No Records?

This case study will take an in-depth examination of when PF NY hits do not result in passable convictions. This happens more frequently than not, but what happens when an individual has numerous booking records and no records are reportable? When contracted for additional services, it was determined that the individual we are studying had several booking records. We researched these fully and the end result was that there were no records we could pass on to our client.

See Figure 1 for the PF NY results.

Figure 1 – Pointer File New York Booking Records

As shown in Figure 1, this individual had three booking records all from the same county. Onondaga County Jail will provide court information for booking records, but never the charge information. The process of obtaining said court information from the jail is a multi-step process that requires a FOIL (Freedom Of Information Law) request, and then an additional validation of authorization from the candidate that we have the permission to request that information.

When there are this many hits, sometimes it is more cost effective to run the name through the NYS OCA as a starting place to locate these arrests. Frequently, courts require a money order for each offense date we are searching. In this instance, that was the case. We had multiple courts to reach out to and various money orders required to obtain the information. We decided that submitting the name through the NYS OCA was the best possible method to obtain the case information.

Figure 2 - NYS OCA No Results Found

¹ Names have been changed to protect their identities.

Figure 2 ¹ shows that the NYS OCA had no results found. We did not accept that there were no results and we reached out to our liaison with the NYS OCA to find out what happened with these cases. We received this response from the NYS OCA:

Figure 3 - Response from OCA

In accordance with performing our due diligence, we did reach out to each of the courts to verify the information received from the NYS OCA. Courts are sometimes more willing to provide information once a NYS OCA statewide has been run and we have the documentation to prove it. All three courts stated that there was no public record. The cases were all sealed, so there was nothing we could pass on to our client.

End Results

Pointer File New York furnishes booking records for individuals across New York State. We were able to see in this case study that when we were contracted for additional services, although we had booking records, none of them were reportable cases. Therefore, the report would be marked as “clear.” Had Screening Logic only run the Statewide, we would never have known there were three possible records to be researched. This is where PF NY displays its greatest strength.

Additional Information

New York State Office Of Court Administration Has Its Limitations

The New York State Office of Court Administration (NYS OCA) is a fantastic entity for obtaining various convictions for individuals with a criminal history.

However, it is a severely flawed system. There are quite a few restrictions to the cases that are provided by the NYS OCA, one being they do not report a misdemeanor conviction after ten years if it is the sole conviction.

This is part of the New York Misdemeanor Redemption Policy. In addition, they do not provide vehicular misdemeanors unless it is an Operating Motor Vehicle under the Influence conviction. The most alarming, is the extreme number of cases missing from the results.

The NYS OCA has yielded zero results, even for convicted criminals, some of which have multiple convictions. The NYS OCA will only provide fingerprinting convictions based on the exact name, and exact date of birth submitted. They do not search for additional spellings, aliases, or suffixes, of any name. Each submission to the NYS OCA is exactly what is searched. One practice that can be problematic is if the subject has a suffix reported on one conviction and does not have the suffix reported on another. In this case, you will not get both convictions back in your search results. The same follows for any alias or changes in spelling for any given name, as well as date of birth variations.

Pointer File New York™ (PF NY) pulls the booking records for individuals all over the State of New York. When contracted for additional services, Screening Logic uses this information to research each record and determine if it resulted in a passable conviction, which we then provide to our clients. There are times when courts are unwilling to assist in providing additional information and we have to utilize the New York State Office of Court Administration. More frequently than not, the NYS OCA provides only a fraction of what PF NY discovers.

At Screening Logic, we do our due diligence when it comes to all aspects of the background investigation. We are determined to do the right thing, always. This is particularly true in our criminal research. The Pointer File New York™ (PF NY) database is an essential diligence tool that allows us to view a history of booking records. When contracted for additional services, we then research these findings to determine whether the arrests resulted in passable convictions. The only passable offenses we provide are misdemeanor and felony convictions. We developed PF NY in conjunction with the NYS Sheriffs’ Association, as an alternative method to obtaining criminal information in New York State. By digging down to the level of booking data, Pointer File New York™ overcomes the fundamental and systemic flaws associated with the NYS OCA search.