A Call for Background Checks

The Indianapolis office of the Salvation Army said that recent allegations about a volunteer’s theft won’t change the way they screen volunteers for the holiday season.

Salvation Army volunteer Sean Sayers was arrested for stealing from the Wal-Mart where he was volunteering as a bell ringer, which violated his probation on a previous stealing charge.

"It always makes me sad," said Major Richard Hartman of the Salvation Army about the Anderson case. "You don't have to steal."

The allegations however, won’t change the way the Christian charity organization screens for volunteers and officials say they won’t probe any deeper into the personal lives of those already volunteering.
The fact that a number of bell ringers are placed there as punishment by the courts, would lead some to think that a background check would be an obvious step, but that’s not the way the SA sees it.

Major Hartman says he's “reluctant to offend” the volunteers and the paid employees who offer their help, not to mention the dent it might make in donations.
"You know, they're helping us out," he said. "I just think it would be prohibitive to do a background check on everyone that rings a bell for us."

"Most of them are pretty good joes," he said.

But what about the ones that aren’t pretty good joes? Call me crazy, but if someone were dressed up like Santa Claus ringing a bell for charity outside of a department store all winter long, I’d want to know if he (or she) were a sex offender, a thief, a felon, drug addict, etc. I think that background checks are cost effective enough that the danger far outweighs the price. Charity organizations have a responsibility to the public to make sure they’re not putting people in danger.