Minneapolis Police Department

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

The data trail on any Minneapolis officer looks the same. Name and current address. Every prior address back to academy. Spouse, parents, kids' approximate ages. Vehicle. The Hennepin County property record showing where you live.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the work. The Hennepin County Property Information system and the surrounding county assessors publish parcel-level property data online. The brokers scrape directly. Cluster patterns of MPD officers in Plymouth, Maple Grove, Brooklyn Park, Coon Rapids, Andover, Ramsey, Eagan, Apple Valley, Lakeville, Champlin, Otsego, and Rogers are visible from a zip-code search inside seconds.

What Minnesota law does for you

The Minnesota Government Data Practices Act (Minn. Stat. ch. 13) classifies personnel data. Home address, telephone, and similar personal fields for public employees including law enforcement are non-public under §13.43. File the written election with the agency holding your records.

Minnesota 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). There is no state-level broker-side statute that gives sworn officers a private right of action against the data brokers themselves. The broker opt-out is the leverage point for what's already on people-search pages.

Why the Hortman case matters here

In June 2025, Vance Boelter shot four people at two Minnesota lawmakers' homes — killing State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and wounding State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. The FBI recovered a written list from his vehicle of 11 data broker websites used to find the home addresses, with notations on which were free and which charged a fee. The full incident is documented at /incidents/hortman-minnesota-lawmakers-2025.

The lookup mechanism Boelter used is the same broker pipeline that sits between an MPD officer's name and their home address today. A named-in-the-news officer is a name that lands on a broker page within hours. The chain isn't theoretical here. It's documented in federal court filings.

What still leaks

Three sources stay open for an MPD officer:

1. County property records. Hennepin, Anoka, Dakota, Ramsey, Scott, Carver, Washington — all publish online. Brokers scrape them.
2. Court records. Minnesota Trial Court Public Access (MNCIS) publishes case data 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 Minnesota's data classifications. They source from out-of-state aggregators.

Family angle

A spouse's workplace, a kid's school in Wayzata, Anoka-Hennepin, or Eagan-Apple Valley-Eastview, a parent's address two streets over — all reachable from a single Spokeo profile in five minutes.

The family runs through the same removal queue as the officer.

What we do for MPD members

Continuous sweeping across the broker landscape — including every site on the list Boelter wrote down. Re-listings handled — we re-check every two weeks and refile inside 24 hours when you reappear. After any Hennepin or surrounding county property filing, we re-check inside 30 days.

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