Letting down Clare
Janet French, an excellent Postmedia reporter who’s now ascended to the Elysium that is the CBC, broke a fascinating story last week. It concerns Alberta’s version of U.K. legislation dubbed “Clare’s Law,” which was passed in the province late in 2019. The intention behind Clare’s Law is expressed on an official government web page, which I will take care to quote directly:
“The Disclosure to Protect Against Domestic Violence (Clare’s Law) Act gives people who feel at risk of domestic violence a way to get information about their partners so they can make informed choices about their safety. Alberta’s version of Clare’s Law is named after a young woman killed by an ex-boyfriend with a history of violence against women.”
The idea is basically that a woman can get access to relevant parts of her intimate partner’s criminal record. And this is where we start listing the various catches involved with this cutting-edge system. An applicant is expected to provide a full boatload of personal information about both herself and the partner she is inquiring into: full name, address, birth date and anything else the police feel like asking about in order to establish that the relationship is genuine.
The cops will keep one’s application secret from the person who’s being targeted, but they explicitly do not promise not to use the applicants’ own information against them. If you have your own open arrest warrants (or perhaps unpaid parking tickets), you are warned that the liaison officer might “respond” and “conduct an investigation” against you.
If you have your legal ducks in a row, however, you can forge ahead with the process. But you are warned that you can expect to wait four weeks for a decision on your application. And you won’t, contrary to early reports on Clare’s Law, just be shown a list of your boyfriend’s criminal convictions. Instead, there will be a risk assessment by something called the Integrated Threat, Risk and Assessment Centre.
If it’s decided that your case cuts the mustard, you’ll be given an appointment to meet with a cop and receive a verbal summary of the parts of the record deemed pertinent to the possibility of domestic violence. This requires you to sign a confidentiality agreement. Anything you’re told can’t be shared with friends or family, nor can it be used in a family law proceeding. You can’t take notes or bring a tape recorder.
That’s how the system works, or how it would work if it were, uh, working. As French noted, that doesn’t really seem to be happening. Over a nine-and-a-half-month period ending Jan. 18, French found, Alberta received 372 Clare’s Law applications. Only 159 of them ended in a meeting between an applicant and a kindly professional summarizer.
French talked to one woman who was beaten half to death by her boyfriend, looked at signing a Clare’s Law form and basically said “to heck with all that nonsense,” before getting savagely beaten again when her ex got out on bail.
It’s not easy to see how Clare’s Law might have helped that woman, but if you’re like me, you will read French’s piece while screaming: “Just put it all on the internet! Criminal records are not private information! Put them in a damn Google spreadsheet today! What is wrong with you people!”
When Clare’s Law was passed in Alberta, criminal trial lawyers kicked up a fuss because it might “infringe on privacy rights of convicted offenders.” What they ought to have been told at the time was that convicted criminals have no such privacy rights, and that any such belief is daft on its face.
Instead, the law was intricately designed to make sure the one thing that would never, ever happen, no matter how much any applicant might be in immediate mortal danger, would be for a woman to get a simple printed list of her boyfriend’s priors to mull over. Why, just imagine how much harm she might do spreading that information around!
In my lifetime as a journalist, I have seen privacy advocates carry on a well-funded jihad against possible abuse of personal information by the state. This was, and is, appropriate on some level: you can tell by the enormous number of stories in which some copper (almost invariably male) peeks at a forbidden database to scrape information about an ex-girlfriend, a potential girlfriend or a politician he doesn’t like.
But subjecting the outcomes of public criminal proceedings to a total and permanent veil of secrecy is something that has never been put directly to the law-abiding public, which would have spewed it out like a bad burrito. The public nature of criminal justice collided with the fad for “privacy,” which is easily subverted to the general purpose of state secrecy, and it was justice that gave way like a rotten rope bridge.
The Alberta government could introduce a “criminal records are public information” clause into its privacy laws with a few weeks’ work, and it ought to. But it could certainly fix Clare’s Law either way. Throw the confidentiality requirements and the elaborate vetting procedure out the damn window.
In the current system, a woman is already required to prove to somebody’s satisfaction that she is a vulnerable person in an intimate relationship. I would happily relax that standard, but perhaps we really can’t bear the horror of accepting universal instant lookup of criminal histories on the grounds that criminal records are the exclusive property of the police.
So keep that requirement and let the eligible women have a simple printout on request. Don’t let anyone edit it for “relevance.” Don’t summarize it. Don’t restrict its further use or publication. Let them walk away with a piece of paper. What’s hard about this?