The Arizona Daily Star ran a story with the headline “Tucson police hope PDA’s make background checks quicker.” Here’s the lead.
Tucson police have turned to palm-sized technology to help its officers and those at other law enforcement agencies conduct background checks and keep track of crime trends. A grant from the Department of Homeland Security has enabled the department to acquire more than 200 PDAs, which they have decided to distribute among their own officers as well as about 20 other agencies across Southern Arizona.
Frankly, it got me thinking about the old days. We never used to use criminal background checks or pre-employment credit checks in hiring. Part of the reason was that we didn’t have to.
Even a couple of decades ago, people didn’t move as often as they do now. So you were hiring people from the area and it was easy to check them out by talking to people who knew them.
Employers would talk to you back then. I can remember a time when people didn’t sue you for giving out damaging, but true information. But in the last couple of decades, employers have gotten suit-shy. They’ll verify dates of employment, but not much else.
In today’s world we need a way to check on people when there isn’t anybody who knows the applicant that we can chat with. The old ways won’t work anymore. But technology has come to the rescue.
Another reason we didn’t check for a criminal record on an applicant and why we didn’t check his or her credit was that the process was expensive and time consuming. Technology has come to the rescue there, too.
Today with the click of your mouse and the payment of a modest fee, you can jump on the SentryLink web site and check the background and credit history of an applicant. And you can do it in minutes, not days or weeks. Ain’t technology grand?