Lately, it seems like there are a plethora of television commercials, news paper adds, and spam email talking about “Do you know who (your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends, etc) really are”. Generally, at this point they give you information on how to do a free criminal background check on someone. I have even gone to them from my home computer, just out of curiosity.
You enter as much information as you have on someone in to an online database. You will get a listing of names and sometimes you get dates of birth and addresses along with a listing of crimes that person committed. There are other databases that you can program in your address and find out where all the felons and/or sex offenders live in your neighborhood. Fascinating, isn’t it? I have always believed that you need to be very aware of your surroundings and be proactive in your own self protection. These types of database searches should be perfect so that I can figure out who has the potential of coming in to contact with children while in our yard, walking to school, or even playing in the school yard. So, I decided to plug in some information on this one particular website (our local grade schools address) to see what issues are going on in our neighborhood.
In my particular neighborhood, there is an ethic male with a history of sex crimes against children and, by the date of birth provided, he was in his mid-thirties. He is reported to be a registered sex offender. Probably the most startling part of the search is that they showed him living at my address. My home is a single family home, not an apartment. I do not have an apartment complex near my home. My family is also not an ethnic family and we are not in our mid-thirties. At first, it was a little amusing, until I wondered how many of my neighbors have also accessed this website and seen the same information. Would they suspect my 50 something year old non-ethnic husband is the same person? I tried to contact the website and let them know that they have something terribly wrong here. What I was told was that this was a public database and the information was drawn from sources all over. I could write a letter to the people that run the website but I would need to know who the source of the information was and then contest the information with that website as the original source. Chances are it would take quite a long time to get this cleared up since it was a public access database. By a long time, they are talking months if not a year or more. At this time, I can only hope that my neighbors have some common sense here and take the discrepancies to heart.
Online databases and free database searches can be dangerous! They do not meet FCRA Compliances. The records found on these sites may be outdated or have incorrect information. Any record that you find through one of these “free searches” should always, always be verified through a court. The crimes also listed on these websites may not be specific and you can get more information if you give them a credit card number and get the details. Again, these database searches are not Fair Credit Reporting Act Complaint and you need to be extremely careful if you choose to use this information in a hiring decision.
