4) NO PROACTIVE USE
This can’t be stated enough: the purpose of the registry is to help detectives locate potential suspects living near a crime scene. Unlike in the United States—where sex offender registries are available online, and are meant to allow the public to find dangerous people living in their neighbourhooods—the Canadian version is for police use only. The content is off-limits to only a select few officers, and not a single witness who testified this week lobbied for a U.S.-style system that welcomes harassment and, in some cases, vigilantism. Three years ago this week, a New Brunswick man famously drove across the border to Maine and murdered two men whose names and addresses were posted on the state’s Internet sex offender registry.
What police forces do want, however, is the power to use the national registry in a proactive fashion. As the law stands now, the database can only be accessed to help solve a crime, not prevent one. During his testimony, Nezan offered a troubling example of the registry’s limited capabilities. “There was a man in an elementary schoolyard taking pictures of children,” he said, not disclosing the location. “The staff who worked there didn’t recognize him as a parent, staff, reporter, or otherwise so they were alarmed by his presence. When they tried to approach him and confront him, he fled. They called the police, the police called the National Sex Offender Registry, but we couldn’t access the database because there had not been a sexual crime that had occurred. Those are the types of proactive uses that we would like to see expanded upon.”
5) IS THE REGISTRY REALLY WORTH THE EFFORT?
This is the critical question, the one that hovers over every debate about the national sex offender registry. After weighing all the pros and cons about proactive use or the Charter rights of child pornographers, the government must decide: Is the database actually effective? Even if it were a well-oiled machine, is it doing society any good?
The goal, remember, is to pinpoint possible suspects, not keep 24-hour track of every known sex offender. But as Insp. Nezan admitted during his testimony, the national registry has not solved a single crime since it was launched four-and-a-half years ago. “We think the results will come,” he said, optimistically. “But we need some important modifications, and it just takes more time.”
Here is Nezan’s logic: as more and more names are added to the list (a process that would be bolstered by automatic inclusion) the odds of catching a repeat offender would naturally increase. Yet even in Ontario, where the provincial registry is eight years old and includes every convicted offender, the database has solved only one crime. One. “This is a significant intrusion of an individual’s privacy—an intrusion that can only be justified on the grounds that it produces a clear and demonstrable public safety benefit that cannot be achieved through less intrusive means,” said Carman Baggaley, a strategic policy advisor in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. “Assessing the effectiveness of the scheme is very important. If it’s not effective, then the privacy intrusion is for naught. Sacrificing someone’s privacy in the hope that this may protect society is a dangerous precedent.”
Baggaley urged the committee not to recommend any changes to the system until a formal, third-party evaluation is conducted “into the effectiveness of the legislation.” He pointed out, quite accurately, that a 2007 report by the Ontario Auditor-General concluded that “even though sex offender registries have existed for many years and can consume significant public resources, we found surprisingly little evidence that demonstrates their effectiveness in actually reducing sexual crimes or helping investigators solve them, and few attempts to demonstrate such effectiveness.” A recent evaluation of the New York state registry reached a similar conclusion.
Brydie Bethell, representing defence lawyers, testified that there are already legal measures in place to rein in the types of repeat, loathsome offenders who pose the highest threat. Police chiefs have the power to warn the public if an especially prolific sex offender is back on the streets. Canada also has dangerous offender legislation, which allows for indefinite jail terms (think Paul Bernardo) and if that doesn’t apply, prosecutors can apply for Section 810 peace bonds, which impose strict bail conditions on newly released prisoners. Lumping every convicted offender into the same registry—from, in Bethell’s words, “drunken office party kissers” to convicted pedophiles—is not only a potential waste of resources, but an unfair infringement on those who pose a very low risk of re-offending. “We are here to strike the appropriate balance, to step back and look dispassionately at what we have, what’s missing, what’s needed, and why we are doing this,” she said. “It is an issue that requires us to balance individual and collective rights.”
Registry critics also like to point out that the stereotypical sex offence—ie. the lurking stranger who tortured and murdered Christopher Stephenson—is an infinitely rare occurrence. The vast majority of victims are abused by people they know and trust (an uncle, for example, or a babysitter) and not by a man in a trench coat lurking in the bushes. In fact, most people on the national database (82 per cent, according to Nezan) are first-time offenders. There is nothing a registry could have done to spare their victims or solve the crime. The Ontario registry, for instance, didn’t help Holly Jones, the 10-year-old Toronto girl who was kidnapped and murdered near her home in May 2003. Her killer, Michael Briere, had an impeccable criminal record and wasn’t listed on the registry.
There is, however, another side to the tragic Holly Jones case. No, the registry didn’t catch her killer, but it eliminated dozens of possible suspects in those crucial few hours after she went missing. Armed with a list of convicted offenders living in the neighbourhood, police were able to knock on doors, cross off names, and redirect limited resources to other potential leads. And what if one of those offenders was the perpetrator? What if Holly Jones had been saved by a sex offender registry? Would anyone be bickering about privacy intrusions or statistical analyses? “If we spend one minute of our time on this, one dollar of our money, and it saves one child or one youth, one woman or one man from becoming a victim, it’s worth our time and our money,” said Robert Oliphant, a Liberal MP on the Public Safety Committee.
The stats, by the way, work both ways. Although researchers have never proven that registries reduce crime, a 2006 study conducted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy did find that sex offenders convicted for failing to register have 50 per cent higher recidivism rates. In other words, there registration has its benefits: those who are ordered onto the database, and check in as required, are less likely to re-offend.
“It is true that offenders who are truly motivated to perpetrate crimes of violence will usually do so,” Nezan says. “It would be disingenuous on my part to suggest that the national sex offender registry would always or even consistently prevent sexual crimes. But there have been cases with other registries where this very thing has happened. While we do not view the sex offender registry as the panacea for solving sexual crime, it nevertheless has a role to play and can support our efforts in identifying and prosecuting sexual crime offenders. More importantly, crime prevention should always be one of law enforcement’s primary goals.”
Jim Stephenson, who since his son’s death has found the courage to meet and counsel many jailed sex offenders, puts it this way: “They appreciate the fact that the sex offender registry reminds the sex offenders that somebody is watching. If that isn’t preventative enough, I don’t know what else can be suggested.” Other than quoting another fairy tale.
