How to Conduct a Criminal Arrest Records Search

Just like the saying about judging a book by its cover, you can’t tell what a person is like without looking into them either. We need to look a little deeper to actually see what people are made of. We live in a diverse world and cross paths with a wide range of people every day, and with a depressed economy and rising crime rate, we need to take precautions to defend ourselves. This has become easier to do than ever before.

There are records in the world about many aspects of our history. The United States has an extensive collection of public records that holds quite a bit of history. If you know what’s in them and how to use them properly, they’re worth their weight in gold, especially considering they’re fre to access. Looking through their arrest records and public records in general can help you find the truth about the people you know in your life.

There are multiple records in the system that relate to arrest histories and criminal violations, and regardless of whether or not a person is declared guilty or not, record of their arrest remains there. This is even true for someone in the military. Even if the charges are dropped due to insufficient evidence or the person is acquitted entirely, they are still kept in the public records of the United States.

Free Arrest Records, on the other hand, are kept by the states. That means that they fall under jurisdiction of state law. This means that the way to access them, or what they actually keep, differ from one state to the next. They’re usually fairly easy to access though, with the exception of times that the information is deemed sensitive, or there are children involved.

These Free Arrest Records can be obtained by any agency that holds them, even the larger ones like the FBI. You can request them in person, by phone, or by fax. They now also have an online request system put together that is becoming more and more popular as time goes on. They are technically free of charge, but there may be a small administrative fee charged by the agency you are requesting it from.

There are quite a few practical reasons to be able to search arrest records in this manner. They are typically used for other agencies‘ legal proceedings, though background checks and official police investigators may request them too. Private parties have been known to use them to look up the history of their neighbors, tenants, or babysitters at times as well. There are limits to what you can use these records for, and going outside of these limits is against the law.

Today, with the internet a daily part of our lives and a full computerization of the records, accessing the Free Arrest Records from a computer is the fastest, easiest way to read them. If you don’t have the patience or the time to do the accessing yourself, you can go to a commercial provider to do the requesting and research for you instead. But when you can access them online in a matter of minutes, why bother to pay the money anymore?