People look for information every single day, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes the information you need is incredibly easy to find, like today’s weather forecast. In other cases, things can be much trickier, like trying to find someone’s arrest records. No matter the information you’re looking for, you deserve to find it. Fortunately, no matter how notoriously difficult arrest records are to find, there is a way. It’s easy enough to find arrest records if you know where to look for them and what tools you need to utilize to make your search easier. Today we’re going to be looking into exactly that. 

Arrest Records: A Brief Explanation and Definition 

Before delving into the real meat of this article and explaining how to find arrest records, let’s get our definitions and explanations out of the way. While most people reading this article probably already know about arrest records, it can be a little confusing for some people. After all, people spend years in school learning the ins and outs of our legal system, so it only makes sense that your average person has some things that they don’t know a whole lot about. This stuff is confusing, so let’s make sure all of our readers are fully up to speed.

Arrest records are, to put it as simply as possible, records of someone’s arrest. Any time someone is arrested, regardless of if they’re convicted of a crime, it appears on their arrest record. That means every time someone was arrested for being too drunk in a public area, for jaywalking, speeding, everything. It all appears on the arrest record. This is so that people who need to access this information can do so easily without having to worry about the fallibility of human memory. This also ensures that records are kept even if the arresting officer dies, which would be an incredibly tricky thing if records weren’t kept. 

There are many types of records other than just records of arrest. The three types that are the biggest to our criminal justice system are arrest records, court records, and criminal records. We already went over the first, but let’s take a quick look at the other two. Court records are a record of any time someone has appeared in court. You can go to court without being arrested, so something can be added to your court record without being added to your arrest record. The third of these three, criminal records, is a record of any crime that someone has been convicted of at any point in their life. 

While you can have something added to your criminal record without having it added to your arrest record, you have to have an addition to your court records to have something added to your criminal record. This is because of due process, which ensures everyone in the United States, citizen or not, is provided a fair trial that is judged by a jury of their peers. This was put into place to ensure that no one has the power to play judge, jury, and executioner. It’s generally considered to be a good thing that things are set up this way. Allowing one person to have sole authority over an entire criminal case can lead to people that don’t deserve prison to be railroaded by the courts.

Why are Arrest Records Available to the Public?

You may be a little curious as to why arrest records are available to the public at all. It’s a reasonable curiosity. No government is required to provide this kind of information. Or are they? The way that things are shaped in the United States, it might actually surprise you to find out that the government is actually required to provide a great deal of information to its citizens, no matter where they might live in the country. Why might this be? Well, there’s a lot of history behind it. 

For decades, people noticed that the government here in the United States wasn’t very transparent. In the 1960s, lawmakers came together to try and solve this problem. That’s when the first ever government transparency law was passed, and while it was rudimentary, it was definitely a start to solving the issue. Back then, most of the information you could get from the government had to be requested. It’s actually common to this day for people to take this approach, especially journalists, lawyers, and highly concerned citizens. As far as the availability of the information that we’re looking for today, there’s an easier way and newer laws paved the way.

It’s been almost 60 years since that first piece of legislation was passed, and as the years have gone by, many laws of the same nature have been passed, both on a state and federal level. Every state has its own set of laws that dictate how these publicly available records are handled, and the federal government has some basic rules. Overall, the states decide their own laws for how these things should work, and they work pretty smoothly for the most part. Some states are more transparent than others, but that’s what happens when states make their own choices for this. 

Most information you would want or need on a regular day can easily be found online. Real estate records are usually on county websites, marriage records can be found through the courts, the list goes on. There are some things that you need to go to an office in person and request the records, but that’s not even too difficult for the most part. The biggest hurdle for the vast majority of public records is a nominal fee, but that fee in itself is rare and only used for processing. So why are arrest records so difficult to access? Well, they’re not all that difficult. You just need to know exactly how to find them. 

Finding Arrest Records with Ease

Finding someone’s arrest record shouldn’t be a difficult task simply for the fact that arrest records are public information. Unfortunately, regardless of what should be, it can actually be a very difficult task if you’re unaware of the tools that you have available to you. The internet has made this search a lot easier for just about anyone, but how does one find these records without struggling? 

If you’re tried checking through government databases, there’s a good chance that you’ve ended up more than a little frustrated at the process. While some counties are great about making this information easy to find right on their websites, it has a lot of flaws for those of us that are trying to find the information. Some counties don’t provide this information at all, or at least in an easily accessible database, while others do have a database and don’t regularly update it. That means that their database is full of unreliable information that will get you no closer to the truth than when you started. 

If you’re going about finding an arrest record this way, you’re going to have a bad time. It’s likely that you’d decide that the entire process is more trouble than it’s worth, but there is something that you should try before you give up. Personal background check services could very well be the solution to this puzzle that you haven’t used yet. These services are incredibly powerful for finding a lot more than someone’s arrest record, and you can even expect to find things like criminal records, driving records, court records, and a lot more.

These services operate by checking your search against the thousands of public records databases they have access to all over the country. Once you type in the person’s first and last name or phone number, it instantly locates all of the relevant information and provides it to you on a single page. It doesn’t get much easier than that, and you can even get the information you’re looking for in less time than it takes to brew a cup of coffee. That makes this both incredibly convenient and informational, hopefully being able to meet all of your arrest record needs in almost no time at all.

Don’t Let Your Arrest Record Search Stress You Out

There are a million and one things to stress out about every single day. Doing something as simple as an arrest record search shouldn’t be one of them. Fortunately, there are laws in place that can help you find this information a lot more easily and services online that can make the entire process a lot easier than it would be otherwise. Nothing can stand between you and the information that you need, no matter what you might need that information in the first place. 

***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.**