Portland Police Bureau

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

The data trail on a Portland officer is predictable. Your name and current address. Prior addresses back to the academy. The names and approximate ages of a spouse, parents, and kids. Your vehicle. The county assessor record for your parcel.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of the collecting. The Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Columbia, and Clark (WA) county assessors publish detailed property data online: owner name, mailing address, and sale history. Brokers scrape those records directly. When officers cluster in Beaverton, Hillsboro, Tigard, Tualatin, Lake Oswego, West Linn, Gresham, Happy Valley, or across the river in Vancouver, a single zip-code search surfaces the cluster.

What Oregon law does for you

Oregon's Public Records Law (ORS Chapter 192) defaults to disclosure, then lists exceptions. Provisions in ORS 192.345 and 192.355 let an agency withhold categories of personal information, including home-address information for some public-safety employees under specific conditions. To use them, you file a written request with each agency that holds your records. Confirm the current exemption that applies to your role before you rely on it.

Oregon runs an Address Confidentiality Program (ORS 192.820 and following). It gives a substitute mailing address to survivors of domestic violence, a sexual offense, stalking, a bias crime, and human trafficking. Police officers are not eligible just for being officers.

Oregon has no data-broker removal statute. There is no state version of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, the New Jersey statute that lets covered officers demand that data brokers remove their home address and sue if the broker refuses. For information already on people-search sites, the broker opt-out is your practical lever. The federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act limits who can pull your DMV and vehicle-registration record, but it does not take existing listings off broker pages.

What still leaks

A few sources stay open for a PPB officer, even with an agency exemption on file.

1. County assessor records. Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Columbia, and Clark (WA) publish online, and brokers scrape them. An agency-side exemption does not reach the assessor unless you also file there.
2. Court records. Oregon eCourt publishes case information through OECI. Addresses in civil filings, divorce, and traffic cases appear unless they were redacted when filed.
3. Out-of-state brokers. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and similar sites are not bound by Oregon's agency exemptions. They pull from national aggregators.

Why the protest angle matters here

Portland has seen sustained protest activity for years, and PPB officers are regularly named in news coverage, on social media, and on activist sites. A name in an article can surface on a broker page quickly. The address attached to that profile is frequently in Vancouver, Hillsboro, or Happy Valley rather than inside the city.

A broker profile does not stop at you. It lists the people tied to your address: a spouse, an adult child, a parent who once lived there. Each of those names carries its own address history and, sometimes, its own workplace. Someone who cannot reach you directly can work through the people connected to you. Family members go through the same removal process you do.

What we do for PPB members

We scan the people-search and broker sites continuously and file the standard opt-outs for each one. We keep checking, because listings come back, and we refile when your information reappears. We also watch for new records after assessor updates in Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Columbia, and Clark (WA). We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something only you can provide.

If your precinct or the Portland Police Association wants to offer this as a member benefit, reach out.