Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham

car, and lives in an elegant, two-story home.
One Friday evening, returning from celebrating her promotion with friends, she is stopped by a police officer. He approaches with a flashlight and asks her to get out of her vehicle. He says he is going to cite her for excessive speed and a burned-out rear tail-light, although he appears to be using the flashlight to get a good look at her black cocktail dress, diamond pendant, and matching earrings.
Suddenly the officer leans over and whispers that he might consider not writing the citations in return for a date. Outraged, she slaps him. Her ring cuts his face. He arrests her on the spot. At the police station she learns that she is being charged with battery on a police officer and resisting arrest, both felonies. She spends a night in jail.
The next day, with the assistance of an attorney, she is released on her own recognizance. The state prosecutor reviews a police cruiser videotape which corroborates her story, declines to prosecute and dismisses all charges. She is miffed at the $5,000 bill from her attorney, and annoyed that the officer only received a reprimand. The following Monday she returns to work, but does not mention the incident, which she considers embarrassing.
Six months later, she is called into her boss’s office and told that she is being terminated due to an internal reorganization, which has eliminated her job. She is given a small severance. Weeks later, she reads in a national business newspaper that her former company has been running background checks on its employees and firing everyone with an arrest record or even an unpaid traffic ticket! She discovers, to her horror, that her arrest record had been picked up electronically by a credit reporting company in another state. She hires a topflight labor attorney and immediately sues for wrongful termination.
There are months of document discovery, depositions, and motion hearings. She finds that, although the company freely admits running background checks, there is no documentation in which her arrest is even mentioned , nor any record that background checks were considered in terminating her or any other former employees, all of whom came from different departments with different skills and pay grades.
There is, however, a mountain of paperwork, including lengthy memos and e-mails, regarding a complex personnel reorganization. The company produces multipage spreadsheets and cost analyses. The fact that most, but not all, of the terminated employees had arrest records is, the company insists, just coincidence. Given the documentation, and the company’s essentially limitless litigation resources, the woman’s attorney persuades her to drop the lawsuit, then presents her with a bill for $75,000.
The woman is unable to find work. The biomed corporations to which she applies will not even give her an interview . She learns that all have begun to run background checks, and they will not employ anyone with an arrest record. Her education and training have been specific to this industry, and within months, finding herself effectively blacklisted, she signs on with a temp agency doing secretarial work. She is forced to sell her home, and now lives in a studio apartment and drives a battered used car. Her fiancé, a surgeon, has broken off the engagement.
     

THE MORALS OF THIS STORY
     
    This scenario, about the use of background checks to fire existing employees, is based on news stories of actual events. The woman in our scenario discovered to her horror the following facts of life.
1. Never, under any circumstance, touch a police officer, even when the cop deserves a good swat. Cops rule the streets, with the power of the state behind them. Even when they do wrong, their punishment is limited by civil service regulations and union contracts.
2. An arrest record is tantamount to a conviction. All prospective new employers were alarmed by the fact that she had been arrested, and they seemed not to care