Minneapolis Police Department

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

The data trail on a Minneapolis officer is predictable. Your name and current address. Prior addresses back to the academy. A spouse, parents, and the approximate ages of your kids. Your vehicle. The Hennepin County property record that shows where you live.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the assembly. Hennepin County's property information system and the surrounding county assessors publish parcel-level records online, and the brokers pull straight from them. Search a zip code where MPD officers cluster (Plymouth, Maple Grove, Brooklyn Park, Coon Rapids, Andover, Ramsey, Eagan, Apple Valley, Lakeville, Champlin, Otsego, or Rogers) and the profiles are already there.

What Minnesota law does for you

The Minnesota Government Data Practices Act (Minnesota Statutes chapter 13) classifies the personnel records that public agencies hold. Under section 13.43, a public employee's home address, phone number, and similar personal fields are private data, so the agency that keeps your file cannot release them to the public. That covers what your own department holds. It does not reach the copies data brokers have already collected.

One federal law also touches your data. The Driver's Privacy Protection Act restricts when the state can release your driver's-license and vehicle-registration records. It carries exceptions that let brokers pull driver data through permitted channels, so it slows that one source rather than closing it. We can file broker opt-outs, but we do not control what the DMV releases under those exceptions.

Minnesota has no data-broker removal statute. As of 2026 there is no state equivalent of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which lets covered officers demand that brokers take down their home address and phone number and sue if the broker refuses. In Minnesota, the broker's own opt-out process is the only lever for information already sitting on people-search pages.

Why the 2025 lawmaker attack matters here

In June 2025, Vance Boelter shot four people at the homes of two Minnesota lawmakers, killing former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and seriously wounding Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. Investigators recovered a notebook listing 11 data-broker websites, with notes on which were free and which charged a fee, along with separate lists naming dozens of public officials. Boelter pleaded guilty in federal court in June 2026. The full account is at /incidents/hortman-minnesota-lawmakers-2025.

The sites in that notebook are the same people-search pipeline that connects an MPD officer's name to a home address today. Once an officer is named in a news story, that name tends to reach a broker profile before long.

What still leaks

Even with the personnel-data classification, three channels stay open:

1. County property records: Hennepin, Anoka, Dakota, Ramsey, Scott, Carver, Washington, and Wright counties publish parcel data online, and brokers scrape it.
2. Court records: Minnesota's trial court public-access system (MNCIS) publishes case data statewide. Addresses on civil, family, and traffic filings appear unless they were redacted when the case was filed.
3. Out-of-state brokers: Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and others are not bound by Minnesota's data classifications and source from national aggregators.

Your family is in the same records

A broker profile lists the people recorded alongside you: a spouse under the same roof, an adult child at a nearby address, a parent whose house is tied to your name through an old record. Someone starting from your name does not stop at your front door. They reach the whole household. When we work a removal, your relatives go through the same process you do.

What we do for MPD members

We monitor the broker landscape continuously, including the sites named in the Boelter notebook, and we treat removal as ongoing rather than a one-time task. Brokers relist people, and county property filings feed them fresh address data, so we keep checking on a regular cycle and refile when you reappear. We handle most of the process for you; when a site needs something only you can provide, we tell you plainly.

To see what is already public on you, run a free scan.

If your precinct or the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis wants to offer this as a member benefit, talk to us.