Arrest Monitoring

How would an employer know if an employee was facing a criminal charge relevant to their role?Often, individuals are arrested and released within hours with instructions to appear in court at some point in the future.

Imperative is considering rolling out an arrest monitoring service

and we’d like your input.

How We Think It Would Work

When people are arrested, they get booked into their local county jail.

There is a network that links the data from about 85% of the United States’ jail population into one system. The network was originally created for victim-notification purposes but is now available for employers’ use.

We are considering building an interface that would allow our customers to upload a file containing the names and identifying information of some or all of their employees to this network to monitor for any new booking records.

If one of the monitored employees was booked into a participating jail, we would be notified within hours.

We would then contact the jail directly to verify that the arrested person was really our client’s employee (and not someone with a similar name and date of birth) and gather any additional details that might be available such as police reports or court filings.

We would then provide that information to our client.

How Many Arrests Are We Talking About?

We ran a sample of over 5,000 people through the network’s historical records. These were people on whom we’d previously run background checks.

A little over 1% of the population had an arrest within one year of their date of hire.

About 5% of them had an arrest within five years of their date of hire.

In the arrest records we identified, there were a lot of DWIs and minor drug offenses.

However, we also saw more serious offenses like assault, embezzlement, and robbery.

What Would Employers Do With The Information?

On March 26th, I’m hosting a free webinar covering what to do when an employee gets arrested.

We’ll cover the notification policy you should have in place, how to discuss the arrest with the employee, how to corroborate the employee’s story, and how to evaluate the relevance of the employee’s circumstances to their position in the company.

You can register here.

The webinar is eligible for HRCI and SHRM recertification credits.

But first, please complete this short survey to help us decide whether we should pursue this project! 

Don’t forget to register for our upcoming webinar!

What to Do When An Employee Gets Arrested
March 26, 2020 | 1PM CST

In this presentation, Mike Coffey, SPHR, will review the kinds of insider threats about which employers may need to be aware. He will also review policy considerations to ensure that red-flag incidents are identified and evaluated fairly. These considerations include employee self-reporting of certain incidents, periodic background checks, evaluating job-specific risks suggested by incidents, and appropriate responses to job-relevant incidents.