So the idea is that there are records in the system about them, but the phrase "criminal record" means specifically that they've been arrested, tried, and found guilty?
That makes sense, but seems like it could/should be phrased better. Maybe something like 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal conviction records.
There's a house in our neighborhood that kinda goes in this category. The residents are low-level ne'er-do-well types. They run a bicycle theft ring but haven't been caught (they're very good about filing ID numbers off bikes, for example), they dabbled in cooking meth, they've hosted a squatter encampment in their backyard, etc, etc. Part of the reason they're such a problem is that they never *quite* get arrested so they're chronically causing more problems.
The main thing that's relevant to this thread is that the article made it sound like they were using lots of 'Big Data' to figure out what to do, but then threw in stuff like "uncooperative witnesses" or "record-free chronic offenders" which both sounded a lot like "people we put on the list just because". I'm glad that the problem was in my understanding, not that they really were doing arbitrary stuff.