Protesters at Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best's home: neighbors' personal information posted online (Snohomish County, 2020)

What happened

On the evening of August 1, 2020, a crowd gathered on a residential street in unincorporated Snohomish County, Washington, outside the home of Carmen Best, then chief of the Seattle Police Department. Local reporting and the Snohomish County sheriff described about 200 people in roughly 40 vehicles. Estimates of the crowd's size varied.

Best was not home, but her neighbors were. According to local reporting, people in the crowd photographed houses on the street, recorded license plate numbers, and asked children in the neighborhood which schools they attended. Several neighbors said their own names and home addresses had been posted on social media before the crowd arrived. Neighbors blocked a road into the community with a truck, and some were armed; the protesters said they were met by residents displaying guns. Best later credited her neighbors with keeping the crowd from trespassing. Protesters said they stayed on the road and disputed claims of illegal behavior.

Why a home address is easy to find

Public reporting on this incident does not say how the crowd obtained the address. What is documented is the market that makes an address like this cheap to find. A sworn officer's home address is one of the most widely resold pieces of information on people-search and data broker sites. Once an officer's address is known, neighboring addresses sit one step away on the same broker pages, in property records, and across other commercial sources.

Best wrote to the Seattle City Council days later, asking it to publicly condemn protests that target public officials at their homes. She announced her retirement on August 11, 2020, and left office on September 2, 2020.

What this means for you

Family targeting does not always begin with a swatting call or a stalker. Here it began with a name, an address pulled from broker listings, and the addresses of everyone nearby. That same name-to-address lookup runs through the broker market every day.

Washington runs an Address Confidentiality Program through the Secretary of State that gives eligible people a substitute mailing address to use in public records. You enroll in that program directly with the state; Frontline Privacy does not file it for you, and it does not pull down an address a broker has already published. New Jersey's Daniel's Law lets covered officers, judges, and immediate family in the same household demand that data brokers stop publishing their home address and unpublished phone number, and sue brokers that refuse. That broker-removal step is the one Frontline Privacy works: finding the pages that resell the address, filing the removal requests, and checking again when a record reappears.

Frontline Privacy finds the broker listings that publish a home address, files removal requests, and keeps checking for the records that come back.

For more on family targeting and steps to take if your address has been published, see /doxxing and Daniel's Law.