The Expert Podcast

…So where do you look to find information to do your own background Check on a person. This is Dave at active Intel investigations. The first thing to look at is what type of background investigation are you looking to do? Criminal records is the most common type of background investigation. Criminal records, for example arrest convictions and other types of, criminal records as opposed to civil…are separated out at four different areas. You can be arrested by city police. You can be arrested by state or police or investigators. You can be arrested by a federal level. For example the FBI or the CIA. You can also have an arrest record at the county level the Sheriff's department. So…all the records for each one of those types of jurisdictions falls within only that jurisdiction. There is no national database. Which is accessible to say where's all the criminal records. What'd you have to do is start where that person may have lived where they may have been arrested, where they may have had convictions What court system did that occur in, and then look at those records. The good news is all court records are public records. They can be accessible to anybody who is willing to go to the courthouse and look at those records. Some of them are online. But in most cases you want to go in person to get the accurate records, the online records may not be complete. Then there's the other type of background is civil court records. Do you want to be aware of lawsuits that that person may have had filed against them? Have they been sued for damages They have judgements against them. You may also want to know if this person has filed lawsuits against other people to find out what their litigation background is. You want to make sure as you're looking at these records whether they're criminal or civil, that you're matching the ID info, you don't want to get the wrong john smith and think that this person has, you know a conviction for some type of narcotics or theft or fraud if it's a different John Smith So you want to match up information from those core records, their address, maybe their date of birth. In some cases there'll be social security numbers, but in many cases those are redacted from records for privacy. So you want to make sure you have the right person. So you're not unintentionally excluding somebody from consideration because it's the same same name on A different person be aware that some type of records may be purged after a certain period of time Some records are eliminated from the public system. You may have to go to arrest records, the find the hard copy documents of the origin of that case.