The Michigan legislature has revised the Public Records Act to specify that criminal records in which there is not a conviction but an arrest are open to the public, according to this press release from the Michigan State Police.
Additional criminal history information, specifically arrest information pending a conviction, will be available to the public as a result of Public Act 310 of 2005, which establishes a state criminal history record information dissemination law. Previously, Michigan did not have a dissemination law so the state followed federal law which prohibits the release of non-conviction data to non-law enforcement entities.
The criminal records index can be accessed from the State Police site.
[Thanks to BRB for the tip.]
Searchsystems has a moderately decent set of links for SOME American jurisdictions, but their international coverage is a bad joke. For India, for example, they have about a dozen links, mostly for garbage like a database of British warships — can you say “filler”??? — whereas I currently have over 1100 open, searchable, REAL-intel databases — in English — for that country alone. Took a good look at SS and, yeah, they’d be great for somebody who really doesn’t know how to hunt OR disambiguate (read: most American PI’s, LEO’s, HR-drones, etc.).
Also, if you’re using a browser for searching such databases, and you’re NOT using client-side JavaScripting to cut through the open-each-link-and-fill-out-each-form crap, you’re enduring a lot of needless self-punishment. OTOH, that might explain why people will shell out dough for that stale, non-disambiguated crap offered by certain “large commercial providers” (cough).
Review Searchsystems.net at http://www.trustlink.org/Reviews/SearchSystemsnet-205648984 – a good public records directory.
This is really useful. I’ve actually used this site: http://www.publicrecordfinder.com in the past for these types of searches and have been really pleased with the results. I’ll have to check out these other resources to compare. Thanks for sharing!