Ottawa to overhaul ineffective sex-offender registry

It appears there is a belief that sex crimes are solved by looking at former offenders (see highlight). If that is what they are implying then they have not looked at their own recidivism stats.

6-1-2009 Canada:

OTTAWA — The Conservative government will announce Monday that it will overhaul the national sex-offender registry, which has not been responsible for solving a single sex crime since it was created five years ago.

Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan will detail the changes at a news conference on Parliament Hill.

He told Canwest News Service last month that he wants to make the registry more effective by making it mandatory for sex offenders to be registered, rather than giving a judge discretion on whether to include offenders when they have served their sentences.

“We’ve been consulting with the provinces, with police forces, with victims groups on how we can make it work better,” Van Loan said at the time.

The House of Commons public safety committee, which is conducting a mandatory review of the federal registry, heard last month that the catalogue of sex offenders is not working well because it does not contain enough names nor pertinent information to make a difference in investigating new crimes.

Sometimes prosecutors forget to ask for an offender to be included, or they trade it away as part of a plea bargain, police told the committee.

Also, police say they are not permitted to tap the registry to prevent crimes — only to solve ones that have already occurred.

The national registry keeps tabs on where offenders live and what they look like.

Officers are also powerless to chase leads arising from car descriptions because vehicle information is excluded from the database, the committee was told.

There are 19,000 names in the database, more than 11,000 from Ontario, but police in that province don’t bother with the national registry because Ontario has one of its own that is far superior, police said.

David Truax, an Ontario Provincial Police superintendent, estimated only 50 to 60 per cent of the province’s sex criminals are put on the national list when they are released from incarceration.

Ontario, which created its own registry in 2001, has urged Ottawa to adopt its model so there would be a stronger registry nationwide.

The Ontario registry, among other things, requires automatic inclusion of all sex offenders. They must report to police before they move or go on vacation, and is accessible to prevent sex crimes as well as solve ones that have already occurred.

Offenders on the national registry, on the other hand, have 15 days after moving to notify police and they do not have to tell anyone if they go away for two weeks or less.

Police check the national registry only about 165 times a year because they have little faith in it, the committee was told.

Ontario’s registry, by comparison, gets 475 hits daily, said Truax. ..Source.. by Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service