If you are new to understanding all there is to know about criminal records and the criminal information industry, one thing you may be considering is the reliability of criminal records. Is the records information correct? What makes for the most accurate criminal background information? Moreover, what factors might limit this accuracy? In the following category, we examine the criminal record from a reliability standpoint, to answer the previous questions; in an effort to offer understanding of how reliability relates to the whole premise of the criminal information industry.
When it comes to criminal records, you may be wondering how reliable the criminal information contained therein is. From the most general of records reporting perspectives, every crime, how its processed, given sentencing, probation, and any other actions involved with the potential commission of a crime should be as accurate as possible. This is because the purpose of government has been set up in such a way to exhaustingly screen and maintain the employees of law enforcement and criminal justice that are recording the criminal records information. So, the reliability of the employees processing the information should be accepted as a given.
With this first of reliability of sources as regards government officials taken care of, there is the issue of how the information from arrests, convictions, acquittals, incarcerations, plea bargains, and probations are recorded. There are two things to address when considering if the criminal record report you are seeking is reliable according to how they are handled by government criminal justice agencies. First, the most common reason that a particular criminal records file may be inconsistent with the whole truth is related to the inconsistency across all jurisdictions of courts and types of information repositories in how the files are indexed. Every jurisdiction at the municipal, county, state, and federal level offers various courts and information repositories for their cataloging of criminal records information; and every single location has a different means of identifying these files-i.e. some by court room number, by plaintiff’s last name, by case number, etc etc. Due to this inconsistency in filing and organization, criminal cases and their respective information can easily be confused with other similar cases.
Secondly, there is the topic of biometric and non-biometric identifiers. In the criminal records indexing world, there are two main ways that criminals are identified, by biometric and non-biometric identifiers. Biometric identifiers are all characteristic of a person that can be without a shadow of a doubt be linked to that individual exclusively-i.e. fingerprints. Non-biometric identifiers are according to demographic variables such as name, hair color, age, height, weight, etc. Since fingerprint identifying systems and other biometric systems are very expensive, most jurisdictional courts and law enforcement stations use non-biometric identifiers. This can result in easy confusion of persons in a criminal database and the wrong respective records. For example, a person could run a criminal records search on a John Doe with brown hair and medium build; but they could come up with not only a number of persons matching those criteria; but their John Doe could have been entered into the database as J. Doe. In this case, the person conducting the criminal records report search, would be misidentifying the subject of their search; thereby making the reliability of their findings slim.