Columbus Division of Police

What brokers know about a Columbus officer

Run a scan on a Columbus Division of Police officer and the same details come up. Full name. Current home address. Prior addresses. The names and rough ages of a spouse, parents, and kids. The vehicle registered to you.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch carry most of it. They pull from public records and resell the profile. The Franklin County Auditor publishes parcel-level property data online: owner name, mailing address, and sale history. Brokers scrape it directly. A single search returns clusters of officers living in Hilliard, Dublin, Westerville, Pickerington, Reynoldsburg, and Grove City, and out into Delaware and Licking counties, in seconds.

What Ohio law does for you

Two Ohio laws help. Neither closes every gap.

Ohio Revised Code §149.43 treats a peace officer's home address and family information as not a public record. In plain terms, the agency holding your personnel file can withhold your home address and family details from a public-records request. The protection follows the record each agency holds, not you. That withholding is the agency's call, not a step we file for you.

Ohio Revised Code §149.45 goes further. It lets peace officers, firefighters, EMTs, and other covered public-safety workers ask a public office to redact their home address from records it posts online, generally within five business days. The Ohio Secretary of State runs a related program, Shielding Ohio's Protectors, that removes eligible workers' home addresses from the voter rolls. One limit matters here: county auditors are exempt from the online-redaction requirement. You or your agency submit the redaction request and the Shielding Ohio's Protectors enrollment; we don't file either for you. Our work is the broker side, where those state exemptions don't reach.

Ohio has no data-broker removal statute. There is no state equivalent of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, the law that lets covered officers demand data brokers stop publishing their home address and sue if a broker refuses. Out-of-state brokers are not bound by Ohio's records rules.

Confirm the current forms and eligibility with your agency or the county before you rely on any of these.

What still leaks

Even after you use both statutes, three sources stay open for a Columbus officer:

1. Franklin County Auditor records. The auditor publishes property data online with owner names, and it is exempt from the §149.45 online-redaction rule. The §149.43 shield covers agency records, not the auditor's.
2. Court records. Franklin County Common Pleas and the Columbus Municipal Court post dockets online. Civil, divorce, and traffic filings can show an address unless it was redacted when the case was filed.
3. Out-of-state brokers. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and others source from national aggregators and do not follow Ohio's records rules.

Why your family is in this

The records that expose you rarely stop at you. A broker profile ties your name to the people at your address and near it. A spouse can appear as a co-owner on the auditor's deed. Relatives get linked to you over years of scraping. Someone trying to reach you can start with any of them.

Columbus adds a second path. It is a state capital and a Big Ten university town, so an officer named in coverage of a protest or a use-of-force review draws attention fast. A name in the news plus an open broker profile puts your home address and your family a few clicks apart.

We remove your family's listings alongside yours, because their records point back to the same address.

What we do for Columbus officers

We scan the people-search sites we track, file removals on the listings that show your information, and keep checking. Brokers often repost from the same public sources, so when a listing comes back, we file again. A property transaction can put your address back in the auditor record, so we watch for that too.

We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something from you, like an ID to verify a request.

If your precinct or Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge 9 wants to offer this to members, talk to us.