The California Department of Justice is still reviewing thousands of Los Angeles County criminal convictions inadvertently omitted from background checks for decades due to an error in the county Superior Court’s previous case management system.
Read more HOA Homefront: Is your board correctly adopting HOA rules?
The DOJ has processed about 320,000 of the missing records over the past six months, but roughly 85,000 more cases are still under review, according to a spokesperson for the California Attorney General’s Office.
Background checks relying on the Department of Justice’s criminal record repository, such as the “Live Scan” fingerprint checks commonly used by public employers and licensing boards, may not have listed those convictions before now, potentially allowing people to buy firearms, get certain licenses or obtain jobs they shouldn’t or wouldn’t have been hired for otherwise.
Once the DOJ’s criminal histories are updated, the old convictions could appear on new background checks, even though some of the cases date back as far as 1965. If employers have signed up for ongoing monitoring, they may receive an alert immediately.
So far, about 2.5% of the records — or about 8,000 cases — have triggered such notifications, according to the DOJ. Those were sent to approximately 900 different employers, licensing boards or other agencies, officials said.
The vast majority of the processed records, roughly 230,000, were eligible for and received automatic record relief under state law. Automatic record relief adds a notation to a qualifying individual’s criminal history that limits disclosure of most misdemeanors and some nonviolent felonies.
It isn’t an expungement or dismissal, however, and those records, depending on the offense, could still be reported to certain employers or other agencies legally mandated to conduct fingerprint background checks.
The full impact of the missing records is not yet known.
The County of Los Angeles is one of the largest employers in the region. Each county department receives notifications about background checks individually, but, in a statement, the Department of Human Resources, which would be notified if administrative action is warranted, said it is not aware of any increase.
The Los Angeles Unified School District declined to answer questions about whether it had been notified about any employees.
The county Public Defender’s Office, which offers free expungement clinics, had not heard from any current or former clients impacted by the issue. In a statement, Nick Stewart-Oaten, the head deputy public defender, said the Public Defender’s Office is working with the Superior Court to find ways to “mitigate harm to individuals who might otherwise suffer job, housing, or licensure loss as a result of incidents for which they long ago made amends.”
“Our ability to address or prevent these harms will require the cooperation of all justice system parties to ensure that these missed, but decades-old offenses do not destroy lives,” Stewart-Oaten stated.
Affected may not know yet
One reason the impact is so hard to gauge is because roughly 80,000 people had their records quietly updated without any notification to them, or their employer.
Read more Why is there a yellow border on some traffic signals?
The DOJ’s website states that anyone who wants to know if they are included can request a copy of their criminal history, a process that requires an individual to submit fingerprint images and pay a $25 processing fee.
Otherwise, those affected by the error may only learn about the update when they apply for a new job, or an apartment, and are blindsided by a background check’s results, said Saun Hough, director of partnerships at Californians for Safety and Justice, which advocates for criminal justice reforms. Some may have had their records expunged years ago, but because the conviction was missing from their record at the time, it wouldn’t have been included, he said.
“This is a horrible situation that never should have happened,” Hough said. “The number of people impacted by this is huge.”
Californians for Safety and Justice recently met with officials from the DOJ and the L.A. County Superior Court, at the request of L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell and state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, to workshop how the county could help individuals proactively learn if they were impacted.
Those discussions are ongoing, but Hough left the meeting feeling positive about the possibility of finding a solution.
“There’s too many specific ramifications of this error to not be intentional about notification,” he said.
Error discovered last year
In February, the Superior Court announced it had discovered a backlog of more than 400,000 arrest disposition reports — which track convictions, acquittals and dismissals — last year while implementing a new case management system and decommissioning its old one.
It took six months to identify the full scale of the error and to weed out duplicates.
The DOJ has been working through the reports since then. About 122,000 of the cases required a lengthier manual review and, of those, about 37,000 have been processed so far.
The Superior Court’s new case management system validates all arrest disposition reports before they are sent to the DOJ and sends reports to court staff to address when a validation fails to prevent such an error from occurring again.
Those safeguards will “ensure no further ADRs fail to transmit to the DOJ successfully,” court officials said previously.
Read more OC Bird of Prey Center hopes to add large enclosure to give more raptors flight