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Tag: common name

  • Need a background check in California? Changes at the courts are causing long waits

    Need a background check in California? Changes at the courts are causing long waits

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    Significant delays in the processing of background checks are causing headaches across California, leaving applications for jobs and housing stuck in limbo while making it harder for employers and landlords to screen for criminal records.

    The situation stems from a state appellate court ruling more than three years ago, which industry experts say has blocked background screeners and any court researcher from using date of birth or driver’s license information to narrow down search results as they investigate an individual’s criminal history.

    The 2021 decision in All of Us or None of Us vs. Hamrick arose from a case brought by criminal justice reform advocates who have long argued that background checks lead to discrimination against formerly incarcerated people.

    A panel at the 4th District Court of Appeals determined that Riverside County’s Superior Court website, which allowed users to input dates of birth and driver’s license numbers while searching for criminal records, was in violation of a state court rule that says such information should be excluded from court “indexes” accessible to the public through “electronic means.”

    “After considering the text, history, and purpose” of the rule, the judges found that state courts should limit search criteria for the public, effectively eliminating the use of birth dates and license numbers.

    Those personal identifiers had long been used to match individuals to their records, and without them it has proved nearly impossible to conduct searches that involve common names, industry experts say.

    “This was an interpretation that no one had ever seen before or seen coming,” said Melissa Sorenson, executive director of the Professional Background Screening Assn. “Each of the courts is trying to figure out how to comply.”

    Delays are particularly bad in Los Angeles County, where background check firms receive about 100,000 screening requests each month.

    “Right now, L.A. County is an example of something that’s not sustainable,” Sorenson said.

    Residents with common names or those with a long history in the area may have to wait for months or even years for their background check to be completed, Sorensen said, if it’s possible for it to be completed at all.

    It has taken time for courts to adjust since the 2021 appellate ruling was handed down. The Superior Court of Los Angeles announced its changes in February.

    “All the background screener can do is plug in Jose Rodriguez, for example, and because it’s a relatively common name in L.A., you could get back hundreds to thousands of results,” Sorenson said. “We have no way to filter based on any other identifier.”

    Dates of birth are contained within physical court files, the Superior Court of Los Angeles said.

    “These restrictions require background checkers seeking information on commonly named individuals to visit the courthouse where the physical court file is located to determine if the information they obtained in an electronic criminal record search applies to the person about whom they are inquiring,” the court said in an email.

    The court limits the number of case files it will retrieve for a requester to five per day at any courthouse. For names with thousands of results, it’s not practical to check each physical file.

    At the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, the county’s busiest criminal clerk’s office, additional court service assistants have been assigned to assist with file viewing requests. The current wait time to pull multiple files at a time is three to five days, the court said.

    In a message reviewed by The Times, the background screening firm Sterling sent out a notice to clients explaining the situation earlier this year.

    “With this change, the L.A. County court has made it significantly more challenging to accurately identify individuals during background checks,” the firm said. “Delays for criminal checks in L.A. County are expected to increase. … Some searches were closed as unperformable.”

    Sterling did not respond to a request for comment. On the online forum Reddit, Los Angeles residents shared concerns that their background checks were not getting completed in time.

    “Sterling is not able to get it done!” one user wrote. “Seriously anxious and have been unemployed for a month now,” said another.

    In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 1262, which would have allowed court researchers to use date of birth to search for an individual without making the date publicly available.

    “This bill would override a 2021 appellate court decision and current court rules that strike a fair balance between public access to court records, public safety, and an individual’s constitutional right to privacy,” Newsom wrote after shutting down the bill.

    The nonprofit Legal Services for Prisoners with Children pushed for the veto, arguing the bill “was sponsored by commercial background check companies … with no regard for the interests of formerly incarcerated or convicted people.”

    Eric Sapp, a staff attorney at the Oakland-based organization, pointed out that when background checks are authorized and required by law, local authorities are obligated to provide the relevant information and assure compliance.

    “There’s no need for a background check company to intervene in those circumstances,” he said.

    “We definitely believe that background checks are overused and are often useless for the purposes for which they’re used,” he said. “The criminal background check as it currently exists today might not be a viable model in the near future.”

    Joshua Kim, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Hamrick case, said he wasn’t aware of holdups with housing and job applications — but said any such issues would be the fault of the background check industry, not the courts complying with the law.

    “If there is in fact a delay that affects people’s opportunity for housing and employment because of the background check company’s inability to do their job, then that could potentially create another legal liability for them,” he said.

    Thirty-seven states have adopted what is known as a “ban the box” policy that prohibits investigation into a job candidate’s conviction history before making an offer of employment, but many employers still seek to vet candidates, especially for jobs that require working with vulnerable populations or involve access to sensitive data.

    “The fundamental question that we’ve been asking in the reentry law community is whether background checks are effective in screening out dangerous employees,” Kim said.

    But some Angelenos have been frustrated by the current state of affairs.

    South Pasadena mother Erin Chang had been stuck waiting months for her disabled son’s summer camp aide to get approved for work. The background check had to clear in order for the state to cover the cost of the aide, Chang said.

    Although the check cleared just before camp began, Chang had to pay out of pocket for the aide and said she will seek reimbursement.

    “Camp is over next week, and we’re still not sorted out,” Chang said. “They offered the explanation that she had a common name and that there is a backlog.”

    Outside Los Angeles, other counties are making similar changes to comply with the court rules. San Luis Obispo County announced last month that it is redacting access to date of birth and driver’s license information in court search engines, and Orange County is rumored to be making the same move soon, said Sorenson of the background check trade group.

    “It is more than just an L.A. County issue,” she said. “If an employer has a candidate with California history, they may have to move on to a different candidate.”

