WRITTEN ON May 21st, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized
Further to Ruth’s post…update – now it’s 2700 and counting.
Questions this raises:
If this is just the number who complained, what’s the full number affected really like?
Does this number of “false positives” show a system erring on the side of caution, or are there false negatives and is the system in chaos?
What wrong have the victims suffered in law, and what redress do they have?
Will an ID system solve this problem, or institutionalise this sort of discrimination based on incompetence?
Nearly 1,500 people have been wrongly labelled as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), it has emerged. A normally Unspeakably Mindnumbing Sunday Paper said the mistakes had led to some people being turned down for jobs or university places. The Home Office said the errors arose when personal details were similar to those of people with a conviction, but were “a tiny proportion of cases”. It said 90% of disputes were resolved within 21 days and, while errors were regrettable, it would not apologise. Only 0.03% of the nine million “disclosures” the agency makes had been wrong in this way, it said.
This is *weary sigh* far from ideal. It seems to have been just incompetence, not malice. But these are the people we’re putting in charge of the great ID discrimination engine.
“This is not about the CRB making ‘mistakes’,” a spokesman said. “Where there has been a mismatch, it is because the individual’s details are similar or even identical to someone else’s conviction data on the Police National Computer.”The 1,500 figure also represents only those who have successfully appealed in the past two years – suggesting that hundreds or even thousands more may have been wrongly labelled criminals without even knowing.
2 Responses to “Not even an apology for Home Office libel”
And of course it must be remembered that it is only people wrongly accused who will complain. The false negatives will just keep quiet.
False negatives – you may recall that early reports of the no-UK offenders released without consideration of deportation spoke of some of them who appeared not to be on the Police National Computer. The likely explanation was surely confusion over names or spelling – they’ve been in prison, they MUST, surely be on the PNC, so look again until you find them.
However, if you’re looking to find out if somebody has committed an offence, and their name doesn’t show up, well, you don’t look again, do you? It’s the same system, it has false negatives, and CRB volumes being what they are, and growing, one would surely expect there to be quite a few of them.