Data coverage & limitations
The catalogs are the truth and they are public. This page explains how to read them and what they do not claim.
The two catalogs
| Product | Catalog | Auth | What it lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sex Offender Search | GET /v1/sources | None | Every jurisdiction searched — the 50 states, DC, the territories and tribal registries — with status and freshness. Jurisdictions. |
| Criminal Records | GET /v1/criminal/sources | None | Every criminal source by public code (TX-DOC, TX-HARRIS, US-COURT): record type, scope, status (live or pending) and health.lastSuccessAt. Coverage · All data sources. |
Read the catalog at integration time rather than hard-coding a list: coverage grows, and a source's freshness changes daily.
Source categories
| Category | Product | What a record is |
|---|---|---|
| State sex offender registry | Sex Offender | A current registrant as the state publishes them: names, aliases, DOB, addresses, offenses, photographs, registration status. |
| Tribal and territorial registry | Sex Offender | The same, for a tribal nation or a territory. |
| County jail roster / booking | Criminal | A booking: who, when, on what charges, and release where published. |
| State prison system (DOC) | Criminal | An inmate or supervised person: offenses, sentence, custody, facility, parole. |
| Court records | Criminal | A criminal case: case number, court, filing, charges, dispositions. |
| Warrant system | Criminal | An active warrant as published. |
| Exclusion list | Criminal | A health-care or procurement exclusion; returned with include: ["exclusions"] where the basis is administrative. |
| Federal | Criminal | Bureau of Prisons inmates, federal dockets, federal warrants and exclusions. |
Freshness: cached and live
- A regular search reads the platform's copy of each source. Each source carries
lastCheckedAton the records it returns andlastSuccessAtin the catalog. - A live re-check (
live.jurisdictionsorlive.scope: "matched") asks the source itself during your request and is billed per source;sourceStatus[]reports each one's outcome. Some sources are live-only by design and are never in the cached copy; the catalog says so. - Live evidence (
live.evidence: "pdf") returns the registry's own page as a document, for workflows that must keep what the source displayed.
Limitations, stated
- Holding records from a jurisdiction is not the same as complete coverage of it. A county jail roster holds bookings for a window; a court source holds the years it publishes. The criminal catalog names the source; the per-source history window is being added to it.
- A match is a candidate, scored. It is not a confirmed identity.
- An arrest or a booking is not a conviction. Read the charge's
dispositionand the record'scurrentStatus; see arrests vs. charges vs. convictions. - A
200is not complete coverage. Readstatus,countsandsourceStatus[]. - No result does not prove no record exists. It means none was found in the sources searched, to the extent they were searched.
Current scale
As of 2026-10-22 the criminal catalog listed 1,899 sources across 52 states and territories (1,547 live, 352 coming soon), and the sex offender search covers 58 jurisdictions. These numbers change; the catalogs are current.