In Hawaii this runs through an agency, not a courtroom.
An arrest is not a conviction. A search result does not make that distinction, and in Hawaii a booking photo can outlast the case that produced it by years.
Hawaii arrest and booking records are public under the Uniform Information Practices Act (Haw. Rev. Stat. §§ 92F-1 to 92F-43). That statute exists so the public can watch how police and courts use their power, which is worth having. The side effect is that a for-profit mugshot site can request those records in bulk, republish them, and be indexed by Google within days — without your consent, and regardless of how the case ended.
Hawaii is one of the states where this does not run through a judge. Under Haw. Rev. Stat. § 831-3, relief is handled by the Attorney General on written application rather than by a court — non-conviction information is already withheld from public access.
That is genuinely useful — no hearing, no courtroom, usually no attorney. But it also means the request goes to one specific office in one specific format, and a request sent to the wrong place simply sits there. Confirm the current form and address with the agency before sending.
Send each site a written request naming the exact URL and the specific record, with the disposition or court order attached if you have one. Keep copies and dates — the paper trail is what makes a later legal demand credible instead of noisy.
If a site demands payment to take a booking photo down, do not treat that as the price of the problem. Several states prohibit pay-to-remove outright, and a demand for money is worth documenting either way.
A page removed from a site can sit in Google's index for weeks. Two different jobs:
Mugshot sites syndicate from one another, so the first result is rarely the only one. Search your name alone, your name with the county, and your name with "arrest" and "mugshot" — then check image results separately. A photo often survives on a page whose text was already removed.
Online Reputation Repair pursues removal at the source, chases the syndicated copies, and handles de-indexing — and tells you plainly when a record is not realistically removable rather than billing you to find out.
Free confidential review — the form below
Often, yes — the route depends on how the case ended and what the state record now shows. The free review determines which grounds apply to your URLs, honestly, including when removal is unlikely.
Paying the publisher is almost never the right first move, and several states prohibit pay-to-remove outright. Change the underlying record where possible, then pursue the site and the search index on the merits.
Straightforward platform-policy removals move in days; record changes and publisher negotiations take weeks or more. A written plan includes per-URL timeframes.
Tell us what was published and where — URLs help. A real person reviews it and comes back with a plain answer about what can and cannot come down, before anything is billed.