Detroit Police Department

If you work for DPD, here's what brokers know about you

Run a scan on any Detroit officer. Same things show up: full name. Current address. Prior addresses back to academy. Spouse, parents, kids' approximate ages. Vehicle. The county register of deeds record showing when you bought the house.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the work. Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, and Washtenaw county registers of deeds and the BS&A property data systems used by most Michigan municipalities all publish online. The brokers scrape directly from them. Cluster patterns of DPD officers in Dearborn Heights, Allen Park, Lincoln Park, Wyandotte, Trenton, Taylor, Westland, Livonia, Redford, Warren, Sterling Heights, Roseville, and Macomb Township are visible from a zip-code search inside seconds.

What Michigan law does for you

Michigan's Freedom of Information Act (MCL 15.243(1)(s)) exempts records that would invade personal privacy — agencies use this to shield officer home address and family information from FOIA disclosure. The exemption is discretionary by default; file the request in writing with each agency.

Michigan does not have a broker-removal statute — no equivalent of New Jersey's Daniel's Law (the NJ law that lets covered officers sue data brokers for failing to remove their home address) — and no statewide Address Confidentiality Program for sworn officers. The broker opt-out is the leverage point for what's already on people-search pages.

What still leaks

Three sources stay open for a DPD officer:

1. County register of deeds and municipal property data. Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw, and Monroe all publish online. The municipal BS&A property systems publish parcel-level data citywide. Brokers scrape it.
2. Court records. Michigan's One Court of Justice MiCourt portal publishes statewide. Civil filings, divorce, traffic — addresses appear unless redacted at filing time.
3. Out-of-state brokers. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and the rest don't honor any Michigan-specific protection. They source from out-of-state aggregators.

Why the residency-rule change matters here

Detroit's residency rule was eliminated in 1999, when Michigan Public Act 212 prohibited municipalities from requiring residency for public employees. The result is that DPD officers today are spread across the metro Detroit suburbs and concentrate in the same towns year after year. Where you live shows up cleanly on a property record search across multiple county registers. The clustering itself is searchable.

A spouse's workplace, a kid's school in Macomb ISD or Wayne RESA, a parent's address one block away — all reachable from a single Spokeo profile in five minutes.

The historical pattern of including officer names in news coverage of Detroit incidents makes this worse. Every named-in-the-news officer is a name that lands on a broker page within hours.

The family gets swept on the same plan as the officer.

What we do for DPD members

Continuous sweeping across the broker landscape. Standard opt-outs across the people-search sites. Re-listings handled — we re-check every two weeks and refile inside 24 hours when you reappear. After any Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb register of deeds filing, we re-check inside 30 days.

If your precinct or the Detroit Police Officers Association wants to offer this as a member benefit, reach out. We work with locals already.