More details revealed on 2018 Moose jaw police privacy breach

In the fall of 2018, the Moose Jaw Police Service fired two workers “inappropriately accessing police information records”, and now more details have been released on what happened in a report from the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner.

In the report from the commissioner released on Tuesday, it described the privacy breaches as “snooping”.

It said in September 2018, the police service got a call from the parent of an alleged young offender, and ended up discovering that an employee, referred to as Employee A, had access that young offender’s records then had sent details from the records to a family member through Facebook.

According to the report, the second employee, referred to as Employee B, had called and tried to get a communications officer to search license plate information to find the owner of a vehicle that had allegedly been in a crash with their child.

The communications officer refused and the employee said they would call back later for another officer, who ended up being Employee A. Police found out later that Employee A had accessed the information Employee B was looking for, and attributed the search to someone else.

Police later found other privacy breaches committed by Employee B, which they admitted were done out of interest and curiosity, and not for any job-related reason.

Both of the employees were fired soon after.

In his report, the commissioner said the police service responded appropriately to the breaches. He recommended though that the service start doing proactive audits of its system, looking for breaches.