Date published: 2006/05/21
The BBC says:
Some 2,700 people have been wrongly labelled as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), it has emerged.
The mistakes have led to some people being turned down for jobs.
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 for its "caution".
Education Secretary Alan Johnson told the BBC only 0.03% of the nine million "disclosures" the agency makes had been wrong, so the issue had to be put "into context".
...
The Home Office said customer satisfaction about the checks was "now at an all-time high" and said last year's checks prevented 25,000 unsuitable people being recruited.It said it made "no apology for erring on the side of caution".
A spokesman said: "The Criminal Records Bureau's first and foremost priority is to help protect children and vulnerable adults by assisting organisations who are recruiting people into positions of trust.
"We err on the side of caution in these rare cases precisely because it is vital to ensure that the disclosure individuals do not fraudulently try to claim they have no criminal convictions when in fact they have."
More breath-taking arrogance and incompetence (a lethal combination) from the Blair government. There are bound to be mistakes, but when you make mistakes you grovel and fix them promptly, you don't dismiss them as justifiable casualties in the war against criminals. Of course the government uses the same logic in the war against terror, that it doesn't matter if dozens or hundreds of innocent people are detained without charge for as long as the government sees fit, as long as most of society is (allegedly) protected because of its draconian measures.
When you have any system like this you get true positives (people who are identified correctly as having criminal records) and you get true negatives (people who are identified correctly as not having criminal records). The real problems are the false negatives (people who are not identified as having criminal records but do) and false positives (people who are identified as having criminal records but do not). Generally, before the Blair government took over, false positives were considered much worse than false negatives. (This is why in many countries jury results have to be unanimous.) Unfortunately Blair and his ilk consider the opposite to be true. (Under the so-called "precautionary principle", which is not so much a principle as a statement of unjustifiable beliefs.)
Given the figures in the article, it looks like there were around 9 million true negatives, around 25000 true positives and around 2700 false positives. (Well, it is not clear whether the figures pertain to the same time period, but let's assume so.) There is no estimate for the number of false negatives. Although the Home Office quotes the ratio of 2700 over 9 million (around 0.03%) to justify the problem as being small, the real ratio to look at is 2700 over 27700, i.e. around 10% of the positive results were false. That is fairly scandalous. And it is likely that many of the 25000 true positives are not really "unsuitable people", making the figures even worse. Of course no members of the ruling elite, or their families, will fall into the false positive category, so they don't really care how many false positives there are.
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