I had to go get a criminal background check today. That's where you hand over $5 to someone standing next to a printer and a few seconds later you get a printout saying whether you have a criminal background. And did I?
Anyway, I'd done this once before. That time I'd gone to the Attorney General's office on South Main St. in Providence. The website said that you'd have to go to another office in Cranston starting on July 23. Which, reading the fine print, turned out to be July 23 of last year, so it was off to Cranston for me.
Specifically it was to the Pastore Center, which is the size of a small town in itself, made up of government buildings which include the DMV, law enforcement centers, and actual prisons. Because I'd never gone to this particular outpost of the AG's office before I got off a little early and had to poke around a little, but it's not that hard to find.
I did spend some time wondering, though, why the move had been made at all. Like I said, it's a very basic process, not something that requires a lot of space. When glasses stores and sandwich shops move out of Providence it's because the rent got too high or they think they can do better business elsewhere. Neither of these factors account for a government office that still owns or leases its old space sending consumers elsewhere.
But while the Pastore Center can be more inconvenient for some, it's got a parking lot right there. Some of the customers I can see complaining that the Providence location doesn't have parking, and I guess that's who they listened to.
2 comments:
I wonder how many people who actually have criminial backgrounds go for these records. Maybe you would if you'd committed some really fascinating crimes that you'd like to brag about and when the guys at the office wanted proof you'd be able to show them the hard copy.
It seems this moving of local government agencies to the outskirts of town isn't that unusual. They did the same thing in Halifax in that a number of them (not the jail) were in the boonies. That was okay for the people needing to renew their driver's licences or whatever, but not so good for people who relied on public transportation. Ans so it goes as Vonnegut used to say.
That's kind of an interesting idea. Sure, anyone can say that they were involved in a bakery robber or were arrested for impersonating a pope. Talk is cheap, and you need paper.
This is sort of what I was getting at. It's in some ways more convenient for people who drive if the government offices they need to visit are in the suburbs and the outskirts. But for people on public transport the opposite is often true. So they seem to be listening to one group and not the other. Maybe they're the squeakier wheel.
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