Fingerprinting a small price to pay to keep children safe

I’ve been fingerprinted a couple of times in my life but I’ve never committed a crime. Nor do I think I was being “treated as a criminal” or that my civil rights were being violated when legitimate requests for my prints were made.

Like thousands of volunteers across Canada, I was fingerprinted during criminal-record checks I had to provide to ensure that I was not a risk to vulnerable people, especially children, I would be working with in various volunteer roles in community centre programs, the Crisis Centre, a soccer club and, most recently, as a volunteer in a variety of minor hockey positions.

Vulnerable sector checks are just one of the requirements nowadays for people who volunteer or work with vulnerable people, particularly children.

Parents who get involved in their kids’ sports and other programs generally have no problem with the checks because they want children, theirs in particular, to be safe from predators.

While they can be a small hassle, most volunteers understand the need for the checks — just one of many policies put in place by responsible volunteer organizations to protect vulnerable clients. Most also wish they weren’t needed.

Unfortunately, history has shown time and again — particularly over the past three or four decades as criminal trials have proven that pedophiles and other predators come from all walks of life — that no group of people can be blindly trusted.

The ranks of teachers, priests, doctors, scout leaders, hockey coaches, and on and on — all kinds of traditionally trusted groups of people — have been found to contain predators.

In fact, it’s known that people who prey on kids will often get involved in professional and volunteer positions where they will have access to large number of children.

So I can’t say I have much sympathy for the complaints of Dr. Joseph Copeland, an emergency room doctor at Richmond and B.C. Children’s hospitals, who complained to CBC reporter Ian Rankin that he had been forced to provide fingerprints after something about his name, birthdate or gender — police didn’t say — was similar to “a pardoned sexual offender.” They needed to confirm that Copeland was not that person.

This happens occasionally as a second stage of screening during vulnerable sector checks.

Copeland and Micheal Vonn of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association say the fingerprint requirement is a breach of civil rights.

The doctor also then griped that all medical professionals may soon need to provide fingerprints during vulnerable sector checks required for their jobs, something an RCMP spokesman implied to Rankin was coming since all persons needing criminal record or vulnerable sector checks will soon be required to provide fingerprints.

“We all have an interest in protecting the kids of British Columbia — nobody more so than the doctors and nurses at B.C. Children’s Hospital,” Copeland told Rankin, also complaining about the “10 or 12 more kids that I’m not seeing in the emergency department while I take time off work to come down here to prove one more time who I am.”

I don’t think I’ve ever used the term before, but check your privilege, doc. Doctors and nurse care more about kids than other people? Really?

I don’t know Copeland, although I have no reason to doubt he’s a good person providing great care for others in a highly respected profession.

But no one is above the law. Doctors, like all sorts of other professionals once assumed to be trustworthy, simply no longer can be given a pass, given the history of a small number of predators in all vocations.

His protest seems particularly tone-deaf given it’s been less than a month since U.S. Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to forever in prison for molesting more than 150 women and girls over two decades, including Olympic and world champions.

Getting fingerprinted sucks, I get it. But if the process keeps kids safer, it’s the small price those of us who work with children have to pay.

History shows the terrible damage done when we naively assumed that “respectable” people like doctors, priests, coaches or teachers would never do them harm.