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Arrest records by profession
For some people an online arrest record is an embarrassment. For licensed professionals, clearance holders and students, it can cost the licence, the clearance or the admission. Pick your situation for what is at stake and what to do first.
- Arrest records and small business
In 2024 the SBA made a past conviction irrelevant to a 7(a) loan and to a guaranteed surety bond — but kept "under indictment" as a disqualifier in both.
- Arrest records and commercial driving
Federal rule forbids every state from letting a CDL holder use deferred adjudication or diversion to keep a conviction off the record — in any vehicle, on or off duty — and defines conviction to include simply paying the fine.
- Arrest records and medical licences
Texas requires your state-run public physician profile to describe charges resolved by deferred adjudication or pretrial diversion — the exact dispositions designed to avoid a conviction — and refreshes it from a continuous national databank query within ten working days.
- Arrest records and background checks
The federal seven-year shield on a non-conviction arrest disappears entirely at a $75,000 salary — a threshold unchanged since 1996 — and none of it applies to an employer who simply searches your name.
- Arrest records and law licences
Attorneys are the only group whose regulator is told about the arrest through two independent government channels before the lawyer decides anything — a fingerprint service built for the purpose, and the prosecutor.
- Arrest records and nursing licences
Nursing is the only profession here where your employer can be told about a disciplinary record automatically, in real time, without anyone searching your name — and where some states require you to self-report a case that is heading for dismissal.
- Arrest records and real estate licences
California requires you to report the bringing of a felony charge to the Department of Real Estate within 30 days — so an agent who is charged and later fully exonerated still had a mandatory filing obligation, and missing it is separately chargeable.
- Arrest records and security clearances
Cleared personnel are the one group for whom a state expungement order is legally irrelevant.
- Arrest records and college
Federal law forces a campus arrest into public view while shielding the university's own file on the same incident — the police log is public by regulation, the disciplinary record is not.
- Arrest records and teaching certificates
Teaching is the only profession where an arrest with no charge resolved and no finding of any kind can put a state-published "currently under investigation" flag on your own public certification record — and where your district learns about the arrest automatically.
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