It was reported in the Los Angeles Times that the City of Los Angeles online public database is omitting 40% of this year’s crimes. This glaring inaccuracy is a result of the Times analysis, that is comparing actual court cases to the ones listed on the public access database.
Last April, the Times discovered that Police programming errors caused many crimes to be mapped in the wrong geographic areas. In other words, you look in your neighborhood and think, despite this rotten economy, crime isn’t all that bad. And then you discover the crimes in your neighborhood are either missing or listed in someone else’s neighborhood.
This brings to mind another flaw in many municipal systems–the online county criminal database background searches. To be fair to Los Angeles County, it is far from the only place where there are glaring inaccuracies. Most states are broke and they have reduced staff, either through employment layoffs or furloughs. They are overwhelmed and understaffed. Small wonder they can’t keep the online portals or the criminal mapping systems current.
As a background checking service, we sometimes have clients,who have accessed the online serices, insisting there are criminal records in Los Angeles or Orange County. Often, quite often, in fact, there are either no records or the records are for another subject of a similar name.
We find that the case numbers are inaccurate. Names are confused. Identifiers, such as dates of birth, do not match. Files that should be there are not, and files that don’t exist in the County Courthouse are accessible online.
If you are an employer and your human resources personnel are conducting criminal background checks by relying on the online portals, you should expect some gross inaccuracies. And these are no joke. You can miss records on employment candidates or assume the records you found for a job applicant are accurate and refuse him the position. Only to discover that he was innocent and had no association with any crime. This leaves the employer open to liability issues for inaccurately reporting someone as a convicted felon.
If you are truly concerned about accuracy, and who isn’t, then conduct the county criminal background search through a reputable pre-employment background checking company. This would be a company that accesses criminal records directly from the courthouse. A reputable company will not rely on name only, but look for other identifiers such as date of birth, middle name or initial, social security number, related residential addresses. That way when records do return, you can be sure they actually belong to your employment candidate.
Check them out before you hire. But check them out correctly.
