Re: Hundreds of innocent people 'wrongly branded criminals

Alex Heney wrote:
On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:48:52 GMT, Palindrome <me9@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Alex Heney wrote:
On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:48:46 +0100, ®i©ardo <here@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Alex Heney wrote:
On Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:46:54 +0100, MM <kylix_is@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Hundreds of innocent people have been wrongly branded as criminals by
the Government agency set up to vet people working with children, The
Daily Telegraph can disclose."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2248521/Hundreds-of-innocent-people-'wrongly-branded-criminals'%2C-by-CRB-checks.html
or http://tinyurl.com/69updf

"People applying to take up jobs as teachers, nurses, childminders and
even those volunteering to work with youth groups are likely to have
been among those falsely accused of wrongdoing by the Criminal Records
Bureau (CRB).

"Those wrongly accused by the CRB face having their careers blighted
or being stigmatised by their communities. They also face having to
endure an appeals process to clear their names."
Of course what the headline doesn't point out is that it is 0.025% of
checks that have returned wrong information (and that includes both
wrong convictions and wrong lack of convictions).

680 checks returned wrong information out of over 3 million.

That is one in 4,411 (at 3 million exactly).

But then a headline saying "less than 1/40 of a percent failure rate"
doesn't read nearly as well as "hundreds of innocent people wrongly
branded criminals".
So if it was you, which description would better suit your feelings on the the matter? Would you rather be, a mere statistic or branded a criminal?
If it were me, I would be extremely unhappy about it.

As, I imagine is everybody else who has been on the wrong end of such
an error.

But on a global basis, no system involving human input is foolproof.
Some errors *will* occur, that is inevitable.

The question is what level of errors are acceptable to society at
large, rather than whether any individual finds it acceptable that
*their* data happens to b one of those errors.
No, with respect I would suggest that the question is whether a system, that is bound to be fallible, has adequate methods for detection and correction of errors and for protecting the subject from the effects of such errors.


That is another important question, agreed.


I don't think it does.

I can think of several improvements.

Where a CRB check does come up with something recorded, the certificate should first be sent to the subject and should contain instructions on what to do if the report contains errors. Any complaint must be investigated and a decision made before any further action is taken.

The subject always has the final decision whether the certificate is issued. There should be a slip with the subject's certificate, whereby the subject has to agree to the certificate being issued and given one month to consider. If they decline or fail to return the slip in time, a letter stating that is sent to the future employer with no other details.


All the above makes a lot of sense.



The subject's certificate should be annotated to indicate that additional information will be included from the Chief Constable. Together with details of how that material can be discussed with the police with a view to correcting any misinformation.


This is never going to happen.

The whole point of any "additional information" is that it is
information the Chief Constable does not wish the subject to know "in
the interests of the prevention or detection of crime".

So they obviously cannot even tell the subject that such information
is going to be present, never mind what it is.

I don't accept that.

It is one thing to delay the issuing of a certificate, say for a month, "in the interests of the prevention or detection of crime". That should be loads long enough for them to either confirm their suspicions and act - or otherwise accept that there is no immediate crime to be prevented or one to detect.

Then, when the certificate is issued, there is no excuse for the subject not to know that additional information was provided by a Chief Constable.

The subject must have the right to know the nature of the additional information and the right to challenge it. So the police cannot write what they like, safe in the knowledge that it cannot be challenged.

The system as it is at the moment stinks. It is entirely opposed to the basic concept that someone is innocent until proven guilty.

--
Sue

.