The Best Way to Find Arrest Records

Humans are a curious bunch. We’ve built towers that touch the skies from the knowledge that we’ve gained. Transcended the heavens to put our flag on the moon and robots on Mars, all because we thirst for knowledge. While our search today isn’t anything quite as groundbreaking as extraterrestrial travel, it still lines up with what humans are best known for. Finding answers to questions, no matter how big or small that question may be. If you’re curious about someone’s past, just know that you’re carrying on a long tradition of curiosity, and it makes sense that you’d want to know how to find arrest records.

The process is actually pretty simple. In order to locate someone’s arrest records, you only need to be aware of the tools that you have at your disposal. The internet is going to be your best friend for this search, but as powerful as the internet is, you still need a direction to go in in order to take full advantage of the power of this tool you have access to. Today we’re going to delve into some background information about arrest records as well as how you can find anyone’s arrest records without ever having to leave the comfort of your home.

A Brief History and Explanation of Arrest Records

Recordkeeping is the backbone of most civilized nations. Humans have been keeping records of all sorts since ancient Egypt, which is a lot further back in time than people realize. To put it into perspective, ancient Egypt was around in 3100 B.C.E., while ancient Greece wasn’t around until about 700 B.C.E. That means that ancient Egypt predates ancient Greece by about 2,400 years. That’s a long time, almost ten times longer than the United States has been a country.

That being said, at the time Romulus and Remus were still being raised by a wolf, there were already intricate recordkeeping techniques that had been passed down through countless generations in Egypt. To this day, we use record keeping to keep track of nearly everything that the government does, from the mundane to the extraordinary. This allows for people to easily review what has happened from year to year or even decade to decade and make choices based on the data that has been collected.

Arrest records are slightly newer, but not too much. The way that the world operates has changed a lot in the last few thousand years, which has facilitated some major changes. In the modern-day, arrest records are added to any time someone is arrested for any reason. There doesn’t need to be any court date set or any convicted charge connected to the arrest in order for this addition to happen. The arrest is the only thing that matters for arrest records. There are two other types of records that are used for the two things we listed off. Court records are for when someone goes to court, and criminal records contain information about convictions.

These three types of records make up most of the criminal justice system’s record-keeping, as far as criminals go anyway. You can have something added to your court record without an addition to your arrest record, and the same goes for your criminal record. You can also have something added to your court record without being convicted, which means that nothing will be added to your criminal record. You do, however, need something added to your court record in order for there to be an addition to your criminal record. That is because you have to go to court to be convicted of a crime. That’s not a step that can just be skipped over. It’s your right as an American citizen.

Why Finding Arrest Records is Helpful

Many people access arrest records every single day, and that action may be more than a little confusing to others that haven’t thought of doing this. There are a lot of different reasons why people do these kinds of searches, and the exact reason for every individual can change a lot depending on their circumstances. For the most part, people are just looking to make sure that the people in their lives are safe to be around.

The world is a dangerous place full of dangerous people. It’s hard to tell what exactly someone is able to do based on their appearance, the way they talk, the things they say, and any nonverbal cues that they may give off. This obscurity of capability is only enhanced by the rise of the internet, with people meeting strangers from the internet at an all-time high. You can tell even less about someone based on their well-curated online persona, and that can lead people into some pretty sticky situations if they aren’t careful.

That being said, many people just want to vet others that are entering their life. That could be new co-workers, a cute date from Tinder, or even a friend that they met in an online game that they really hit it off with. Finding out if someone has an arrest record can paint a pretty clear picture of the type of person they are and what sorts of acts they’re able to bring themselves to. Now, arrest records don’t need any sort of conviction, so many people might claim that using them for this is a little hit or miss, but you can still tell a lot about a person if they’ve been arrested on multiple occasions for assault, for instance.

Finding Arrest Records: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

Now, arrest records are considered public information, which means that it is your right to access them. That being said, even if they are public record, that doesn’t mean that the government has to hand them to you on a silver platter. The information is out there, but you need to be able to use the right approach to get exactly what you’re looking for.

For example, many counties do provide arrest information for recent arrests. This is useful if you’re just checking to see if a loved one was arrested because you can just search by name, and it will pull up their record and sometimes a mugshot along with it. Not every county does that, so things can be tricky, even just for that kind of search. Some counties provide all arrests for someone, while others only provide arrest information for the last week or so. It can vary a lot from county to county, but if you’re lucky and just checking to see if a loved one got arrested, this method can yield good results.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to vet someone, you’re likely to run into some major issues early on. Between the lack of information availability and the fact that counties don’t interconnect their databases, you can run into not getting the information you need pretty quickly. That poses some pretty huge issues for your vetting process, but there is another way that can yield you a lot more information in a fraction of the time that looking through the databases provided by the government would take you.

This method is pretty simple. Just use a personal background check service. Those services are able to pull arrest records, warrant information, criminal records, driving records, court records, the list goes on. By using one of these services, you can be sure that you’re getting all the information that you need without having to worry about there being any information missing from your search.

The reason why these services are so trustworthy is because of the way that they operate. Their systems are specially designed to pull data from public records databases all over the country with speed and precision. You just need to enter in the required information, usually either the name of the person in question or their phone number, then hit enter. The system will do the rest of the work and instantly provide you with all of the records you need to be sure that you’ve thoroughly checked the person in question’s background.

Arrest Records and You

Finding arrest records should never be a task that you find stressful. The information is out there if you know where to find it, and that very same information can save you a lot of headaches in the future. No matter why you might have an interest in obtaining this information, you deserve to be able to do so easily. The internet has made this task exceedingly easy for those that know the proper channels to find the information that they seek. That’s great news for anyone and everyone that wants to find this sort of information.

***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.**