An Abbreviated History Of Criminal Background Checks

Detective and police movies are rife with many clichés. There are the more familiar ones, like a world weary cop or detective, damsels in distress, car chases, stupid police chiefs, and nattily dressed crime bosses. There are also other less notable clichés, like the messy apartment of a protagonist littered with boxes of take out Chinese food, partners that invariably get killed, and in older cop movies we see the most important cliché of all (for this piece anyway)… heroes surrounded by filing cabinets, digging though mounds and mounds of folders containing information files on criminals, conducting criminal background checks or whatnot.

Most of the clichés contain at least a grain of the truth with the rest being hyperbole. In the case of detectives digging through mounds of documents in period movies, the truth is, in the old days (even in the present time, in less well adjusted police departments), this was how most police work, including conducting criminal background checks got done. The hyperbole in the cliché is, the heroes always hit the jackpot or finish their work with time to spare so they can gun down the bad guys in warehouses near the waterfront. In reality, most law enforcement agents, especially those with desk jobs, spent most of their time doing paperwork. The paperwork on a single person often took a lot longer than one would expect.

Because of the expense and effort to conduct criminal background checks, such checks were not often conducted or requested by employers unless the position sought by an applicant was especially sensitive. Thus the vast majority of background checks, including criminal background checks were done by law enforcement officials for keeping countries safe. However, doing these checks was hard work and conducting them on people who lived outside of certain jurisdictions created red tape. As a result, some dangerous characters were able to hide and avoid detection due to the difficulties and inefficiency inherent in the old system. Things got even more complicated when criminals escaped to other countries where the country of origin had no agreements to share criminal records or the like. With these complications, criminal background checks became especially harder to conduct.

Then developments in computers and computer networking allowed law enforcement officers to share information with each other much more efficiently, even when they operated in other jurisdictions. As computers became smaller and computer networking became easier, more and more private firms conducted criminal background checks to reduce their liability in case of workplace violence or other untoward happenings. This is mostly due to the fact that old system, with its slow pace and great costs in time and effort was replaced with a new one that was cheap and efficient enough so that conducting criminal background checks on more employees became feasible.

As a matter of fact, the private sector conducts the most criminal background checks in the industrialized world in general, not law enforcement officials. The potency of computers and computer networks in making work more efficient in this respect has truly been demonstrated. A consequence of this speed and efficiency is that privacy laws have been said to have lagged behind technology. The future of all this is yet to be seen.

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