Why Criminal Records are Hard to Find

Have you ever wondered why certain records are more difficult to locate than others? Things like real estate records can be a breeze, but criminal records take herculean effort to find. Both of these types of records are considered to be public records, so why is one so much more difficult to find than the other? Even with the gift of the internet, it can still take weeks or more just to find someone’s criminal record.

Criminal Records and You

Criminal records are just one of many types of records that are kept by the United States government. Really, everything that the government does is included in a record somewhere. Some of those records are easy enough for the public to get their hands on, and others are classified and buried so deep that it will take until its classification period ends. In most cases, the longest any piece of information can stay classified in the United States.

Criminal records are records of crimes committed by specific people. For example, if Michael robs a bank, gets caught, and manages to survive the warzone that is a botched bank robbery, he would be taken to court to be tried for his crimes. Once convicted, and, assuming he doesn’t have a world-class lawyer that also works miracles in their free time, he would be convicted because of the massive amount of video evidence that would come from a bank, that attempted heist would appear on his criminal record.

You see, criminal records are just one of the records that Michael would get a new entry added to. He would also get an addition to his arrest records because he was arrested during his attempted bank robbery and an addition to his court record because he had to stand trial for his actions. All three of these types of records are incredibly important and serve their own distinct purpose.

The Reason Why Criminal Records Are So Hard to Find

The internet has created a portal to all of the collective knowledge of the human race. You can just as easily learn how to build an a-frame house in the middle of the woods as you could learn how to make a nice carrot cake for your loved ones. You can learn all about 4th-century Germanic peoples or about the political unrest in the middle east. Everything you could want to learn about is right there at the tips of your fingertips.

In fact, the internet even allows you to access public records. Housing records, arrest records, heck, even warrant information can be easily accessible in some counties. So why are criminal records so difficult to find? Criminal records are, after all, considered to be public record. Most public record information is easy to find, so why not that one?

Well, the availability of this information can be easier or more difficult depending on where you look. If you go directly through law enforcement websites, you’re going to have a bad time. Most law enforcement websites make this information incredibly hard to find. There are three categories of how you’ll find this information:

• Up to date and well-maintained databases with useful information. This scenario is the best-case scenario, but is far from the norm. Even in the best-case scenario you’ll likely only be provided with arrest records and need to figure out if the person in question was convicted of a crime or not. Repeat that process until you’ve sorted through every entry. This scenario is most likely to happen if you need to look in a well-funded county but can sometimes occur in less well-funded counties.
• Out of date or incorrect information. This scenario is also common and is especially common in counties with smaller budgets that still want to make this information available. You’ll still need to manually compile actual convictions from arrest records, but there may be a lot of missing or incorrect information.
• No database to speak of. This may be the most common, and it can come from any county, no matter the funding. In this case, you just won’t be able to get any information. You can’t get water from a rock, and you can’t get information from a database that simply doesn’t exist.

On top of these three scenarios, none of the databases are connected. That means that you’ll need to check in every county you suspect the person in question may have been convicted of a crime. As you might imagine, that can take a lot of time and can lead to you having incorrect or missing information.

Unfortunately, this is the reality of how most people go about trying to do criminal records checks. It’s very time-intensive, and often, the results aren’t worth the work. That means that millions of Americans are just throwing their time down the toilet to find information that might not actually be available. There is a better way to go about this, and all it takes is a little know-how.

An Easier Way to Find Criminal Records

If you’ve ever tried to find criminal records yourself, you’ve probably run into some of the walls that we discussed in the last section and wished there was some way to streamline the process. After all, time is a nonrenewable resource. Once you spend a day on a wild goose hunt, you’ll never get that day back. If you want a faster way, all you need to do is look, and you can have the information in less time than it takes to cook a Hot Pocket.

There are many companies that exist simply to provide this information to people that are looking, and that makes your search a lot easier. You simply need to find a good personal background check service. These services are incredibly powerful tools and provide their users with unfettered access to information they might not have been able to find otherwise.

Personal background check services are different by design. It’s a rather short and simple process. You enter the name of the person you’re trying to get more information on, and then you hit enter. Once you do that, their system scrubs thousands of public records databases from counties all over the United States simultaneously. It then gives you access to the person in question’s criminal record, but that’s not all.

At the end of your search, you can expect to have active warrant information, arrest records, court records, driving history, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and sometimes even more, depending on what’s available. All of this information is available on a single, easy-to-read page, and you can expect to get your search results instantly.

This method is a lot easier than trying to search through law enforcement websites and takes a fraction of the time. It really makes finding criminal records a walk in the park, and that’s really what you want when you’re trying to find someone’s criminal record.

The Reason Why People Seek Out Criminal Records

There are a number of reasons why people seek out criminal records, but the biggest one that we’ve heard of is safety. There are a lot of dangerous people in the world, and it would be impossible to tell every single one of them with just a glance. Most people are interested in extending their time here as long as possible, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to be sure that you aren’t putting yourself into dangerous situations with dangerous people.

Many people also have children to think of. Most Americans have worried at some point or another if they can really trust their neighbor to drive their children to school or to babysit. On top of all of the normal dangerous people in this world, there are people that wish to use children for their own twisted pleasure. It’s any parent’s worst fear for their child to be taken advantage of by some sick pedophile that doesn’t know how to respect children, and finding someone’s criminal record allows them to illuminate their past so they can be sure that the person they’re about to trust their children with isn’t going to cause harm.

Make Your Criminal Records Searches Easier

People waste a lot of time. It’s just kind of something that we do, and a lot of that time waste happens because of inefficient ways of doing things. Fortunately, the easiest way to correct this issue is to simply know the most efficient way to go about it. There are a lot of ways that we can make our everyday lives more efficient, and by doing so, maybe, just maybe, we can unlock that 25th hour that we all so desperately need.

***SpyFly provides consumers affordable, immediate access to public record information. Federal laws prohibit businesses from using SpyFly’s service to make decisions about employment, insurance, consumer credit, tenant screening, or for any other purpose subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 USC 1681 et seq.**