed.
What § 1203.4 does not do: it does not seal the underlying arrest record. Your arrest record, including your mugshot, remains a matter of public record after expungement. This is why many Californians are frustrated to discover that their expunged conviction is still appearing in mugshot searches — the expungement addressed the conviction record, not the arrest record.
Expungement under § 1203.4 does NOT remove your mugshot from aggregator websites. Many attorneys who handle expungements do not make this clear, and many clients assume the expungement resolves all public record issues. If you have only an expungement order and not a sealing order, you have limited legal grounds to demand mugshot removal from aggregator sites. You can still make an editorial request — and the expungement order is supporting evidence — but it is significantly weaker than a sealing order under § 851.87 or § 851.92.
If your case resulted in a conviction that was later expunged under § 1203.4, and you do not have a separate sealing order, your best paths for mugshot removal are:
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and its successor the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA, effective 2023), gives California residents the right to request that businesses delete personal information they have collected. Mugshot aggregator sites that collect, compile, display, and often sell personal information — including your name, arrest date, charges, and photograph — may qualify as data brokers subject to CCPA deletion requests.
California Civil Code § 1798.105 gives you the right to request that a business that collects your personal information delete that information. To make this request effectively for mugshot removal:
The most effective California mugshot removal approach combines a CCPA deletion request with a sealing order. The sealing order addresses the underlying legitimacy of the data (it describes an event that California law says did not occur); the CCPA request addresses the site's obligation as a data business to delete your personal information upon request. Sites that resist one argument are often persuaded by the combination. When both fail, escalation to professional news article removal services with legal expertise in California privacy law typically produces results that self-help approaches cannot.
Once you have a sealing order — whether obtained through a § 851.87 petition or confirmed under SB 731's automatic sealing provision — you have a powerful document for demanding mugshot removal from aggregator sites. Here is how to use it effectively.
Search your full name combined with your city, arrest year, or "mugshot" in Google and Google Images. Document every site displaying your image. The major aggregator sites in California include Mugshots.com, BustedMugshots.com, JailBase.com, BustedNewspaper.com, ArrestFacts.com, and county jail roster sites. Some county sheriffs' departments also maintain public arrest databases that may include your photo — these require separate removal requests directly to the agency.
Your removal demand letter should be accompanied by:
Send your removal demand by email (for aggregator sites, the removal email is often listed in their privacy policy or footer) and retain a copy. If the site has a formal removal submission form, use that in addition to email. California law requires CCPA requests to be acknowledged within 10 business days and completed within 45 days. For non-CCPA editorial requests, there is no legally mandated response time, but most reputable sites respond within two to four weeks.
Not sure how to find the right contact? RemoveNews.ai identifies the correct removal contact for major mugshot sites and helps draft legally precise removal demands — free initial assessment, no obligation.
Start Free AssessmentWhen a mugshot site removes your image, the URL typically returns a 404 error or redirects. At that point, Google's index still contains a cached version — and your name search may still surface the result for weeks or months before Google's crawlers discover the removal. You do not need to wait for this naturally.
Use Google's Outdated Content Removal Tool (search.google.com/search-console/remove-outdated-content) to submit the removed URLs for accelerated removal from Google's cache. This tool is designed exactly for this situation — a page has changed or been removed at source, and you want Google to update its index faster than natural crawling would accomplish. Removals through this tool typically process within a few days to two weeks.
If the mugshot site has not yet complied but you have a California sealing order, you can also submit a request to Google's legal removal team. Google has a process for considering removal requests based on privacy laws in various jurisdictions, and California's strong sealing language — "deemed not to have occurred" — is among the most compelling grounds available in any US state. Submit through Google's legal troubleshooter.
For a comprehensive guide to this process, see our article on how to remove a mugshot from Google.
California's arrest record sealing laws and the CCPA are powerful — but they have important limits that every person pursuing mugshot removal should understand before sending any demand letters.
If your arrest was covered by a newspaper, TV station, or online news outlet with a journalistic mission — the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, local TV stations, or even smaller community news sites — California's sealing laws and the CCPA do not compel those publishers to remove their coverage. The First Amendment protects the press's right to report on arrests, and that protection does not evaporate when an arrest record is later sealed.
For news articles, the correct approach is editorial outreach combined, in appropriate cases, with a proportionality argument: given that California law has sealed the underlying record, what public interest is served by the article's continued prominent display? Many editors, when presented with a well-documented sealing order, will choose to update or remove old arrest coverage as a matter of editorial ethics rather than legal obligation. For help with this, see our resources on removing expunged records from Google.
If your arrest was covered by a publication that operates in the European Union — or if Google's European subsidiary indexed the article — the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) right to erasure (Article 17) may provide additional leverage. Even if GDPR does not technically apply to your situation, many multinational publishers are responsive to right-to-be-forgotten style requests because they have GDPR compliance processes already in place. This is particularly true for large media companies with European audiences. Including GDPR language in removal requests to international publishers sometimes produces results even when strict GDPR eligibility does not apply. See our guide on the right to be forgotten and California's CCPA.
California's sealing statutes require law enforcement agencies to seal their records, but implementation across all agencies can take time, and not every government database updates simultaneously. If your sealed record continues to appear in a government-maintained database, contact the specific agency maintaining that database directly and provide your sealing order. Most agencies have processes for handling sealed records — they simply may not have processed your specific case yet.
If you were arrested in another state and your mugshot originates from that state's records, California law does not govern the source records. You would need to pursue the sealing and removal process under that state's laws. For example, if you were arrested in Nevada but now live in California, California Penal Code § 851.87 does not apply to the Nevada arrest record, and CCPA rights may still apply against California-based mugshot sites displaying the Nevada arrest data.
Not every California mugshot removal case ends in a clean takedown. Conviction mugshots are outside the scope of California's arrest record sealing statutes -- if the arrest led to a conviction, Penal Code § 851.87 does not apply, and the CCPA's exception for publicly available information may still permit mugshot sites to display the record. News articles published by legitimate California press outlets are protected by the First Amendment regardless of whether the underlying arrest record has been sealed. And sites operating outside of California -- or outside the United States entirely -- may simply ignore CCPA demands without consequence. When direct removal isn't achievable, the practical alternatives are Google de-indexing under the platform's outdated content policies, NOINDEX tag requests to the hosting site, and content suppression -- building authoritative, positive content that systematically pushes the mugshot off the first page of search results.
Professional help on a California mugshot case starts with an honest assessment -- not a sales pitch. Our removal specialists have worked these cases for over 13 years and have helped more than 5,000 clients, so we can tell you quickly whether removal is realistic for your specific situation, what suppression would involve if it isn't, and what a realistic timeline looks like. The free consultation is designed to give you a straight answer: what's achievable, what it costs, and how long it will take -- with no pressure and no obligation to move forward.
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