How to Find Out if Someone Has Been Arrested

Locating the Individual

Talk to the person's likely companions. If you know who last was with the person you're trying to find, and have the ability to contact them, try talking to them first. They may be able to give you more information about the person's whereabouts and whether they were arrested. If you don't know the person's close friends or don't know who was with them most recently, you may have to do a little investigating. Try calling their phone number or any other number you know of a mutual friend. If they're an employee, try the emergency contact they provided, or ask other employees who have a personal relationship with them. You might not be able to find someone who was with them when they were arrested – if they were, in fact, arrested. But you can at least get an idea of where they were and what they were doing.

Narrow down possible locations. To find out if someone has been arrested, you first must know where they were last. Since each city and county has its own law enforcement department, you can save yourself a lot of time if you have a good idea where the person last was. Unless you've gotten different information from the people you've called, you typically want to start with the city or county where the person lives. You may need to contact more than one law enforcement department if you're near the border between counties or the jurisdiction boundary between city and county.

Call the local police department. Once you have a good idea of the city or county where the person was last seen, call the local police department using the non-emergency number and talk to the desk officer who answers the phone. Whether you can get information from the police department often depends on how large that department is and how busy it is. Larger, more active departments may not release information about arrests over the phone. Some police departments may have a specific phone number you should call to find out if someone has been arrested. If you can't find that number, the person at the general non-emergency number can tell you what you should do. You also may be able to find out if someone has been arrested by going to the police precinct in person. However, they may not have any information unless the person was processed through that specific precinct.

Ask the desk officer if the person has been arrested. Whether on the phone or in person, the officer on duty should be able to get you information about the person if they've been processed through that particular station or precinct. When you speak to a desk officer, you'll have to give them the person's legal name to find out if they've been arrested. Keep in mind the person may have a different legal name than the name you're accustomed to using. In smaller police stations in more rural areas, you may be able to describe the person and find out if they were arrested with that information. An arrest record must be created from the moment the police take the person into custody, so if they've been arrested the police should have that information, even if the person hasn't been taken to jail yet.

Contact the nearest jail. Another way to find out if someone has been arrested is to call the city or county jail nearest where they were last seen. Typically officers who arrest someone will take them to the nearest jail, so if they've been arrested that's where they'll be. As with law enforcement, you'll have to have the person's full legal name, because that would be the name under which they were arrested. Keep in mind that it can take 24-48 hours for information regarding the person to be reflected in the jail's records. If they've only recently been brought to jail, they may not be in the system yet.

Checking Arrest Records

Search for the city or county's law enforcement website. Many cities and counties, particularly in more populous areas, have their arrest records available online as a searchable database. You'll need basic identification information about the person for whom you're searching. If the city or county has its arrest records online, this can save you a lot of time because you can search several locations quickly without having to make a lot of phone calls or drive all over the city. You typically can find out if an online database is available by doing a general internet search for "arrest records" and the name of the city or county. You may want to include your state as well to narrow the results, since some cities or counties have relatively common names and may exist in many parts of the country. Look for a website with a URL that has a .gov or a .us extension. While not every city or county website uses these extensions, that's the easiest way to make sure you've got an official website. Keep in mind that arrest records are public information. You should never pay a fee to look up arrest records online.

Provide the individual's information. At a minimum, you'll need to know the person's full legal name to search the arrest records and find out anything useful. If the person has an extremely common name, you may need additional information to distinguish them. Searching an online database can be less forgiving than talking to someone in person. If you don't have the person's exact legal name, or know the correct spelling, you may not retrieve any results. You also can't overlook the possibility that the person's name may have been entered incorrectly in the database, even as the result of a simple typo. For example, you may be looking for someone named "Sarah Lincoln," but if the person who entered her information in the database typed it as "Sara Lincoln" by mistake, you may not find her. Many online databases allow you to provide additional information if you have it, such as the person's gender and their age or birthdate. As with their name, you can't guess – it needs to be the exact information as included on their driver's license or other state-issued ID, or the person you're looking for won't show up in the results.

Retrieve your results. Once you've entered the information you know about the person you're looking up, click the button to submit that information and the system will return results of arrestees who match the information you provided. Particularly if the person for whom you're searching has a fairly common name, and you don't have much additional information about them, you may have to sift through a few results to find them. The information may contain abbreviations or codes that you don't understand. There should be a key somewhere on the page that lets you know what those codes mean. If your results include locational information, it's typically a good idea to call that location first and make sure that person is still there. It can sometimes take up to 24 hours for online systems to be updated.

Consider also checking neighboring counties. If your search doesn't come up with any leads, you may want to check neighboring areas to make sure the person hasn't been arrested somewhere else. You'll have to repeat many of the same steps to check arrest records in neighboring areas as you did the first time. If you're coming up dry, you may want to go back and talk to people who know the person and see if you can find out more about where they might have gone or what they were doing. It also could be that you don't have accurate information for the person. Without their correct legal name, you're going to have a hard time finding out if they've been arrested. For example, you may be looking for a woman who recently was married and hasn't changed her name on her Social Security card or driver's license. If she was arrested, it would be under her maiden name since that still is her legal name.

Contacting a Bond Agent

Search for nearby bond agents. Bond agents typically have offices near local jails or criminal courts, and they often have a lot of information about people who've been arrested or charges that have been filed. Much of a bond agent's business comes from being easily accessible and easy to find, so it should be easy to locate a number of bond agents nearby. Bond agent offices frequently are open late hours and weekends, so it may be easier to track down a bond agent than it is to call the jail.

Ask the bond agent for information. Particularly if the person has already been booked, a bond agent with an office near the jail may have information on whether the person has been arrested or is being held at the local jail. Even if you end up not using the bond agent to bail the person out, they typically are willing to provide you any information they may have. A bond agent also may be able to help you if you aren't sure about the person's legal name. If they were present when the person was booked, they may be able to recognize the person from a physical description. How much information a bond agent will have often depends on how busy the jail was on that particular night. If the bond agent is located in a small town or relatively rural area, you probably can get more information than if you live in a densely populated urban area.

Find out how to purchase a bail bond. If the person has been arrested and booked in the local jail, and you want to help get them out, the bond agent can help you find out whether the person's bond has been set and what you can do to pay it. You also may be able to find this information by calling the jail. If the person hasn't been booked yet, the jail will let you know when that person's bail hearing will be held. Typically, the booking and bail hearing will be held within 24 to 48 hours of the time the person is arrested. If the person has special medical or other needs, talk to someone at the jail and find out what you can do to help or get needed medications to them.