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Fingerprint scanner streamlines background checks
Now, there’s no ink, no mess and no more waiting for months and months.
That leaves people like Pat Phelan breathing a huge sigh of relief, even if she’s deep in the heart of St. Albert’s RCMP detachment. She is standing nervously at a computer console that shares the same room as the holding cells. The Morphotrak LiveScan looks like a futuristic video arcade machine, but it’s a biometric whiz, scanning her fingerprints and checking them against a national database.
Phelan – the director of volunteer centre services at the Community Information and Volunteer Centre – says that this has been a long time coming.
“It brings the latest technology to the city that we certainly need in the volunteer sector and in the employment sector,” she stated, emphasizing how completing security checks is going to be streamlined.
She still remembers what it was like, even recently, to process the hundreds, if not thousands of volunteer applicants for local major events like the upcoming Special Olympics Canada Winter Games.
“It was very tough if a volunteer needed the next level of screening. It meant the old-fashioned fingerprinting and it meant that it was taken manually and mailed to Ottawa, arriving on someone’s desk for who knows how long, screening it and then mailing it back. The pressure on our detachment must have been astronomical.”
The $17,000 computer is designed to scan electronic fingerprints – the digital impressions of anyone’s digits – and then check them against the RCMP’s National Repository of Criminal Records located in Ottawa. Until LiveScan came along, these Vulnerable Sector Checks could often take several months to process.
Since it became operational, St. Albert has seen a decrease in the wait time from an average of 90 days to two weeks. The RCMP and the CIVC both hope that future checks will be completed in three days. St. Albert joins several other cities across the province to get one of the scanners.
“The addition of LiveScan to the vulnerable sector check process means that the RCMP is able to actively support volunteerism in St. Albert,” emphasized Constable Janice Schoepp.
The process for completing Vulnerable Sector Checks changed 18 months ago, necessitating this extra level of security. Volunteer applicants must first go through a police information check, but the second check is designed to protect vulnerable members of society, such as children, the elderly or persons with disabilities, from dangerous offenders who have a criminal record and/or a pardoned sexual offence conviction.
The Vulnerable Sector Check usually only requires the applicant to fill out a form, but this is only matched to the database based on some superficial characteristics. If there were someone in the database with your same name or birth date, for instance, then your application would necessitate the extra step of fingerprinting.
Approximately 230,000 civil clearance fingerprint requests are received annually.
After 90 days, the Canadian Criminal Real Time Identification Services destroys fingerprint submissions relative to civil screening, including vulnerable sector checks, when the search process is completed. The fingerprints are not added to the RCMP National Repository of Criminal Records and are not searched for future purposes.
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