Data & sources

This page explains, in practical terms, where our booking records come from, how often they are refreshed, and what we deliberately do not collect.

Primary sources

Booking records on Alabama Arrests are collected from the public jail and inmate-roster systems operated by Alabama county sheriffs and related facilities. Those systems already publish, for public inspection, information such as:

name and identifiers used by the facility (subject / booking numbers);
date of birth or age, and basic descriptors;
booking date and, when available, release date;
facility name and booking origin;
charges, crime class, arresting agency, and bond amounts;
mugshot photographs, when the agency publishes them.

We do not scrape sealed records, juvenile records that are not public, or non-public law-enforcement databases. If an agency does not publish a field, we do not invent it.

How often records are refreshed

Each county is polled on a schedule that depends on how its roster behaves. High-volume counties are checked multiple times per hour; quieter counties are checked less often. When a county's site is down, rate-limited, or behind a challenge page, updates for that county pause until it responds again. A booking that appears on our site within minutes of the county publishing it is normal; delays of several hours are also normal when the source is slow.

What we keep after release

County live rosters typically drop a person once they leave the facility. We keep a historical copy of each booking we have seen, so a record remains searchable after release. That is the main difference between this site and the live roster on a sheriff's website. Historical retention is also why a takedown request can be meaningful — once a record has been sealed or expunged at the source, we remove our copy.

What we deliberately leave out

Juvenile records that are not public under Alabama law.
Sealed, expunged, or agency-withdrawn records, once we are notified and can verify.
Private contact information that is not part of the public booking sheet.
Speculation about guilt, motive, or pending investigation details that the agency has not published.

Known limitations

Coverage is uneven. Not every Alabama county publishes a usable public roster. Some publish only a subset of fields. A missing county is usually a source problem, not an oversight.
Source errors pass through. Name spellings, dates of birth, and charge descriptions come from the agency. When they are wrong at the source, they are wrong here until the agency corrects them.
Identity collisions happen. Two people can share a name and a date of birth. We link records when the agency's own identifiers say they belong together; we do not merge people based on name alone.
Photos vary. Some agencies publish mugshots; some do not. A missing photo does not mean a missing record.

Corrections

If you believe a record is wrong, use the takedown request form and include the subject number. For questions about how a specific county's data is collected, email admin@alarrests.com.