If you subscribe to PI buzz Alert you may have seen the link I included to UCrime, a crime information mapping site of recent crime incidents at universities. Search by address or date (2008 only) to see reported crimes plotted on a map, with icons distinguishing the type of incident. No names are listed and it’s not clear what the source is for the data, but this may still be useful if you need a snapshot of the criminal activity on any one of about 100 schools.

A site that may be an sister site, SpotCrime provides the same type of interactive mapping for cities and counties.

There are also crime logs and mapping of crimes at the Web sites of universities, university public safety departments and newspapers. The Morehead State University Police Web site has logs of incidents to 2004. This Texas college newspaper has put together a map of campus crimes, while this major daily paper only shows crimes perpetrated in the surrounding community in which students of the University at Albany were involved. A site calling itself UMichCrime gets data from the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety then plots it on a map. Most of the data on these sites are not retained for more than a few years; the Case Western Reserve crime mapping is an exception, extending to 2000. The Boulder Police Department at the University of Colorado plots recent crime incidents on an interactive map.

Find more campus crime maps searching for the words or phrases in the URL: crimemap, map or crime. If you don’t have a specific school in mind try variations on a search query: inurl:crimemap site:edu or campus inurl:map intitle:crime.

All disciplinary records of Arizona government employees become public records September 28, 2008. Arizona Revised Statutes adds section 39-128, Disciplinary records of public officers and employees; disclosure; exceptions.

Release of home address, telephone number and photograph of people in certain job categories (law enforcement) is restricted.

The Arizona Ombudsman produces a monthly educational newsletter, The Public Law. A recent issue offers agencies guidance that speaks to the complaints of private investigators, reporters, and all those who request public records. Read, Public Records Law 101: Avoid the top ten most common pitfalls.

Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska and Iowa are among the few states that have a statewide ombudsman office.

Does your state have an open records law related to government employee discipline records?

Attorney disciplinary records are organized on the state level and, if online, are usually found at the state bar or state court. The court division that is responsible for investigating attorney misconduct may be called “Office of Disciplinary Counsel”, “Disciplinary Board” or “Disciplinary Commission”. And that’s just one of the many reasons why you should subscribe to a public records directory. CourtPort is one that’s tailored for the legal community.

A directory of lawyer disciplinary agencies can be found at the American Bar Association site. Some of these links go to the bar association’s home page, because that state doesn’t have lawyer discipline records online. Or, in the case of the Alaska Bar Association, the search page is buried and the disciplinary actions are mixed with the general member directory.

The Arizona Bar separates discipline reports by year. If I knew whether the lawyer was disciplined and the year this site would be sufficient. With that annoyance in mind, I developed a Google custom search engine of disciplined attorneys. This enables you to search, for example, the Arizona Bar Association records for all years. Also, search across multiple states at once — helpful if you don’t know the state in which the disciplinary action may have occurred. I include several sites that index appellate and Supreme Court records, which may make the results too cluttered, but will catch some cases related to attorney misconduct claims that aren’t at the state sites.

Not all states are included. Many don’t have directories that could be configured to work with another search engine. Let me know if you find a way to search the excluded sites.

Is the Disciplined Attorneys search engine helpful?

Before your eyes glaze over, your head goes into free-fall, allow me to point you to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) database of insurers who have been in receivership. This newly initiated project to get all state insurance commissioners to supply data on insurance providers licensed in their states, now contains historical data and will expand to include balance sheet information of active receiverships. The strangely named, Global Receivership Information Database (GRID) –since, I think, it’s just national — is “a voluntary database provided by the state insurance departments to report information on insurer receiverships for consumers, claimants, and guaranty funds.”

Information from more than 1,200 receiverships, provided by state insurance departments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, are housed within GRID. This includes such information as receivership contact information, relevant court orders and docket numbers, ongoing tasks, distribution of assets, claims-liability details, business activity and deposits.

The other NAIS database, Company Search for Complaint and Financial Information, is a search by insurer name, which only provides the states in which the company is licensed and statistical information on complaints. NAIS points you to the state map with links to state insurance commissioners to get details on actual complaints. Problem is, many states don’t have that information at their Web sites, so you’ll have to make a state Freedom of Information Act request.

Texas gives an extensive explanation of the information in their complaint files, provides the records, but in a form that’s cumbersome to use. Their database of disciplinary actions against insurers and agents is searchable, covering 1996-2008.

Does your state have complaints against insurers online?

What are the top 10 searches in the Google search engine of interest to private investigators? The new Google product, Google Insights, is a Web site optimization tool, or just an amusing time-waster, depending on your inclination.

I searched the phrase “find my”, which returned top searches, listing, “find my ip” and “find my way” — humm, either part of a song or someone who’s lost? It also gave me related terms and “rising searches”, number 6 being “find a person”. Each phrase is assigned a value, 1 to 100, the higher number correlates with more search queries. See the volume plotted on a graph, mapped by region or in a state list. The search can be filtered by state, category or specific dates. Interesting factoid: the number of queries with the phrase “find a person” has declined since 2004.

Search terms related to find a person:

Top searches

1. find people 100
2. person search 85
3. find phone number 80
4. find address 80
5. find someone 30
6. locate a person 20
7. find an address 20

Continue to drill through related terms to phrase searches that are on the uptick, such as “people finders“.

The Missouri Secretary of State now has a statewide Voter Information Lookup online. Enter the person’s first and last name, county and street name. If you’ve correctly matched that personal information, you have to select the correct street address, as you can see in this image.

Then you’ll get a confirmation that the person is registered to vote.

If you can rely on current voter registration status to verify where someone lives, then this could be useful.

Have you found that the voter registration lookup sites return valuable information?

Background Screening and Investigations: Managing Hiring Risk from the HR and Security Perspectives is a wide-ranging guide to the technology, resources, policies and procedures, and trends in employment screening. A road map for Human Resource decision makers who are screening potential hires and current employees or who are evaluating outside background screening companies, Background Screening and Investigations adds depth to the extensive topics covered, without being overly technical.

The target audience is primarily the employer businesses, not the providers of background check services. Private investigators just getting into the background screening business or those smaller providers who want to brush up on recommended practices and the trends in the industry will also find this a valuable guide. Also, the findings from surveys of the screening practices and objectives of employers is essential for anyone who wants to offer a responsive screening service.

Sandwiched within the essays by over a dozen specialists in the legal, standards setting and metrics, service provider and security/risk analysis arenas are short-hand chapter highlights, and summaries from the differing perspectives of those in human resources and workplace security. There’s a lot here.

Background Screening and Investigations helps employers think through setting screening policies and practices and whether to outsource, as the vast majority do. Niche services and the expected components of a thorough background screening process have expanded with innovations in data collection. This book describes and evaluates the value of various services — those that are standard and others that are not as regularly employed — such as identity verification, drug testing, reference checks, hand-checks of court records and international screening. With the proliferation of resellers of aggregated electronic criminal records the public and employers may be lulled by the myth of a national criminal records database. There is no substitute — in either comprehensiveness or accuracy — for examining the criminal records index at the courthouse.

The legal mandates for employers and background screening agencies are sufficiently complex that you’ll want to peruse this guide for pre and post hire tips.

Review the Table of Contents and first chapter.

Sign up for The Background Buzz newsletter to receive news of current events in pre-employment.

The names of jurors are public records, according to a ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which countered the actions of a Pennsylvania federal judge who kept the juror names from the media in a high-profile trial. Apparently, the 3rd Circuit believes that’s not the norm in federal court, but the reality on the ground is a bit mixed. It’s a different world in state courts, many of which have an explicit ban on releasing the names of jurors.