How to Find Out if Someone Has an Arrest Record
Finding a Person’s Arrest Record
People wanting to learn how to find out if someone has an arrest record might range from a potential employer, a landlord looking to rent property or even a single mother searching for good childcare options. You have something you want to protect, whether it’s a child, money assets and or production standards.
Searching for an arrest record lets you see what a person has been arrested by law enforcement for, so you know what the police have charged a person with in the past, even if that man or woman was cleared of the charges later. You’ll usually be able to see misdemeanor arrest records for the past 7 years, while you can see felony arrest records for a person’s entire adult life.
So you’ll be able to get a good idea if the person you are hiring, taking in as a tenant or trusting to enter your children’s lives has done something which would disqualify them from such trust. There isn’t a comprehensive database of crimes and arrests, though, so you’ll have to access several crime files to know for sure the people in your life aren’t criminals.
Get Full Name Information
This is where we usually start. Get as much information as you can about the person you are performing the search on, with the minimum amount of info being their full name.
Search Your County’s Clerk of Courts
Find out whether the subject of your research has a local arrest record by going to the “Clerk of Courts” for your local county. Look in your Phone Directory or do an online Google to find the contact information. If you can’t find a specific clerk of court’s office, call your County Courthouse (also found in the Phone Directory) and ask them for the number and location of the Clerk of Courts.
Visit Your State Website
Once you know your subject’s local arrest record, go to the law enforcement agency website for the state the two of you live in. You might have to pay a fee for the information, but you can purchase for a small fee arrest records or other criminal court records for your state.
Avoid the FBI Site
There’s little reason to try the FBI website, because the Federal Bureau of Investigation only gives out arrest records to the person arrested. That is, you can request a copy of your arrest record (and challenge the information), but you cannot request a copy of any other citizen’s arrest record.
The FBI keeps information on all fingerprints, so this is a huge arrest database. If you believe you aren’t getting jobs or leases because of something in your arrest record, get your FBI arrest record.
Go to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Website
Instead of the FBI, go to the FBP or Federal Bureau of Prisons website. This site lets you get inmate information. While this won’t help you learn about misdemeanors, you will learn if the person you are researching has served time in a federal prison for a felony conviction.
Finding Out if Someone Has an Arrest Record
When you find out if someone has an arrest record, you’ll be able to act on that information. Sometimes, an arrest might not concern you, if you are reading about traffic arrests or misdemeanour pot possession. But if you are hiring someone to make deliveries, a traffic history could be a red flag. Possession of weed might be a red flag if your company has a rigid drug policy.
The real advantage of finding out about an police record is when a person has a serious felony record, whether the arrests involve murder, manslaughter, robbery, battery or rape. You never know until you check it out, especially in this day and age, when people move around the country and start new lives all the time.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Criminal Records, Private Investigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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