The Complete Guide to Conducting Your Own Completely Free Criminal Record Check
I have written several articles in the past on how to conduct your own free background checks. I wanted to make this article as comprehensive as possible on how to conduct your own criminal check for free. If there are things on your record that you would like to check on, this is the proper way to do it. First get yourself organized. Start by getting all of your previous addresses together so it will be easier to look up information.
Free County Criminal Record Background Check
You may actually conduct this on other people as it is considered public record. You are going to need all of your previous addresses for this part so make sure that you have them.
1) Let’s start by going to Crimcheck’s free public record page located here http://www.crimcheck.com/freerecords.htm. Scroll down a bit and look for your state. I live in Ohio so I would choose Ohio from the list. After I click on my state it takes me to a list of state offices and a list of the counties located within that state.
2) Scroll down until you find your county. Under that county heading you will find another list of offices specific to that county. The county I am interested is Cuyahoga County.
3) Under Cuyahoga County you will see some city courts and some county offices. I want to conduct a Cuyahoga County criminal record check so I will go to the link here OH - Cuyahoga County - Common Pleas Criminal Records.
4) Once I go to that link I will find a search box to conduct a name search. In this case I would want to search my own name to make sure that I had no criminal record within that county.
5) Now repeat the steps above with all of the previous counties within which you have lived.
That seems easy enough but what do you do if your county isn’t listed? Well, it is a good thing we have Google. You can just type in whatever county you are looking for into Google, for instance, “Cuyahoga County Court”. That will usually yield a result that can give you a starting point. If you have to you can even go to the courthouse within that county and request any criminal records that you may need, as a matter of fact most courthouses have public computer terminals for just such reasons.
One tip that you may want to use is checking surrounding counties around the area that you are searching for records. You may also want to check smaller cities in that area as well, because they may contain some misdemeanor records.
The Free City Criminal Record Check
This one is easy enough as it very similar to checking your county records. Again, you can go to the free public records page located at Crimcheck and scroll down to the appropriate area. Cities can get somewhat complicated just because of jurisdictional issues. There are city courts, mayor’s courts and some traffic courts. These mainly cover misdemeanors and traffic incidents, but they are very useful, especially when crimes from higher courts have been bound over to them. If you are having trouble finding the appropriate court in your city you can always use Google or call your local police department and ask what court covers your city. As always it is a good idea to check the surrounding area as well.
Put Your Skills to Use
Now let’s try a simple exercise. I am looking for a criminal record on the person listed below:
Manis D. Smith Jr. From Cleveland, Ohio with a date of birth of 12/15/1971
I know Cleveland, Ohio is in Cuyahoga County. So, I went to the Cuyahoga County website docket information page and searched for his name. I received the results below:
Displaying 1 thru 3 (out of 3) matching your search criteria.
MANIS D SMITH JR 12/15/1971
MANIS D SMITH 02/09/1955
MANDEL D SMITHERMAN 12/01/1961
As you can see I have 3 results. The first one is my guy so I clicked on his name, Manis D Smith Jr. and got this:
Case History of MANIS D SMITH JR
CR-06-488774-A CASE CLOSED 11/03/2006
CR-06-478327-A CASE CLOSED 01/13/2006
CR-03-442602-ZA CASE CLOSED 08/14/2003
CR-99-381614-B CASE NO BILL 06/21/1999
CR-94-316759-ZA CASE CLOSED 11/23/1994
CR-93-295323-ZA CASE CLOSED 04/01/1993
At this point you can see the case numbers. For my purposes I only want to check on his most recent case so I click the first result and it reveals this case: (click for larger image)
Granted, this is just one county out of the thousands in the United States but you can adapt this method for just about any county and any subject. If you are not sure what is on your record you may want to check before you go and apply for that job, you may be surprised!
