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Debate continues over arrest records disclosure
BY VERN SMITH
A councillor who was wrongfully arrested during his youth is opposing a proposed bylaw that would see both arrest and conviction records packaged together for sale to potential employers.
Administration committee chair Lorenzo Berardinetti (Ward 37, Scarborough Centre) has suggested that all arrest records be destroyed after either the police or the courts decide that the person should have never been arrested in the first place.
"They need to make those changes," says Berardinetti, who was mistaken for a car vandal when he was a teenager. "We requested that they look at their whole policy of keeping arrest records and why they keep so many records."
Norm Gardner, Toronto's top police commissioner, says council doesn't understand the bylaw.
The bylaw would let police keep permanent records regardless of whether those arrested are found guilty or even charged with a serious offence. While the city had requested further changes, Gardner says that only the disclosure forms need altering to reflect the eventual outcome of the arrest.
"What we will show is anybody's involvement, if in fact they have been arrested, detained and convicted -- that kind of information," Gardner says. "If charges are withdrawn or dropped, it never comes up on the disclosure form."
But Gardner also adds, "It doesn't say they will ever be totally eradicated by police forces in terms of background information, because you may have a situation where you know someone was involved in criminal activity, but can't prove it. Do you destroy everything? Or do you keep some of this stuff in the event that it becomes a clue in another criminal act? Police rarely destroy everything."
The bylaw passed quietly while the city was arguing about Kirkland Lake before the last municipal election. The new council found itself under heavy media scrutiny over the issue in May and voted to kick it back to its administration committee to rethink it. The committee handed it back to the Police Services Board in July after recommending a five-year moratorium on the retention of arrest records for those not convicted.
As the bylaw stands now, Berardinetti thinks it may affect an individual's ability to land a job: "[The police] came back and said to us, 'Well, we have to follow a pattern down the road if that person ends up being a pedophile.' The question is, why would you keep a record on someone who's been arrested but not charged? The Police Services Board has to explain that to us.
"There's potential there for abuse, too. Police may say, 'You know what? I want to arrest this person.'"
Gardner says he can't understand council's problem.
"I still don't think the city understands," he says. "They've run amok with Big Brother attitudes. It was one bad case that got [Ward 1 councillor Suzan] Hall hot and bothered. Consequently, she's been like a pit bull on the issue. She has not been absorbing the fact that it's the disclosure form that is the problem."
Hall, who has been fighting the bill on behalf of an anonymous constituent who lost out on a job after his record was sold, is out of the country. But her top aide says disclosure is not the bill's lone flaw. "There are two things," says executive assistant Rose Burrows. "It's the disclosure and it's the retention.
"[Hall] wants records retained for a five-year period, and she's also talking about situations where the police acknowledge the person should not have been arrested and courts acknowledge that the person should not have been arrested.
"It's not just the form issue," says Burrows. "It's the whole principle."
