Help on Searching Criminal Records

Criminal Record Search Help

Are you one of the millions of consumers in need of a criminal record search? Perhaps you represent a business in search of better applicant screening procedures. On the other hand, you might be interested in vetting renters for your residential or commercial business. Regardless of your actual needs, you can conduct a criminal record search to learn the truth about those individuals whose past you question. However, making use of criminal records can be more difficult than you might think. How are you to use them? What information do you need to conduct a criminal record search?

While conducting a criminal record search is certainly an important thing to do (in an incredibly wide range of situations), knowing how to conduct such a search is very important. What do you need to do? Where do you turn for help?

If you represent a business interested in improving your applicant screening process, you are probably familiar with conducting a criminal record search with the aid of your local sheriff’s office. This is the traditional manner of completing such a search. That said, it is not without its drawbacks and concerns, the very least of which is the time required to conduct a search in this manner. You will find a number of different ways to search for this background information. However, in order to determine the best choice for your needs, you will have to know a bit more about the information required to conduct such a search.

Information Needed for a Criminal Record Search

What information do you need to conduct a criminal record search? Actually, this is the most important factor in the process, even more so than the actual search means that you employ. If you lack the required information, or have too little information, your results might be a bit more ambiguous than you would like, or even nonexistent. What should you include in your search? Here, you’ll find a bit about the information that you have to have, as well as information that pays enormous dividends to include.

Name: Obviously, you will have to include the person’s name. This should comprise their first and last name. However, you can also include their middle initial or even the full middle name. The reason that this is important is that many names are quite common. When you include the middle initial or full middle name, you provide greater specificity for your search and help ensure that you are provided with accurate results through a criminal record search.

In addition, you can include other aspects of the person’s name. This might include their maiden name, in the case that a woman is married or divorced. You might include the person’s suffix, such as Jr., Sr., III, etc. Of course, you can include suffixes such as LLD, Esquire, or other suffixes used in the person’s professional life. Once again, this provides greater specificity during your criminal record search and ensures that you find records only pertaining to the person in question.

State: This is an important field and you should ensure that you know what state the person resides in. However, you need not know their actual current state of residence in many instances, if you know previous states in which they have lived. That said, if you know their current state of residence, this is the best place to start – secondary and even tertiary searches can be run for multiple states of residence in the past.

It is important that you check any state that the person has lived in through a criminal record search, as this is the only way to gain a comprehensive look at their criminal past. In today’s society, it is becoming increasingly common for people to live in more than one state, even at a young age. Crimes can be committed in different states and the records will not show up under a criminal record search of another state.

Date of Birth: As you can see by the abovementioned criteria, specificity is of immense importance to your criminal record search. By providing the person’s date of birth, you help eliminate many other potential search results from the equation. Not only does this reduce the time it takes for the search to be completed, but it also decreases the time required for you to sort through search results. However, date of birth is not a required search criterion for most criminal record search providers (it is an excellent thing to include, though).

Social Security Number: Your Social Security number is used to identify you in almost every area of your life. It is used in employment, by the government, by the IRS, by your bank, lenders and everything else. It is also used by arresting officers and law enforcement agencies. Including the person in question’s Social Security number in a criminal record search also ensures that you are able to achieve the utmost in specific results. Of course, including the person’s Social Security number in the search is not a hard requirement, as many people do not have this information. That said, it pays enormous dividends to include this information in a criminal record search.

Where to Conduct a Criminal Record Search

As mentioned previously, you can certainly make use of the local sheriff’s office to help you conduct a criminal record search. However, this method only provides results from the local area and does not include information from neighboring states and often not even neighboring counties. The best choice for anyone in need of a criminal record search is to utilize online public record aggregates. These websites make powerful search tools available to consumers and businesses alike and ensure that you have the results you need in an almost immediate timeframe.