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 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!

Instant People Check is a leading provider of an instant criminal background check 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.