How Do You Read A Rap Sheet?
From jurisdiction to jurisdiction—and certainly country to country—there is no uniform format for a rap sheet, which is the printed record of a person’s citations, arrests, convictions and incarcerations. However, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which collects every American arrest record, has worked to standardize rap sheets. Read on. Check the top of the rap sheet for the internal record or “IR Number,” the number associated with a person’s fingerprints. Nearly everyone who has been fingerprinted has an IR Number, and it remains the same even if the person changes his or her name. Read the birth date and name or names for the person. All names an individual has gone by should be listed. Examine the events on the individual rap sheet in the order they are presented, which is from the earliest to latest. If the arrest date was the last day of December 2009, it will generally read 12/31/2009 or Dec. 31, 2009. Violations may be abbreviated as, for instance, “CTTP” for