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    Caroline Petrow-Cohen

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  • Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

    Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

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    Since the start of 2022, I’ve consumed more than my body weight in sweet potatoes. The average American eats closer to the equivalent of one (1) fry a day, but for the past decade, I’ve had at least half a pound of the roots at almost every dinner. I travel with sweet potatoes more reliably than I travel with my spouse. All I need in order to chow down is a microwave and something to cushion my hands against the heat.

    Tomorrow, Americans will finally put sweet potatoes in the spotlight—and still not appreciate all that they’re worth. Families across the country will smother the roots with sugar and butter beneath a crunchy marshmallow crust. This classic casserole may be the only serving of sweet potatoes some people have all year—which is a travesty in terms of both quantity and (sorry) preparation style. Sweet potatoes deserve so much more than what Thanksgiving serves them. And maybe they’d get it, if they weren’t so misunderstood.

    For starters, sweet potatoes are not potatoes or yams. Each belongs to a distinct family of plants. And although potatoes and yams are technically tubers, a riff on a plant stem, sweet potatoes are a modified root. The common name doesn’t exactly help, which is why many experts want to change it from sweet potato to … sweetpotato. Even in grocery stores, confusion abounds. A small part of Lauren Eserman-Campbell, a geneticist and sweet-potato expert at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, dies every time she spots a can of Bruce’s Yams.

    Mostly, the sweet potatoes in American markets resemble Bruce’s (Not) Yams: orange-fleshed, brown-skinned, sugary, moist. But the plant’s true range is much more diverse. The outside comes in earthy umbers, ruddy reds and purples, and sandy beiges; the interior can be cream, buttercup yellow, cantaloupe, lilac, even a shade of violet that verges on black. Some are rather watery; others are almost as dry and starchy as bread. Not all of them are even perceptibly sweet. And thanks to the plant’s zany genetics—six copies of each of 15 chromosomes—nearly every combo of color, texture, taste, shape, and sugar and water content can spring out of a cross between, say, a dryish, veiny purple and a moist, smooth-skinned orange. Craig Yencho, a sweet-potato breeder and geneticist at North Carolina State University, told me that, given enough time, “I could find a sweet potato that would be enjoyable to just about any consumer.”

    The common misconception that potatoes are fattening and devoid of nutrition (slander!) might make some people assume the same or worse of sweet potatoes. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Pit their nutritional profile against other staple crops, such as rice, wheat, and corn—all of which command a larger share of the world market—and, in many respects, “sweet potato is on top,” says Samuel Acheampong, a geneticist at the University of Cape Coast, in Ghana. The orange-fleshed varieties, in particular, come chock-full of iron, zinc, and beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A; the purples are rich in cancer-fighting anthocyanins. Even sweet-potato leaves are a powerhouse, packed with folate and a surprising amount of protein. Also, they’re delicious stir-fried.

    Read: America’s lost story of crops rewrites the history of farming

    Sweet potatoes tend to get America’s attention only in November, but they’re hardy, flexible, and ubiquitous enough to be an anytime, anywhere kind of food. They’ve taken root on every continent, save for Antarctica; they’ve been rocketed into space. Acre for acre, sweet potatoes also yield edible crop far more efficiently than many other plants do, “and that is really important in families where they don’t have enough quality food,” says Robert Mwanga, a sweet-potato geneticist based in Uganda, where some locals eat the roots at nearly every meal. In Kenya, sweet potatoes have sustained communities when other crops have failed. Among some populations, the roots have earned an apt moniker: cilera abana, protector of the children.

    But even among scientists, sweet potatoes get, if not a bad rap, at least an underwhelming one. “It’s a tiny community, and there’s not a lot of funding,” Eserman-Campbell told me. “I went to a sweet-potato breeders’ meeting one time, and I just thought there would be more people there.” It doesn’t help that the plants can be a bit of a genetic pain, Mwanga told me. Their many copied chromosomes make breeding tricky, and new sweet-potato varieties can be propagated only by clonal cuttings. Among consumers, the sweet potato has also struggled to shed its reputation as a poor person’s food, turned to in times of famine or war and culturally linked to rural, low-income farmers.

    People in the Western world are catching on—especially now that nutritionists so often tout sweet potatoes as a superfood, says Ana Rita Simões, a taxonomist at Kew Gardens, in London. In the past decade, demand for Yencho’s sweet potatoes has tripled, maybe quintupled; “I have never seen a crop take off like that,” he said.

    Read: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner

    Culinarily, though, Americans are still batting in the sweet potato’s minor leagues. The big hitter remains the Thanksgiving casserole—a dish Acheampong likes but remains a bit mystified by. “You guys add a lot of sugar,” he told me, which is amusing, considering that the orange-fleshed varieties are already plenty sweet. Plus, the casserole is (gasp) under the thumb of Big Confection: Its invention was commissioned as part of a ploy to sell more marshmallows. It’s sugar all the way down.

    I am not here to yuck anyone’s yam; I celebrate any dish that features sweet potatoes. More preferable, though, would be casting these wonderful roots in a starring role. In other parts of the world, sweet-potato recipes run the gamut from sugary to savory, from appetizer to main to dessert. They’re pureed, stir-fried, noodle-fied; they’re blended into soups, beverages, and pastries. They’ve even found their way into booze. Imagine how they could dress our Thanksgiving tables: sweet potatoes roasted; sweet potatoes grilled; sweet potatofurkey—I mean, why the heck not.

    Read: How to engineer the optimally delicious Thanksgiving plate

    Or perhaps there is a more modest proposal to be made: Enjoy the roots all on their own. Yencho, like me, is a purist; he likes his sweet potatoes plain, baked until soft, no condiments necessary. They just don’t need anything else.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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