Houston Police Department

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

The profile looks the same on nearly every HPD officer. Full name. Current address. Prior addresses going back years. Spouse, parents, and kids' approximate ages. Vehicle. The appraisal-district record showing when you bought the house and what you paid.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the work. The Harris County Appraisal District publishes detailed property records, including purchase price, lot size, and plat, and the brokers pull straight from it. Officers cluster in suburban pockets like Cypress, Tomball, Atascocita, Pearland, Sugar Land, and Kingwood, and those clusters are searchable by zip code.

What Texas law does for you

Texas Government Code §552.117 keeps a current or honorably retired peace officer's home address, home phone, emergency contact, and family information out of the records an agency releases under the Public Information Act. For peace officers the exemption applies automatically, with no written election required. §552.1175 covers the same kind of personal identifying information for peace officers and other officials in sensitive roles; some of those other covered roles do have to file a written election with their agency.

Fewer officers know about Tax Code §25.025. File the comptroller's confidentiality form with the Harris County Appraisal District and your home address becomes confidential in the appraisal records, restricted to official use instead of the public property search. Current and former officers qualify, and so do a spouse and adult children.

The federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act limits when a state DMV can release the name, address, and phone number from your motor vehicle record, with a short list of specific exceptions. It restricts DMV disclosure; it does not pull your address off broker sites on its own.

Texas also runs an Address Confidentiality Program that gives you a substitute mailing address. It is built for survivors of stalking, family violence, sexual assault, or trafficking, so it fits an officer being stalked, not every officer.

What still leaks

Even with both filings in place, several sources stay open:

1. County court filings. The Harris County District Clerk publishes civil and criminal dockets online. Civil suits, divorce, and traffic matters can show an address unless it was redacted when the case was filed.
2. Property records scraped before you filed. Anything published before your §25.025 election was likely already copied by brokers. Re-running the opt-outs after you file is what closes that gap.
3. Out-of-state brokers. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and the rest aren't bound by Texas agency law. They pull from national aggregators that already hold your data.

Why the family angle matters here

Your broker profile is really a profile of your household. It ties your name to the address where your family sleeps, then links out to the relatives who share it or live nearby. A spouse who works at a Klein or Cy-Fair ISD campus, a parent a few streets over, a kid with a listing of their own. None of them took the job, but the record exposes them anyway.

Houston-area news tends to name officers involved in an incident. Once a broker attaches that name to your home address, a stranger who reads the story can find the house. That is why we clean the whole household, not just the officer. Everyone at the address goes through the same removal work.

What we do for HPD members

We monitor the people-search sites that matter for HPD officers and file removals when your information shows up. In our experience, appraisal-district refreshes tend to bring officers back onto broker sites, so we keep checking after those updates and re-file when you reappear. We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something only you can provide.

Run agency-wide privacy enforcement for HPD at the division level and the workflow scales without each officer filing on their own.

If your division or the Houston Police Officers' Union wants to offer this as a member benefit, talk to us.