A Northern Ontario police department is launching a highly unusual program to publicize the names of all motorists charged with impaired driving, raising concerns it will stigmatize suspects before any guilt has been determined.
The impaired drivers list, which will be released every Tuesday on the force’s web site starting on June 7, is meant to “detect, deter, and prevent the commission of impaired driving,” Frank Elsner, chief of the Greater Sudbury Police Service, said in a press release.
He noted that despite enormous effort to curtail drunk driving, charges continue to rise. In 2009, the city was traumatized when three teens walking along a road were struck and killed by a drunk driver, said Const. Bert Laplame, a police spokesman.
For a time the number of charges seemed to drop but now have begun to rise — so the department felt the need to try something new as a way to stem the problem, he said.
Many Canadian police forces regularly release lists of all charges laid against people facing a range of charges — everything from murder to robbery to assault. But what appears to make Sudbury different is the intention to issue a specific list of just those charged with impaired driving and make that information easily available.
“We recognize that impact drinking and driving can have on communities and that it’s a very difficult task for police to come up with new strategies for combatting this problem,” said Graeme Norton of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “I think, though, the risk is people are going to assume that [the accused are] guilty of the crime without that person being found guilty in a court.”
There is no real issue when the police take special effort to release the name of an accused in a case that has been followed by the media for months or is of significant public interest, he said. “But for police to selectively publicize names outside of obvious interests of protecting the public seem to me to go too far.”
He said there might be an assumption that every impaired driving case will lead to a conviction, making publicizing the names of the accused less of a civil liberties issue.
“Drunk driving cases can be very complex and there are different ways people can end up not being convicted.”
This is not the first time that police departments in Canada have tried similar tactics. In a number of jurisdictions police have released the names of “johns” as a way to discourage prostitutes and shaming customers.
Two years ago a public list of accused johns was proposed by police in Lethbridge, Alta., and in 2004 Winnipeg police began posting clips of men soliciting sex on the web but with faces and automobile licences blurred.
The most daring attempt to shame potential criminals came in Cornwall, Ont., in 2009 when police began posting lawn signs in front of homes in which drug warrants had been executed and charges laid.
The province’s privacy commissioner ultimately ordered the practice stopped.
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