THUNDER BAY - The wait times for obtaining a criminal record check has been reduced from weeks to days after the Thunder Bay Police Service partnered with an outside police agency to help handle lower level checks.
Insp. Dan Taddeo, who oversees the Thunder Bay Police Service records management branch, told the Thunder Bay Police Services Board on Tuesday that partnering with the Cobourg Police Service in Cobourg, Ont. has significantly reduced the workload of the local service and cut wait times for criminal record checks substantially.
“We had a time delay of up to eight weeks,” Taddeo said. “Cobourg was able to deal with all of the level one and level two applications in a short period of time. Currently, there is no delay. I believe their processing is less than a week for those two application levels.”
Level one and level two record checks, or criminal record checks and information checks respectively, are often required by employers for various jobs, such as trades, security guards, or bank tellers.
A level three check, or a vulnerable sector check, is required for anyone working or volunteering with children or the elderly.
“The vulnerable sector check that we still deal with here in Thunder Bay, we’ve been able to take that down now from six weeks to four weeks because our employees now are able to focus solely on vulnerable sector checks,” Taddeo said.
The Cobourg Police Service entered into a multi-stakeholder partnership early last year to create what Taddeo called an innovation hub. By partnering with Venture13, an innovation and entrepreneurship centre, Cobourg is able to process a significant amount of criminal record check applications from the private sector.
“The majority of their applications are third party private sector entities,” Taddeo said. “As they continue to grow, these opportunities arise and we view this of taking advantage of a police service has the ability and capacity through their private sector partnership.”
The Thunder Bay Police Service processes more than 6,000 criminal record checks and a year and Taddeo said it can be a very resource insensitive service. In the past, a level one or level two check could take up to four weeks, while a vulnerable sector check could take as long as seven or eight weeks.
“The issues relating to the delay and somewhat inability to process these criminal records applications in a timely manner had to be addressed,” Taddeo said. “We looked at all sorts of options, increasing our staff compliment, which puts increased pressure on our budget or other options.”
Instead, the Police Service took an outside the box approach and began working with the Cobourg Police Service.
“This took a lot of work on our behalf to ensure our electronic records were extremely accurate,” Taddeo added. “Like all police agencies there are a number of alias used by people, similar dates of birth, human error when entering data, so we had to ensure that all of our data was very clean and very accurate.”
For more information on obtaining a criminal record check, visit the Thunder Bay Police Service website.
