Detroit Police Department

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

Run a scan on a Detroit officer and the same fields come back: full name, current address, prior addresses, the names and approximate ages of a spouse, parents, and kids, and the vehicle you drive. The county register of deeds record showing when you bought the house is usually in there too.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the collecting. Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw, and Monroe county registers of deeds publish deed records online, and the BS&A property systems that many Michigan municipalities run publish parcel and tax data on the web. The brokers pull straight from those sources, so a search on your name returns a home address without any inside access.

What Michigan law does for you

Michigan's Freedom of Information Act has a law-enforcement exemption, MCL 15.243(1)(s). It lets an agency withhold the home address and phone number of an active or retired officer, and of the officer's family, when it answers a public-records request. The exemption is discretionary and weighed against the public interest, so file your request in writing with each agency and ask for that protection by name.

That exemption only controls what a government office hands out. It does nothing about the data brokers. Michigan has no broker-removal statute: there is no state version of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which lets covered New Jersey officers sue a data broker that refuses to take down their home address. Michigan also has no Address Confidentiality Program that covers officers because of the job. For anything already sitting on a people-search page, the broker opt-out is the only real lever.

One federal law touches the vehicle data in your profile. The 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 pull you off a broker site by itself.

What still leaks

Even after opt-outs, a few sources keep feeding the brokers:

1. County and municipal property records. Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw, and Monroe registers of deeds publish online, and the BS&A municipal systems publish parcel-level data. Brokers re-scrape it.
2. Court records. Michigan's MiCourt case-search portal publishes statewide. Addresses in civil filings, divorces, and traffic cases show up unless they were redacted when the case was filed.
3. Out-of-state brokers. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and the rest are not bound by any Michigan rule. They buy from out-of-state aggregators and rebuild the profile from there.

Why the end of the residency rule matters here

Detroit long required its officers to live inside the city. Michigan's Residency Act, Public Act 212 of 1999, barred cities from imposing that kind of requirement, so a DPD officer can now live anywhere across the metro area — suburbs like Dearborn Heights, Livonia, Redford, Warren, and Sterling Heights are examples, and there are dozens more spread across Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties. Wherever an officer lives, that address is recorded on a property document in one of the county registers, and every one of those registers is searchable by name.

A home address does not stay contained to the officer who lives there. The same deed record that names your house also confirms who shares it, and a broker profile links out to the relatives it ties to you: a spouse listed under a maiden name, an adult child at a nearby address, a parent still in the old neighborhood. Take down your own listing while theirs stay up and there is still a short trail back to your door. That is why a removal has to cover the household, not just the officer.

What we do for DPD members

We scan the people-search and data-broker sites for your information and file opt-outs across them. Brokers relist, so we keep checking and file again when your profile comes back, including after a new deed or court record refreshes their data. We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something only you can provide. No single removal stays down on its own; the monitoring is what keeps it off.

See what a broker search turns up on you: run a free scan.

If your precinct or the Detroit Police Officers Association wants to offer this to its members, talk to us.