Editorial standards

Where our records come from

Booking records come from the public inmate rosters that New Mexico county detention centers publish, and from records released to us under the Inspection of Public Records Act. Court records come from the New Mexico court system's public docket. Missing person records come from NamUs, the federal missing persons database run by the U.S. Department of Justice. Sex offender registry records come from the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and are published under NMSA 1978 § 29-11A-5.1.

We do not buy data from brokers, we do not scrape private sources, and we do not obtain records through anyone's login. Where a source's terms prohibit automated collection, we do not collect from it automatically — we request the records through the public-records process instead, and some counties are in our database for exactly that reason.

What we refuse to publish

Juvenile records are never published, on any page, from any source. Social Security numbers, driver's license and state ID numbers, and dates of birth are stripped before a record is stored. Booking photographs are never composited into a social share card, because a share preview is cached by the platform and effectively permanent — which would quietly defeat a removal request we had already honored.

An arrest is not a conviction

This is the most important sentence on the site. Being booked into a jail means someone was accused of something. It does not mean they did it. Charges are dropped, cases are dismissed, people are acquitted, and records are expunged — and the roster a record came from does not always tell us when that happens. Treat everything here as what it is: a snapshot of a public record at the moment we read it. Every record page carries that notice, and so does every listing.

A court docket entry is not an arrest either. People land on a criminal calendar in ways that never involve a jail: a summons served by mail, a citation written at the roadside, an indictment. A hearing on the calendar means a case is scheduled, nothing more.

Accuracy, and what we do when we get it wrong

We publish what the source agency published. Agencies make mistakes, spell names differently across systems, and sometimes list charges a prosecutor never files. We are not able to independently verify every record, and we do not represent that any record is complete, current, or free of error.

When something is wrong, we correct it and we do not treat it as a favour. Corrections, dismissals, acquittals, updated dispositions and court-ordered expungements go to the front of the review queue — ahead of requests to take down a record that is simply accurate. How that works, and what to send us, is on the corrections and removals page.

How often the data updates

The county booking rosters and the court calendar are re-read every six hours. Each source is monitored, so a county whose roster goes quiet or whose page changes shape raises an alert rather than silently going stale. The sex offender registry is a periodic capture rather than a live feed, and the date it was captured is printed at the top of that page for exactly that reason.

Independence

Advertisers have no say over what we publish. Advertisers cannot have a record removed, promoted, or featured, and no advertiser gets access to reader data. Sponsored placements are labeled as advertisements. If any of that ever changes, this page changes first.

Contact

Questions about how we source or handle records: use the contact page.

This page is written to be read, not to be impressive. It is not legal advice and it has not been reviewed by counsel; if you are relying on it for a legal question, talk to a lawyer.