At age 19, Thoby King broke a window during a party at the University of Toronto.

He was charged with mischief.

Despite hiring a lawyer, donating $200 to charity, paying to have his fingerprints taken, volunteering 28 hours of community service in a free lunch program for underprivileged Torontonians, and securing a withdrawal of the charge in court, King’s summer job offer from the City of Toronto was rescinded last month.

King has no criminal record. But a mandatory police background check flagged the withdrawn charge.

And that marked a swift end to that.

The now 21-year-old was supposed to be at work today as a tram announcer on Toronto Island — a dream summer job the accomplished university student was offered in May.

His momentary teenage indiscretion not only stole that job, he fears it could hold far-reaching implications as he begins his young working life.

“It’s difficult to have this bureaucratic nonsense impact me,” he says. “I’ve heard of problems with people (with charges) applying for schools. It does look like it will be a problem in the future.”

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King is among thousands of Canadians whose names are captured in massive police databases despite having never been convicted of a crime, an ongoing Star investigation has found.

The routine disclosure of such non-conviction information — including unproven allegations, withdrawn charges, police surveillance notes and mental health calls to 911 — undermine employment, volunteer work and travel to the U.S. for hundreds of thousands of innocent Canadians, the investigation has found.

It’s easy to see why the city wanted to hire King, now a student at Concordia University, after he applied online and went through an interview last month.

Articulate and smart, the son of two lawyers, he was a steady 90s student in high school and earned top marks in his first year of university in Halifax.

After being offered the job, he was asked to sign a letter of consent for a police background check.

“I wasn’t really worried about it at the time because there wasn’t a conviction,” King says.

He thought his financial recompense and volunteer work, along with the withdrawn charge, marked the end of the matter.

But a response from Toronto Police eventually came weeks later saying, “We require elimination/verification of a criminal record through fingerprint results received from the RCMP.”

He was advised to have his fingerprints taken and submitted by a private firm. The process would take months, he was told. And without a clear police check, the city refused to hire him.

In an effort to salvage his son’s job prospects, King’s father swore an affidavit saying his son has no criminal record or pending charges.

“I am fully aware that if this statement were later shown to be untrue, I could be disbarred or disciplined by the Law Society of Upper Canada,” Edward Hore, Thoby’s father, wrote in an email to the city. “This sworn assurance should provide the city and the people of Toronto with the necessary protection until such time as the completed formal check is completed.”

It made no difference.

“It is bureaucracy run amok,” Hore, an intellectual property litigator, said in an interview this week. “It’s a fixed bureaucratic rule that gets followed regardless of common sense.”

Police reference checks are conducted by city staff as a final step in the hiring process for new employees in departments including Parks, Forestry & Recreation, Long-Term Care Homes and Services, Children’s Services and the Shelter, Support and Housing Administration.

A 2012 city staff report on the City of Toronto’s police background check says council has “recognized the inherent responsibility for safeguarding the community and ensuring that no individual employed by, or volunteering with, the city has been convicted of a crime which would call into question their ability to work directly with children or vulnerable persons as a regular part of their job or volunteer duties.”

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The report — and the actual city policy on police reference checks — make no reference to non-conviction records such as withdrawn charges as an impediment to employment with the city.

Today, King will be pulling a shift washing dishes on a Toronto cruise boat — an unsteady summer job he mustered without having to provide a police background check.

“I hope I’m not totally unemployable for anything other than washing dishes,” he says.

King says he immediately admitted to the campus police who arrested him that he broke the window in February of last year.

“It was a moronic thing to do,” he said in an interview. “There was no excuse for it.”

In a letter of apology written shortly after the incident, he wrote that, “I was not thinking very clearly, but I had the wherewithal to realize the utter foolishness of the act as soon as it was done. I have nothing but regret for the decision that I made that night.”

Robert Rotenberg, the Toronto criminal lawyer who represented King in his mischief charge, calls his client’s case, “laughably beyond outrageous.”

“We have a young man capable of doing extraordinary things in his life. Instead of embracing him and opening up opportunities, we’re sending him into this Kafkaesque bureaucracy.”

Currently, there are no firm rules about what records police can and cannot disclose in background checks. Discretion is left to individual forces and practices vary across the province.

Criminal lawyers, privacy advocates and organizations including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the John Howard Society of Ontario have called for legislative or policy change that would ban the disclosure of non-conviction records except in rare cases where the information release serves the larger public interest.

In response to the Star investigation, all three main provincial parties vowed during the recent election campaign to review the state of police record disclosures in Ontario toward better protecting the presumption of innocence.

Meanwhile, demands for police checks by employers, volunteer organizations, universities and other institutions are growing dramatically.

Toronto Police have experienced a 92 per cent increase in police background check requests in the past five years. Toronto Police have repeatedly insisted the information is vital to both officer and public protection.

“Where is it written that police are to be information hoarders?” says Rotenberg, adding he has numerous clients whose lives or livelihoods have been impacted by non-conviction disclosures. “They have no right to collect people’s information and keep it ad infinitum. As a society, what the hell are we doing? Why are we collecting everything about everyone and keeping it?”

Rotenberg says King’s withdrawn charge may yet have more impact on his professional aspirations as he starts out in the working world.

“The great irony is that we live in a country where we expunge the record showing you own a gun, but we won’t expunge the record of you kicking in a window at age 19,” he says. “You’re carrying a weight with you through your life for no reason. It’s like it never ends. There’s no closure.”

If you have a story to tell, contact Robert Cribb at rcribb@thestar.ca

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