Public Criminal Records

Businesses rely heavily on their manpower to help them attain success. And for this reason the employee therefore plays a vital role in the success of any company. But there are hazards involved in the workplace – hazards which might be brought on by other employees. The average cost of damages brought on by violence in the workplace is something close to $ 2.2 million. These are only for negligence lawsuits that arise and do not cover yet insurance losses, loss in productivity, et cetera. For this reason, companies are now more carefully serious in their hiring practices.

“Don’t talk to strangers.” Echoes of this warning from our childhood days come to us briefly in certain moments. In today’s highly mobile society, it’s hard to trust just anyone. Everyday we encounter new faces of whom we know nothing about. We don’t know for one if that person we met at the subway has a record of mugging. We don’t know if the nanny we hire to care for our kids while we go to work has a history of violence against children. And then we don’t even know whether our co-workers have the same tendency to commit violence.

There is no such thing as a nationwide database of criminal records. There are state central repositories of criminal records, however, which contain information that are useful for those conducting pre-employment background checks. Then again, not all states keep public access databases of criminal records. In fact, only 29 of 50 U.S. states have made their central repositories available to the public. The rest only allow local databases of public record information which would have to do. One such state that does not have a public access central repository is Montana.

Even with many of the states offering online public access to criminal records, the idea is still a hot debate topic for Pennsylvanians. In 2004, a group of state employees has been meeting for months quietly and behind closed doors. The issue is deciding whether or not online public access to criminal records ought to be adopted to make Pennsylvania criminal court information readily available to state citizens.

Pima County in Arizona State has several different repositories of information on criminal records. These sources of criminal records deal mostly with Pima County convictions and not necessarily with cases wherein the result was not a criminal conviction.

There are several types of criminal records and not all of them deal with convictions. Therefore, the information that you get from Pima County databases may not necessarily be as complete as you would like it to be.

When speaking about federal criminal records, the first thing that really comes to mind is the FBI database, which is also known as the NCIC or the National Crime Information Center. The FBI database contains a large number of federal criminal records and for this reason, it is the closest thing that we have to a “nationwide” federal criminal records database. However, the federal criminal records stored in the FBI database are not open records and are therefore not accessible to the general public. Accessing information from the FBI database for any reason other than legal or the search is performed by unauthorized individuals, i.e. those that do not work for any criminal justice agency, could warrant huge fines or penalties.