...Perhaps, but then the landlord has to anticipate charges of racism or discrimination by participating in that process...
Then part of a package of statutory changes to enable this would obviously require 'hold harmless' provisions, akin to Good Samaritan laws; good faith, unless disproven.
...This is not to mention that credit checks cost money. If you have 10 people applying for one of your apartments, that gets to be pretty expensive...
Cost of doing business. Most large-to-medium -scale property management companies do this already. Sounds like a job for specialized clearing-houses catering to the smaller-scale landlord; bringing economies of scale to the low-volume end of the market, as well.
...In the past, I've asked my Councilman to give landlords access to criminal records to help us keep lowlifes out of our city. He stated it couldn't' be done...
If the data is public and digitized, a tweak here-and-there to existing statute should do the trick.
...Now I was not asking for police records, just a rating system by the police perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10. Having such a system would help protect me from discrimination liability in the event I don't rent to a minority applicant...
Good idea. In any overhaul of statute designed to facilitate the integration of citizenship and criminal-conviction databases into clearinghouse repositories for credit checks and the like, such a rating system might very well relieve some of the political and legal concerns which might otherwise serve to lessen the usefulness of such an approach.
...I'm all for landlords being held accountable for renting to illegals, it's just that it has to be reasonable, economical, and most of all, protective to landlords. If an applicant gives me a false identification, there is no way for me to verify that his or her identity is not theirs.
That's why God invented bio-metric and two-factor identification methodologies and technologies, and rendered them commonplace, effective and inexpensive. Ask any doctor or nurse or government employee who logs into their computers using simple SmartCards. They, too, can be hacked and forged, but it's damned difficult, and won't be widespread.
But that's all just detail.
If we lay the legal and social and technological groundwork to make it dirt-cheap and easy for employers, landlords, etc., to E-Verify (or similar), verification becomes routine and sustainable and, in very short order, second nature to anyone on either side of a business transaction of such a nature.
It's not exactly rocket science... similar data clearinghouse transactions are coming anyway over the next decade or so... so we might as well turn that to our advantage.
Sooner rather than later.
Or so it seems, to this observer.