Cleveland Division of Police

What brokers know about a Cleveland officer

Pull up a Cleveland Division of Police officer on a people-search site and the same profile appears: name, current address, prior addresses back to the academy, the names and rough ages of a spouse, parents, and kids, the registered vehicle, and the county property record that ties it all to where you live.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the work. They pull from county property systems and national aggregators. The Cuyahoga County Fiscal Officer publishes parcel-level property data online, and Lake, Lorain, Medina, Geauga, and Summit counties run similar sites. Brokers scrape all of them. A single zip-code search surfaces officers clustered in Parma, Strongsville, North Olmsted, Brunswick, Medina, Avon Lake, North Ridgeville, Mentor, Willoughby, Eastlake, and Macedonia.

What Ohio law does, and doesn't do

Ohio Revised Code §149.43 treats you as a "designated public service worker," which puts your home address and family information outside the definition of a public record. The exemption runs through each agency that holds the record, so an agency can withhold that information when someone files a public-records request. Note the limit built into the same statute: under §149.43(B)(9), a journalist can still request an officer's home address in writing by stating that disclosure serves the public interest. And the exemption does not reach the county fiscal officer's property database on its own.

Ohio has no data-broker removal law. There is no equivalent of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which lets covered officers demand that data brokers stop publishing their home address and sue if the brokers refuse. Ohio also has no statewide address confidentiality program for sworn officers. For the profiles already on people-search sites, the broker opt-out process is what actually gets them down.

What still leaks

Three sources stay open even with the §149.43 exemption in place:

1. County property records: Cuyahoga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Geauga, and Summit all publish parcel-level data online, and brokers scrape it. The §149.43 shield doesn't cover it automatically.
2. Court records: Cuyahoga County Common Pleas and the Cleveland Municipal Court post dockets online. A home address can appear in a civil case, divorce, or traffic filing unless it's redacted when filed.
3. Out-of-state brokers: Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and others source from national aggregators and don't follow Ohio's public-records rules.

Where this reaches your family

Ohio cities can no longer require officers to live in the city. The state ban on municipal residency rules was upheld in Lima v. State in 2009, so Cleveland officers are spread across the suburbs and tend to stay put. That makes a home easy to pin down across several county property sites.

A home address rarely stops at you. The same profile that lists your street lists the people who live there. A broker ties your spouse to the deed, connects your kids to the same household, and links relatives to you over years of scraping. Remove your listing and leave theirs, and the path still leads home. We remove the household's listings together, not just yours.

What we do for Cleveland officers

We scan the people-search sites and data brokers, match the records that belong to you, and file removals across them. Listings come back, so we keep checking and re-file when they reappear. County property and recorder filings can push you back onto broker pages, so we watch for that too. We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something from you.

If your district or the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association wants to offer this to members, talk to us. Other Ohio officers can read the Columbus PD page and Cincinnati PD page for the same statutory picture.