Not feature tours. Each guide takes one real implementation end to end and spends most of its length on the parts that decide whether it works — common names, what to store between runs, partial searches, and where the human belongs.
Each guide is written for the engineer or operations lead who has to make screening work in production: continuous alerting for a monitored population, registry checks inside an AI agent, and registry screening in a rental application.
12 min · for engineers building trust & safety or continuous-monitoring workflows
Build continuous sex-offender monitoring that alerts on real changes instead of re-alerting forever. Scoring, state diffing, common-name handling, and the legal line.
9 min · for engineers wiring tool calls into an agent or assistant
Give an LLM a registry search tool it can cite. Tool schema, grounding rules, refusal handling, and how to stop a model asserting a match it cannot support.
10 min · for engineers and ops leads at property-management and leasing platforms
Add a nationwide sex-offender check to a leasing workflow: where it belongs in the funnel, how to handle common names and prior addresses, and the compliance line.
The search call is the easy part. These are the problems each guide spends most of its length on, because they decide whether screening helps or quietly fails.
A surname search can return dozens of people. A date of birth is the single most valuable field, and every result carries a match confidence and the basis it matched on, so you can act on evidence rather than on a name.
A response that reached 57 of the 58 registries is not a clean result. Each response reports which sources answered; the guides show how to treat a partial search as unknown, never as clear.
Monitoring that diffs whole records alerts forever. The alerting guide shows which fields to fingerprint so an alert means a real change.
The system supplies evidence; a person makes any adverse decision against a threshold set in advance — and hiring or tenant decisions run through an FCRA workflow.
| You are building | Start with | Then read |
|---|---|---|
| Ongoing monitoring of staff, providers or volunteers | Build an offender alert system | Monitoring API reference |
| A chatbot or agent that answers safety questions | Add safety checks to your AI agent | MCP server |
| A leasing or property-management workflow | Tenant screening against the registry | FCRA tenant screening |
| A one-off sweep of an existing roster | Batch search docs | Bulk sex offender search |
Standard search results are not a consumer report. If your product will help decide whether to hire someone or rent to them, that decision has to run through an FCRA-regulated workflow — FCRA Partner Access, for background check companies and screening platforms under a written FCRA agreement, with pricing by quote. Several states also restrict using registry information for housing, credit or insurance, so the tenant guide starts with a per-jurisdiction check.
Industry-specific rules — rideshare statutes, child care and healthcare screening laws, volunteer program rules — are covered on the screening by industry pages, and the API quickstart gets a first call working in a few minutes. Read how FCRA workflows work before shipping a decision flow.
Get a key, make one call, read a scored, source-cited response, and spot a partial search.
Coverage you can enumerate, provenance, match quality and published pricing, side by side.
Jail bookings, custody, court cases and warrants are different systems; which one your question needs.
No. A key comes with 25 free searches, then per-search billing with no minimum. FCRA Partner Access is the exception: it runs under a written FCRA agreement, with pricing by quote.
Monitors handle scheduling and diffing for you and alert on new, changed or removed records by email or signed webhook. Scheduled searches give you full control of what counts as a change. The alerting guide covers both.
Yes. Criminal search is a separate endpoint on the same key, billed per call, covering county, state and federal records.
A legal first and last name and a date of birth. Without a date of birth, a common surname produces a review queue rather than an answer.