Denver police commander doxxing — first conviction under Colorado's anti-doxxing law (2024)

What happened

In September 2023, activist Regan Benson — a frequent critic of Denver police — livestreamed a protest. During the livestream she asked viewers to track down the home address of a specific Denver police commander. Viewers used publicly available channels to find the address and reported it back to Benson, who then repeated it aloud on the stream and invited followers to gather at the location for what she called a "pig roast party."

Colorado prosecutors charged Benson under the state's 2022 anti-doxxing statute, which prohibits sharing personal information of first responders or other protected categories online when the act "poses an imminent and serious threat" to the safety of those individuals or their families. A Denver jury convicted Benson in 2024 — the first known conviction under the statute. Sentencing followed.

How it started

The address-finding step was performed by viewers using publicly available channels — the kind of data that lives on people-search broker pages, county property records, and adjacent open sources. The doxxing chain didn't require insider information or a hack. It required a name, a willingness to look, and the standard tooling that already exists.

Benson's case is expected to face First Amendment challenges on appeal. The legal question of how far state anti-doxxing statutes can constitutionally reach is unsettled — a federal court struck down West Virginia's broker-removal statute (its version of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which lets covered officers sue data brokers for failing to remove their home address) in 2025 on First Amendment grounds. The underlying mechanic — that home addresses of officers are easily findable — is not in dispute.

What this means for you

For sworn officers and other first responders, the Denver case shows the threat shape clearly: the address is the linchpin, the address is online, and the legal tools are reactive. They punish after harm. They don't prevent the address from being findable in the first place.

Removing the address ahead of time is the upstream piece. It doesn't replace the legal protections — it cuts down what an adversary can find before any threat is made.

For more on the doxxing threat shape and what to do if you've been doxxed, see /doxxing and /doxxing/recovery.

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