Austin Police Department

What brokers know about Austin PD members

Run a scan on an Austin PD officer and the same records show up: full name, current address, prior addresses going back years, the approximate ages of a spouse, parents, and kids, and vehicle details. The appraisal-district record shows when you bought your house and what you paid.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the work. Travis Central Appraisal District, along with the Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, and Caldwell appraisal districts, publishes parcel-level property data online, and the brokers copy it directly. Suburbs like Pflugerville, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Leander, Hutto, Buda, Kyle, and Manor are all searchable by zip code, so a profile surfaces from a single lookup.

What Texas law does for you

Texas Government Code §552.117 keeps a peace officer's home address, home phone, emergency contact, and family information out of any record an agency releases under the Public Information Act. For peace officers that exemption applies automatically. §552.1175 is a separate step you file with a governmental body to keep the same information confidential in its own records. Do this per agency.

The lever most APD officers miss is Tax Code §25.025. File a request for confidentiality with Travis CAD, and with any other county where you own property, and your home address is redacted from the appraisal roll, the tax record, and the online property search. Current and former peace officers, their spouses, and their adult children qualify.

There is also the Texas Address Confidentiality Program, which assigns a substitute address for people in family-violence, stalking, or trafficking situations. It is a narrower program most officers will not need.

What still leaks

Texas has strong agency protections, but no statute that forces a data broker to remove your address. Three sources stay open:

1. Court records. The Travis County District Clerk and the surrounding county clerks publish civil and criminal dockets online. Addresses on civil suits, divorce filings, and traffic matters appear unless they were redacted when the case was filed.
2. Property data captured before you redacted it. Anything the appraisal district posted before your §25.025 request was already copied by brokers. Redacting the source does not pull those existing broker listings down. Running the opt-outs afterward is what closes that gap.
3. Out-of-state brokers. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and the rest are not bound by Texas law. They pull from out-of-state aggregators.

The federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act limits who can pull the personal information in your DMV and vehicle-registration records and lets you sue for misuse. It does not remove you from broker sites by itself.

Why Austin raises the exposure

Austin is the state capital. Regular protests, heavy news coverage, and stories that name officers all make it easy to tie a name to a profile. Once your name is in a story, anyone can connect it to a broker page that carries your home address. That page reaches people the article never did.

That exposure does not stop with you. A single people-search profile links your name to your relatives and to the address where you live. Your home address is the detail that turns a name into a place, and into the people at that place. The information about your family runs through the same removal work as your own.

What we do for APD members

We scan the broker and people-search sites for your listings and file removals on the ones we find. In Texas the fastest way back onto those sites is a fresh appraisal-district record, so we keep checking after county property updates and refile when your information reappears. We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something from you, like an ID to confirm a removal.

If your sector or the Austin Police Association wants to offer this as a member benefit, talk to us.