opinion

FBI database can cause you big headaches

If you've ever been arrested, you were fingerprinted and photographed. Perhaps charges were never filed. Or maybe you paid a fine. Or perhaps police decided they had the wrong person and released you.

You move on with your life — except the arrest might cause you problems later.

Search your name online and you see your mug shot because websites collect them, post them and then charge people as much as $1,000 to remove them. Pay up and the photo may or may not be taken down.

A few weeks ago, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that makes it illegal to charge residents to remove their mug shots from websites — a practice that amounts to extortion.

But the mug shot being seen by a potential landlord or mother-in-law may be the least of your problems. And California's response is akin to fighting a criminal justice forest fire with a squirt gun. Simply being arrested creates a public record that can come back to haunt you. In fact, an arrest generates a record with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI has 77.7 million people in its master criminal database, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation. That's about 1 in 3 American adults.

The people interviewed by the newspaper could be any of us or our neighbors. They include:

• A woman arrested at a protest, charged with disorderly conduct and released, who couldn't clear her name to be considered for a job. That's because there was no record of her at the local courthouse.

• A grandmother who applied for a job in a school cafeteria who was told her fingerprints, taken as part of the job application process, matched prints in the FBI database from a 1963 arrest of someone the woman had never heard of.

• A middle-aged man who was fired shortly after being hired because his employer alleged he didn't disclose his criminal record when he applied. Years earlier he had gotten in trouble as a juvenile, which can land a teen in the FBI database.

• A man eating dinner was arrested for sexually assaulting young girls. Police later acknowledged they were looking for another person with the same name, yet he was responsible for clearing his own record — and a debt of more than $20,000 for money his wife borrowed to pay a bondsman.

This is the country's criminal justice system at work in the information age.

It is why employers should not dismiss applicants because a background check turns up something. By one estimate, about half the people arrested are not convicted of a crime. Many are not even charged with a crime, although they might have been arrested initially.

Meanwhile, 10,000 to 12,000 names are added to the federal database each day. Contrast that with the fact that an average of less than 11,000 births are recorded in this country each day.

How long until the number of Americans with a "record" constitutes the majority?

The DesMoines Register, a Gannett newspaper.