Tacoma Police Department

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

Run a scan on almost any Tacoma officer and the same profile comes up: full name, current address, prior addresses back to your academy days, spouse and relatives, kids' approximate ages, your vehicle, and the county property record that ties it all to your house.

Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch do most of that work. Pierce, King, Thurston, and Kitsap county assessors publish detailed property data online, including owner name, mailing address, and sale history. The brokers copy it. A single zip-code search can surface clusters of officers living in University Place, Gig Harbor, Puyallup, Sumner, Bonney Lake, Lakewood, Lacey, Olympia, and Bremerton.

What Washington law does for you

Washington's Public Records Act (RCW 42.56) starts from the assumption that records are public. Two provisions matter for an officer.

RCW 42.56.250 lets a public agency withhold a public employee's home address, personal phone numbers, and personal email from the records it holds. That covers law enforcement. You file it with your agency, and it applies to agency-held records. It does not reach the county assessor or a private data broker.

Washington's Address Confidentiality Program (RCW 40.24) gives a substitute mailing address to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and trafficking, plus certain election workers. Officers are not eligible on the basis of the job alone.

Washington has no broker-removal statute. It has no equivalent of New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which lets covered officers demand that a data broker take down their home address and phone number. In Washington, the broker opt-out process is your main lever for what people-search sites already show.

What still leaks

Three sources stay open even after you file every agency exemption you can.

1. County assessor records: Pierce, King, Thurston, and Kitsap publish parcel data online, and brokers copy it directly. The RCW 42.56.250 exemption does not reach the assessor. Ask the assessor's office separately about any address-protection option it offers.
2. Court records: Washington's courts make many case records searchable online. Civil filings, divorce, and traffic cases can show an address unless it was redacted when filed.
3. Out-of-state brokers: Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and similar sites operate outside Washington and pull from national aggregators. Washington's personnel exemption does not bind them.

Why your family shows up too

Property and people-search records do not stop at your name. The same profile lists the people connected to your address: a spouse, kids, a relative who co-signed or lives nearby. Joint Base Lewis-McChord concentrates officers and their families in the same South Sound suburbs. The same neighborhoods and school districts surface on scan after scan, from Puyallup to Sumner-Bonney Lake to Peninsula. Once a stranger has your street, the surrounding details fall into place quickly, because officers cluster year after year and the records all sit in one place.

The doxxing risk is not hypothetical here. In August 2020, protesters located Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best's home in Snohomish County and gathered outside it, and she asked the city council to intervene. For regional context, see our Seattle PD page. An officer's name in local news coverage can be matched to a home address on the broker sites that copy these public records.

What we do for Tacoma PD members

We scan the people-search and data-broker sites for your information, file opt-out and removal requests on the listings we find, and keep checking, because these sites repost. When a listing comes back, we file again. We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something from you, such as an ID to verify a request.

We cannot remove what Washington law keeps public. The county property record and court filings stay where they are. What we can control is the broker layer that copies those records and sells them to anyone who pays.

If your precinct or Tacoma Police Union Local 6 wants to offer this to members, talk to us.