Don't ask a police officer! If you think that you might have active arrest warrants out on you then the last thing you should do is ask a police officer because he might just arrest you on the spot. It's much better if you find out discretely and confidentially by yourself so that you can do something about it before it gets out of hand.
Never ask a cop if there is an arrest warrant out on you
Don't even think of asking a police officer if you have a warrant for arrest unless you don't mind him arresting you on the spot. Any officer of the law will be pleased to do a search for your active arrest warrants but if he finds one then he will have no option but to take you in and arrest you. Wouldn't it be better if you found out for yourself in a discrete and confidential way? If you find out that way you have a warrant then you can do something about it in your own good time.
Active arrest warrants are not the sort of thing that you want to ignore. If you have a warrant and you wait for the cops to come and arrest you then you are going to have an uphill struggle on your hands whether you are guilty of the crime or not.
Depending on the severity of the offence and the state that it was committed in,
it could be years before the police decide to actively chase after you. They like to be patient and wait for you to stumble into their little traps of routine vehicle checks or minor traffic violations. When you get pulled over they will do a routine check for active arrest warrants. After a while, if they haven't caught you, you might find that you get a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Have you forgotten to pay a fine? Do you even know that you have a fine? Have you been driving fast and picked up a ticket that you haven't been notified of yet? You might have forgotten to attend court or failed to do some community service. You might even have had your identity stolen and someone has committed a crime in your name.
You could be the victim of criminal identity theft
You could be the victim of criminal identity theft where someone has stolen your identity and committed a crime in your name. If this has happened to you then you could have many active warrants for your arrest in different places. This is the worst situation to be in and it's difficult to prevent it happening.
Try to avoid getting your identity stolen. Destroy your old credit cards, shred anything with your personal information on it, never leave your documents unattended. It's hard to avoid getting your identity stolen but it's a great deal harder to put right the things that the identity thief can do to you. Active arrest warrants in your name can be one of the hardest things to fix.
The sooner you find out that there are arrest warrants out on you the better it will be for you. If you know about them then you can take steps to sort out whatever mess they have placed you in. You will always look better in court if you give yourself up voluntarily on a warrant than if the police had to chase you down and pull you in.
Check the courthouse
Any courthouse will check and tell you whether they have active arrest warrants on you but you might have to ask in a lot of courthouses to be sure you are warrant free. If you've become a victim of criminal identity theft then you could have warrants in different states and even different countries.
Use an online public records database
To make absolutely sure that you've done everything that you possibly can to check for warrants then you should use an online public records service. These services combine information from multiple private and public records databases so that you can search them all quickly, conveniently, confidentially and from the comfort of your own home.
Find out if you've got any active arrest warrants right away because you can't afford to leave it even a minute longer.
