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Public Safety committee The one thing we had was the CSC connection for federal and provincial offenders--the travel advisories, the access for police officers, and the expansion of what allows police officers to get onto the system, the definition, not only for crime of a sexual purpose, but reasonable grounds to believe....
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee We do have FOI requests for information from the registry. To date, we have not had to give up information, as far as I know.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee Automatic removals apply to pardons. Also, if they appeal their decision and the conviction is quashed, that takes them off.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee Currently, as soon as an offender becomes non-compliant, the police service is responsible for that offender. They take as many steps as they can to try to identify his location. If they cannot identify the location, they seek a Christopher's law warrant in Ontario. It's a provincial warrant, but it's only for compliance purposes, so there's no charge attached to it.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee As I mentioned earlier, the pardons would be a very major issue for us, which we'd love to resolve. There are some other issues like travel advisories and people coming in from other countries. We get Americans moving up to Canada who may have had similar convictions. We'd like to put them on our registry as well, because they reside in Ontario, and we can't.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee That's correct.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee What we've done is we've broken down the province into regions. There's a coordinator for each region, both OPP or within the municipal service, and they're the contact or liaison with us. So they will be fully trained on any portion of the registry, but they also have people who continue to do registrations or can do queries or have limited access, depending on the type of training they've had.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee A police officer can do it if they have a direct line to their police location.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee If I were at home and I wanted to dial up into my headquarters office location through a secure network, I could go in there and access the information.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee For us it is because we're on call. The people who work in the Ontario sex offender registry at headquarters, because we're on call 24/7, need access to the system. We frequently get calls after hours to assist police services, so we can access it from home.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee There are ten of us. The one comment I would like to make, sir, is that I have personally served over 2,000 of these offenders with these notifications, to let them know they're on the registry. The first question they ask is who is going to know where they live. We tell them it's only the police.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee In the case you identified there, the police then would have discretion on what they're going to do with it. If there's a fine line whether or not that person should be charged with voyeurism, knowing the registry is there and knowing the person could be on the registry for x amount of time, the police have some discretion whether to lay a charge or a voyeurism charge.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee The police need the facts to lay that charge; they need all the evidence to lay that charge, to find that person guilty of that offence. I can't speak for other police officers, but in the line of work I've been doing, you'd use discretion.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola
Public Safety committee The one area I think Ontario could change would be the pardons provision. Currently, in our pardon provision, if a person gets a pardon, they come off the registry, which is totally different from the national. In the national, you don't come off just because you get a pardon. If we had to make one change, that would be the biggest change we'd make.
May 12th, 2009Committee meeting
Sgt Jim Mascola