Commenter Gitarcarver on yesterday’s item about how some in the Charlotte Police Department have talked about designating “public safety zones” where persons who have previously been arrested would be forbidden to go:
The City wants to make these zones based on arrests (not convictions.)
At the same time, an employer cannot ask whether a person has been arrested. Of course, there is now the push for “ban the box” which means an employer cannot ask about a conviction.
The City wants to say it can ban people and arrest people from public property, but those private companies can’t even ask about those convictions (much less arrests) during the initial hiring process.
Yeah.
THAT makes sense.
4 Comments
I think it’s a grand idea. Employers, barred from asking questions like “Have you ever been arrested over the dead body of a colleague, a bloody axe in your hand?” will be able to just meet applicants in a city park. Applicant not showing up? Either not interested or …
Don’t totalitarian governments do something like this? I seem to remember that Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were banned from Moscow – exiled to Siberia.
Makes perfect sense to me, one case is a governmental power and one case is a private right. Which does a government have incentive to increase over time and which does it have incentive to restrict?
I would think (and hope) that any such restriction would be considered a punishment. Therefore (1) it can’t be done to anyone not convicted and (2) it can’t be done to anyone who has completed his sentence (so he must still be on probation/parole).
Then again, the same ought to be true of sex-offender registration, but it has been upheld.
We need a new Supreme Court. Or at least a couple of new justices.