Police error warrants an investigation

The Edmonton Police Service made a terrible, careless mistake when it publicized the name and photo of a 16-year-old girl in connection with the Operation Warrant Execution program. Though the damage has certainly been done, it is at least encouraging to see EPS is open to a full investigation of how and why it happened.

Young offenders are held to account for crimes they commit, but in accordance with the Youth Criminal Justice Act, that is normally done without making their names public. If the identity of a young offender is revealed, it is supposed to happen only by court order.

Teenagers under age 18 are still growing into adulthood. By withholding the identity of young offenders from public scrutiny, we give them a chance to put the mistakes of youth behind them.

By including a 16-year-old, the police have broken the law and tarnished the program itself. That’s a shame on both counts. Police are charged with upholding the law, not contravening it. And the idea of using publicity to target people with a combined total of more than 16,000 outstanding warrants was innovative.

The girl’s identity was included in the second part of the program, a media blitz using the photos, names, ages, height and weight of the 100 worst offenders with outstanding warrants. Such a strategy needed to be done meticulously. There is no room for error if a police service is plastering people’s photos and personal data on newspaper pages and on the police website.

So the girl wasn’t just exposed to publicity, in violation of the law, she was somehow included in a list of the worst offenders. That was not only illegal, but hurtful and damaging to her. As Wallis Kendal, co-founder of the ihuman Youth Society, told a

Journal reporter, the mistake will only deepen the distrust that at-risk youth feel toward the police.

This breach of the Youth Criminal Justice Act has been turned over to the RCMP, and Chief Rod Knecht is also inviting the Alberta privacy commissioner to investigate. Both investigations are certainly warranted because there are numerous questions to answer.

How can a high-profile publicity campaign like this make such an error without anyone noticing? How was it that a teenager’s name was in this mix of candidates for publicity in the first place? Most puzzling, why was this girl included if her warrant was only issued March 21? The whole point of this list is that it contains bad actors, people who refused to deal with their outstanding warrants. How did this teenager get added to the publicity if her warrant had been issued just two weeks before?

We need a full report tracking this campaign as it developed. We need to know who produced the list of names, who checked it, and how or if it was vetted by senior police officials. Finally, EPS must act on the report and ensure this mistake never happens again.