How to Conduct a Criminal Background Check on Your Own

So, you want to go it alone, on your own? You don’t think you needto pay some company to help you determine if your new business partner,au pair or future son-in-law is on the up and up. Be prepared for longhours of research, lots of paperwork and a great deal of waiting. Andwaiting. And waiting.

Step 1: Verify Identity

The first thing you have to do when conducting your own criminalbackground check is to verify the subject’s identity. You don’t want todiscover that you’ve just spent days researching the background of thewrong person. At the least you will need full birth name, any marriedor adopted names, and the person’s birth date. Most public records suchas arrest records, court records and residential records require birthdate verification because there is a good possibility that there reallyis more than one John Smith running around out in the world. Thepossibility of two John Smith’s sharing the same birth date is real,but mighty slim. If you’ll be considering a deep background check, saythrough the FBI’s criminal database, you’ll also need a set offingerprints. As a prospective employer, you have the right to ask forthis information, even the fingerprints. Your prospective son-in-lawmight find it strange, however, unless you can lift his from a glass ordoor knob or something without his knowing it.

Step 2: Verify Previous Places of Residence

Unless you know for certain that the subject of your criminalbackground check has lived at one and only one address for his/herentire life, you’ll need a record of all previous places they havelived. Most electronic databases have this information for at least 7years. Some go back even longer. In the event that you’ll need to dolegwork to carry out your criminal background check (and be prepared,you most likely will) you’ll have to cover all possible jurisdictions.

Step 3: Conduct Your Criminal Background Check

You can begin your criminal background check with your subject’scurrent residential jurisdiction. You’ll have to make a request of thecourt clerk for any records regarding your subject. You can forgetabout any crimes he/she may have committed before turning 18 (in somecases 21) as juvenile records are typically sealed. You can search atthe local and state levels fairly easily in most cases with a simplerequest form. You may have to wait a day or two for that request to beconsidered legitimate, so be prepared to wait. After you’ve beengranted permission, you’ll have to slog through boxes and boxes ofpapers in most cases. Computerized arrest and court records are fairlyrecent innovations. Small towns and cities tend to either not havethem, have them only recently, or have a back-log of files waiting tobe entered into the new database. If you are lucky enough to conductyour search in a larger city with computerized filing firmlyestablished, you may still need to dig through the dusty boxes in thebasement of the courthouse for any records of crimes committed prior tothe computer’s use.

Now, remember when we discussed verifying a residential history?Here’s why – you’ll need to conduct local searches in each and everylocal jurisdiction. That means that if the person in question has livedin seven different cities in 6 different counties in the last 5 years,you’ll have to visit each and every one of them before you can beassured of a clear record. No open-to-the-public nationwide criminaldatabase exists. Not even the FBI has one. (The NCIC, or National CrimeInformation Center, is only available to law enforcement officials.)So, you’ll be slogging through boxes in lots of courthouses andstatehouses if your criminal background check subject has moved arounda lot. If your subject has attended a private school or college,consider contacting them, as well. Some colleges and universities don’treport crimes committed on campus for fear of bad publicity, especiallyminor crimes and student-on-student crimes. To ensure that yoursubject’s wild-oats days weren’t a source of criminal activity, you’llwant to contact the campus police or public safety officials.

Let’s suppose that you did manage to lift a good clear set ofson-in-law-to-be’s finger prints from his water glass at dinner and youwant the FBI to run them. You’ll have to fill out a request form, waitfor it to be processed and then wait 24 hours to a week to get yourresults. The FBI can tell you if the subject has ever served in themilitary, ever been employed by local, state or federal government, andwhether or not his fingerprints are on file for any other reasons (gunownership, criminal record, etc.) Employers are supposed to be assuredof a 24 hour response for prospective employees, but the general publicmay have to wait a while for their results. I think that’s probably adeterrent to prospective fathers-in-law and other nosey neighbors.

Whether or not your search turns up anything is a good thing or abad thing, depending on what you hope to find. You can hire someone todo the “dirty work” of slogging through old case files. You can spendweeks and even months before you find out what you did or didn’t wantto know. My best advice is to hire an online criminal background checkfirm like Instant People Check and let them do the work for you.They’ve got nearly instant access to local, state and federal recordsyou could never search as quickly or as thoroughly. And they don’t needthe boy’s fingerprints to do it!