Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be with you again today. I last appeared here with Superintendent Dave Truax, also from the Ontario Provincial Police, on April 21. Also with us today is an officer with the Ontario sex offender registry, Sergeant Jim Mascola, who has the

Public Safety committee  I know that Jim and Anna Stephenson, the parents of Christopher Stephenson, whom our legislation in Ontario is named after, appeared before committee a few days after we did. This is the bill that was proclaimed on April 21, 2001. Some of our findings were cited in some research

Public Safety committee  Perhaps I could add some closing comments, now that I've finished advancing the slides. You may recall that when I was here on April 21, I was able to give you some very current, as of that morning, statistics for the sex offender registry. On April 21 there were 11,963 registe

Public Safety committee  Well, I was going to give you an example of a case many people are familiar with, and that's the Paul Bernardo investigation. I can tell you from my familiarity with it, having been involved in that investigation, and from information that would be available through court transcr

Public Safety committee  I don't recall specifically if this came up, but Ontario has kept its registry because of its investigative usefulness and the absence of the investigative usefulness, in our opinion, of the national sex offender registry. This is the CACP's position. There are a number of area

Public Safety committee  I believe one study--I apologize, I'm very rusty on its source--was done by the FBI in the mid-seventies showing a triangular relationship in serial homicide that included arson, bed-wetting, and animal cruelty. That is why research, such as the murder research I gave at the open

Public Safety committee  We don't have any statistical studies, and they are absent as far as quality assurance measures. We are working toward that. It's still relatively new over the long term to see the reduction. As you can well imagine, many of the offenders would be incarcerated and re-incarcerat

Public Safety committee  Yes, sir, and initially there wasn't funding per se to the Ontario Provincial Police to implement this program. There was some initial funding to provide cameras, etc. Our officers still go around to all of the locations in the province, municipal and provincial agencies, to prov

Public Safety committee  Our annual budget is $4.1 million to operate the Ontario sex offender registry headquarters, the unit in Orillia, as the sergeant has indicated. That's for the support, training, all of the technology upgrades and changes. Any time there's a legislative change, obviously that imp

Public Safety committee  Yes, sir, the nexus you mention is why our Ontario sex offender registry is located within the behavioural sciences area of the Ontario Provincial Police. As a criminal profiler in past years, I would have loved to have had this additional information. A profiler tends to become

Public Safety committee  The one thing I know--and again, I'm speaking on behalf of the CACP--is that we should have a national registry so that we would know sex offender information from right across the country. Obviously, in Ontario we're only capturing those offenders who, through the judicial proce

Public Safety committee  As with other checks that are done by police, say, when they're stopping someone on the side of the road or conducting an investigation, there is a consideration of the immediacy of the situation. Some officers could have access through their cars. In other cases, detectives don'

Public Safety committee  I think probably, to use a psychological term, correlation does not equal causation. Therefore, I know that this study saw correlation between these behaviours and serial offenders in their younger years, but it was not stating that it caused them. It was simply an observation ma

Public Safety committee  I'm sorry, it's probably been 15 or 18 years since I looked at the study. However, if you would like a copy of it, I'd be happy to provide it. It would be with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, but I can facilitate that.

Public Safety committee  No, sir, it's not my opinion.