The internet, they say, lasts forever.
That once your fingerprints get on the ol’ Google machine, there’s no wiping them away. I’m not sure how true that is. Some wealthy people pay big money to have negative stuff about them scrubbed as much as possible from the internet.
I bring this up because I received a call the other day from a man convicted of a nasty assault in Burnaby a few years ago.
I’m not going to name the guy, but will say his crime involved assaulting someone while they were defenceless on the ground. All because the other dude called him a name.
Grownups – what are you gonna do with them?
The man was convicted and went through the justice system. The man now says he’s a different person and that having a story about him on the Burnaby NOW website is making his job prospects difficult.
Well, yeah, having being convicted of assault does make things more difficult in life.
It’s called consequences.
The man asked us to remove the story about his conviction from our website. I explained that we don’t remove accurate stories from our website just because criminals don’t want them there.
“I made a mistake,” the man said.
Well, no, a mistake is forgetting your keys at home or something benign.
Assaulting someone is a criminal act that comes with repercussions that can last a long time. It means that you might be competing for a job against someone who has chosen to not commit a crime – and you might lose that job because of what you did.
Sorry, I don’t make up the rules.
OK, perhaps I’m being flippant about this, but the bottom line is that our policy is to not remove articles from our website if they are accurate. There might be extenuating circumstances and I’m willing to listen, but saying that your past crime is making your life difficult is not one of them.
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
