It's worn out its welcome after 28 years.
It frequently forgets important messages, often takes afternoon naps, and would be more expensive to kick out.
It's the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), the criminal database 14,000 police, corrections and immigration stations, and RCMP rely upon in their pursuit of villains. Located in Ottawa, it contains everything from criminal records to reports of stolen cars, all accessible via computer 24 hours a day in most every police cruiser in Canada.
"I can't tell you how it works as a matter of national security", Acting Superintendent John Petz of Hamilton-Wentworth police said. "That would provide criminals with an unfair advantage."
CPIC has been a matter of concern recently. When it was launched in 1972, it was one of the greatest investigative tools available. But now it crashes around 11 per cent of the time and there is a backlog of fingerprints and criminal histories to be input. It handles some 314,000 queries daily, but it was built to handle about 25,000.
Canada's Auditor General Denis Desaultels said Tuesday that the unreliability of Canada's only criminal registry was jeopardizing the safety of police and the public.
Solicitor General Lawrence MacAuley promised $115 million to replace the system last spring. That would mean a new program running by 2003.
RCMP Sergeant André Guertin said a new system was long overdue.
"A lot has been said about the public's safety, but we must consider the safety of officers as well", he said. "That's why we've been working so diligently at trying to change it."
The system is used by Hamilton-Wentworth police as part of a long-standing agreement to share criminal information among RCMP and local police agencies. Petz chose his words carefully when describing the reliability of CPIC.
"It's like Windows 98", he said. "It's a very effective system but, given what we can do with technology today, there is room for improvement. If the RCMP want to upgrade it, then that's great."
The system has been known to go down erratically, for anywhere from minutes to hours. On Dec. 26, 1998, it went down for 20 hours in British Columbia. Petz didn't think that would pose a problem in Hamilton.
"Like any system, it does go down for maintenance, but that's a minimal threat for our officers. If it ever did go down, they could always call in to the records office where we have access to local files."
CPIC came under attack in the mid-1990s, after it was found that murderer and rapist Paul Bernardo was suspected of attacking a number of women in the Toronto area in the late 1980s, prior to his 1991 and 1992 murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.
Armed with a better program, it was said, police would have apprehended Bernardo long before the deaths of the two teenagers.
Another problem with CPIC is that it does not record summary offences. These are minor crimes that net penalties ranging from a fine to six months in jail, and do not require fingerprinting or mug shots. Summary convictions include offences such as communicating for the purposes of prostitution, causing a disturbance, exhibiting an indecent show and driving while suspended.
What this means is that if you are charged with a summary offence in a jurisdiction outside the one in which you live, local authorities may never know. A man charged for masturbating in public in Manitoba could conceivably be hired as a nanny in Saskatchewan, because a police background check wouldn't indicate the charge or even a subsequent conviction(without authoritative knowledge of his prior conviction).
Petz would not say if this lack of information hindered police.
CPIC is also used by social agencies requesting criminal background checks from prospective employees. It costs the municipality $40 to run a check on behalf of an applicant.
Though criticized for being intrusive, the process eliminates the possibility of a day-care centre, for instance, hiring a pedophile. Guertin said the increase in agency requests is not the cause of the overflow. Last year it accounted for only 1,300 of the 522,000 databank searches.
Guertin said a new CPIC would allow pictures of offenders to be sent electronically to mobile computers, reducing the chances of a felon escaping. It will also allow access by Crown attorneys and judges in determining sentences.