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by: Randy Mann
 So, you want to go it alone, on your own? You don’t
think you need to 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 long hours of research, lots of
paperwork and a great deal of waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Step 1: Verify Identity
The first thing you have to do when conducting your own criminal background check is to verify the
subject’s identity. You don’t want to discover that you’ve just spent days researching the
background of the wrong person. At the least you will need full birth name, any married or adopted
names, and the person’s birth date. Most public records such as arrest records, court records and
residential records require birth date verification because there is a good possibility that there
really is more than one John Smith running around out in the world. The possibility of two John
Smith’s sharing the same birth date is real, but mighty slim. If you’ll be considering a deep
background check, say through the FBI’s criminal database, you’ll also need a set of fingerprints.
As a prospective employer, you have the right to ask for this information, even the fingerprints.
Your prospective son-in-law might find it strange, however, unless you can lift his from a glass or
door knob or something without his knowing it.
Step 2: Verify Previous Places of Residence
Unless you know for certain that the subject of your criminal background check has lived at one and
only one address for his/her entire life, you’ll need a record of all previous places they have
lived. Most electronic databases have this information for at least 7 years. Some go back even
longer. In the event that you’ll need to do legwork 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’s current residential jurisdiction.
You’ll have to make a request of the court clerk for any records regarding your subject. You can
forget about any crimes he/she may have committed before turning 18 (in some cases 21) as juvenile
records are typically sealed. You can search at the local and state levels fairly easily in most
cases with a simple request form. You may have to wait a day or two for that request to be
considered legitimate, so be prepared to wait. After you’ve been granted permission, you’ll have to
slog through boxes and boxes of papers in most cases. Computerized arrest and court records are
fairly recent innovations. Small towns and cities tend to either not have them, have them only
recently, or have a back-log of files waiting to be entered into the new database. If you are lucky
enough to conduct your search in a larger city with computerized filing firmly established, you may
still need to dig through the dusty boxes in the basement of the courthouse for any records of
crimes committed prior to the 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 every local jurisdiction. That means that if the person in
question has lived in 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 be assured of a clear record. No
open-to-the-public nationwide criminal database exists. Not even the FBI has one. (The NCIC, or
National Crime Information Center, is only available to law enforcement officials.) So, you’ll be
slogging through boxes in lots of courthouses and statehouses if your criminal background check
subject has moved around a lot. If your subject has attended a private school or college, consider
contacting them, as well. Some colleges and universities don’t report crimes committed on campus
for fear of bad publicity, especially minor crimes and student-on-student crimes. To ensure that
your subject’s wild-oats days weren’t a source of criminal activity, you’ll want to contact the
campus police or public safety officials.
Let’s suppose that you did manage to lift a good clear set of son-in-law-to-be’s finger prints from
his water glass at dinner and you want the FBI to run them. You’ll have to fill out a request form,
wait for it to be processed and then wait 24 hours to a week to get your results. The FBI can tell
you if the subject has ever served in the military, ever been employed by local, state or federal
government, and whether or not his fingerprints are on file for any other reasons (gun ownership,
criminal record, etc.) Employers are supposed to be assured of a 24 hour response for prospective
employees, but the general public may have to wait a while for their results. I think that’s
probably a deterrent to prospective fathers-in-law and other nosey neighbors.
Whether or not your search turns up anything is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you
hope to find. You can hire someone to do the “dirty work” of slogging through old case files. You
can spend weeks and even months before you find out what you did or didn’t want to know. My best
advice is to hire an online criminal background check firm like Instant People Check and let them
do the work for you. They’ve got nearly instant access to local, state and federal records you
could never search as quickly or as thoroughly. And they don’t need the boy’s fingerprints to do
it!
About The Author
Instant People Check is a leading provider of an instant criminal background check http://www.instantpeoplecheck.com/ "
target=new>http://www.instantpeoplecheck.com/ online. For just $12.95 you'll a lot more
about your potential new hire that they may want you to. You can do national or state-specific
criminal records checks quickly and cheaply.
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