Sunday, March 14, 2004

Ricardo Thomas / The Detroit News Dearborn Heights soccer coach Richard Robell, who is also a police officer, is one of 13,000 youth soccer coaches in Michigan who undergo criminal background checks through the Michigan State Police felony database.

FBI provides most thorough check

$50-$70 cost a major drawback in push for precise checks

By Fred Girard / The Detroit News

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Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the FBI in Washington, has some advice for youth sports leagues who think it’s important to run criminal history checks on coaches and others who deal with kids.

“We would suggest you have a rule that allows you to use FBI fingerprint checks,” he said.

A Detroit News investigation has found that fewer than 11,000 of the 83,000 coaches of youth sports in Michigan are run through the most rigorous criminal history check there is — the fingerprint-based nationwide FBI database.

The remaining organizations in Michigan check coaches against the State Police felony database, the state’s sex offender registry, or not at all.

The two Michigan databases are “name systems,” Bresson said, subject to errors and omissions.

“People can change their identities much more easily than their fingerprints,” he said. “It’s easy to change one digit of your social security number, or your birth date, or use your name differently — there are many ways of trying to avoid detection in a name search.

“But a person’s fingerprints, digitized and stored in our database, will determine whether a person has been arrested, whether there’s any disqualifying information on his record.”

A drawback to an FBI fingerprint check, however, is its cost — in Michigan, from $50 to $70.

“It would be great if the federal government would make the information in the National Crime Information Computer available to our local leagues for free,” Little League spokesman Lance Van Auken said.

“But as it is now, it might cost $60, $70, $80 per person for those checks to be made, which means our leagues wouldn’t be able to do it. And if we forced our leagues to do it, they would just leave our program and go to another program that doesn’t have any checks at all.”