Comprehending An Instant Criminal Background Check
Today, computers and computer networks and the internet make life easier for everyone by making information easily available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection anywhere around the world. Information can be instantly accessed about almost any topic and thanks to the policies of some governments with regards to public access to official records and the posting of the same online; an instant criminal background check can often be conducted.
In the days before an instant criminal background check was in the realm of possibility, criminal background checks took much time and effort to conduct effectively and thoroughly. Paper cuts, among other inconveniences, were the travails of working with thousands or even millions of paper files, possibly from extremely far and dissimilar sources. The inconvenience, cost in time and effort, and inefficiency of the old system made it unappealing and unfeasible for anyone who was not in law enforcement to conduct any sort of background check. Background checks at this stage were everything but instant. In countries where government records have largely not been put online, this is still largely the case.
As time went on and improvements in computing and networking allowed information sharing between law enforcement arms on a scale that was not yet imagined, the idea of an instant criminal background check became a reality. This was especially true whenever jurisdictions and law enforcement districts had agreements to share information with each other, as the technology would not be quite reaching its full potential if such policies and agreements are not put into place.
In the United States, the impetus for an integrated system to allow almost anyone to perform an instant criminal background check began after the passing of Public Law 103-159, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (Brady Act) in November 1993. This law required FFL or Federal Firearms Licensees to request a complete background check on individuals who attempt to purchase firearms. The United States had at the time, and still has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, and the passing of such a law would have strained the system that processes background checks. This was because, though at this point most criminal records have been encoded into computer networks, there were no conformity standards or even mechanisms put into place to allow these separate networks to effectively communicate with each other. The passing of the Brady Act prompted the Attorney General to set up the National Instant Criminal Background Check System or NICS in 1998, when the last provisions of the law had been instituted. This is, of course a system that allows one to run an instant criminal background check on people who have records on certain United States government databases. This includes the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), NICS Index and the Interstate Identification Index (III). While the system was developed for making easier the running of an instant criminal background check for those attempting to purchase firearms, it could also be used for the same kind of checks for different uses and is in fact, an indispensable tool for law enforcement in the United States. The NICS, strictly speaking, is not instant though it consistently returns results of a query to within 30 seconds, which is obviously a vast improvement of the weeks such searches may have taken before the system was implemented. Other countries and unions have similar systems in place. Depending on local laws, anyone could run an instant criminal background check on anybody. Using private firms that specialize in such checks is usually the easier way to go about things and such services are often used by employers and are readily available online.
Background Check
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