Criminal Database Companies Make Background Checks for Youth Sports More Common, Affordable.

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MEMPHIS, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 11, 2004

Each spring, millions of children participate in youth sports, playing on local baseball, soccer and softball leagues. In order to maintain a fun, healthy environment for everyone involved, more organizations are realizing the need to perform background checks on all volunteers who interact with children.

"In this day and age, with an organization like ours that exists for the young people, there's no such thing as being too safe," said Jon Butler, executive director of Pop Warner Little Scholars Inc. "We can't afford not to do the fullest background checks available for all those who volunteer."

Protecting children from dangerous persons, such as violent criminals or child molesters, is a growing concern nationwide in youth sports. According to the Center for Sex Offender Management, people who are close to children such as babysitters, coaches, even relatives, are more likely than strangers to commit a sexual offense. Also, statistics show child molesters are four times more likely than other violent criminals to recommit their crime.

Pop Warner Little Scholars, Little League Baseball, Virginia Youth Soccer Association and Kids Sports Network are a few high-profile groups performing background checks on their volunteers using a national database of criminal records called Rapsheets.

Historically, background checks involved searching a single county or state sex offender registry. However, searching a comprehensive database such as the Rapsheets National Criminal Index (NCI) database could potentially reveal serious crimes that occurred outside a league's county or state that would not ordinarily be detected in a single county search. Additionally, database results are instant, and a fraction of the cost of traditional checks. High-volume nonprofit users may pay less than $9 per search.

"We have found that youth organizations that only check one state's Sex Offender Registry find less than 10 percent of criminals with crimes against children," said Bill Whitford, chief operating officer of Rapsheets.

Through its customized Volunteer Verification Web site, Rapsheets offers youth sports organizations instant access to its National Criminal Index (NCI) database of more than 160 million criminal records, including a unified search of Sex Offender registries from 39 states.

Rapsheets, a division of Investigation Technologies LLC, performs millions of criminal records searches each year through its Internet site, server-to-server gateways and other sophisticated technologies. For more information visit www.rapsheets.com or call toll free [phone].

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