David Hicks

Review of Computer Services, RCMP HQ Hal...

Now before reading this review, understand that I ...

Now before reading this review, understand that I have much respect for the officers who we dealt with -- I'm sure they were following standard procedure. The system itself is what I'm complaining about. Both my brother and I, American citizens, tried to attend a club in Halifax and our US licenses were refused because they could not verify our licenses existed in the Canadian system. That is fine -- you can't expect everything to work out in your favor. However, I thought Canadian police may be of help because they may have access to different resources than a bouncer might. This was a wrong assumption -- after googling our first, middle and last names, apparently both my brother and I had committed crime in Halifax despite living in the US our entire lives. This is wrong and I wish I could come up with an explanation for what I can imagine are extremely low odds that both my brother and I who have unique first, middle and last names and dates of birth would have both committed crimes in the city despite living in another country our entire lives. Keep in mind that one of these crimes was a traffic violation when I was 16 and had never even driven out of the US. Of course, stuff can go wrong and both my brother and I can understand that, but then the police seized our licenses because they thought they were fake. This is where things began to bother us. Understand that for us a license is an investment -- imagine you pay for a right in your country and you follow rules your entire life just to have you identification seized from you. It bothered us both greatly. We tried explaining this to our officer; we told him where our extended family was staying, and facts about our lives which I thought he was verifying. Instead, we were told we would have to show our passports to get our licenses back. No big deal in terms of our ability to, but the principle itself really bothered me. To visit family in another country and have our licenses seized knowing we had never committed a crime seems wrong. It is important to note we got our licenses back after much argument, but we are kind of annoyed. To reiterate, we do not blame the police officers -- the one who dealt with us was a very nice guy who I could tell was genuinely trying to take every step he could to help us, but Interpol really screwed us over tonight and it is important that the Halifax police understand this. Feel free to contact me for further comment.