[Adam]

Camron, you have not stated that the example you spoke of would have been prevented by a background check.

You have not addressed the fact that while the information may or may not be public (that will depend on jurisdiction), the labor intensive nature of extracting that information from newspapers and court records essentially makes the information private. My evidence for this is that police officers are prohibited from using their official resources to do background checks outside the performance of their duties. If it's all public information, why would it matter?

You can find plenty of examples of people leaking private information about a person for purposes that are purely vindictive. I don't think this needs to be relegated to examples of officials. For one, background checks on officials are relatively new so there's been far fewer opportunities for this to happen. Secondly, unless you can show a greater propensity among the officiating community for these crimes, the risks of exposure (of the private info) should be considered equal to the general population.

The common system you speak of has to have a decision maker. Someone has to review the entire file in order to make the "go or no go" decision. What then happens to that entire file? I assume there would need to be checks on that process, which would require storage of the entire file. As soon as that file is compiled, it needs to be stored, protected, and restricted.

You're free to be dismissive of the arguments against background checks all you want, but you dismissing them doesn't mean they're without merit any more than me bringing them up gives them merit.