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About California Criminal History

California criminal records are divided among CA DOJ's fingerprint repository, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the California Megan's Law Website, 58 Superior Courts, and local law-enforcement agencies. The source changes with the record. This private guide organizes those official routes so readers can tell when a statewide system applies and when a county court, sheriff, jail, or police agency holds the source file.

Why We Built This Site

California has no public statewide trial-case search and no public CA DOJ name search for another person's RAP sheet. That makes source selection the first task. CA DOJ provides fingerprint-based review of a person's own state summary. CDCR publishes selected current state-custody information through CIRIS. The California Megan's Law Website is the public layer of a larger law-enforcement registry. Trial cases, arrests, bookings, jail rosters, and many incident reports remain local. This site brings the statewide channels together and routes local research through all 58 county sites without presenting one metro system as the statewide answer.

What You Will Find Here

  • Record guides: how California criminal court cases are located and read across separate Superior Court systems
  • Official review instructions: how fingerprint self-review works through the CA DOJ repository
  • Statewide system explanations: what CA DOJ, CIRIS, the Megan's Law Website, and appellate search each contain
  • Record-relief context: how California dismissal, arrest sealing, and automatic relief differ and why filings stay county-based
  • County routing: a complete directory of all 58 California counties for local court and agency sources

What We Cannot Do

This is a privately run reference site, not a California court, police department, sheriff, CA DOJ office, or CDCR service. Those boundaries determine what we can provide:

  • We do not retrieve official records or conduct government criminal-history checks
  • We cannot submit California expungement, sealing, challenge, or public-records paperwork
  • Certified case documents and RAP sheets must come from the office that holds them
  • We do not give legal advice about a charge, warrant, disposition, or form
  • Agency procedures, provider rolling fees, and local access methods can change

Only CA DOJ, the Superior Court, or the California agency that created a record can issue its official or certified version.

Search Partners

Third-party providers power search boxes that appear on some pages. They operate independently and decide what their tools return and what they charge. A paid signup reached through one of those tools may produce a referral fee for this site. That support helps keep the guides available, but it does not give us control over a partner's service or results.