University of Texas at Austin Police Department (UTPD)

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

Run a scan on a UTPD officer and the base picture matches any Texas department: full name, current address, prior addresses, vehicle, and relatives. People-search sites like Spokeo, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch scrape and resell it. Travis Central Appraisal District supplies the rest from property records: parcel, purchase price, and purchase date.

The campus wrinkle

Your employer is a university, and universities publish more about their own staff than a city government does. UT runs a public directory tied to your UT EID, the login for university systems. Depending on your directory privacy settings, it can surface your UT email, office location, and department. On its own that is work contact information. Matched against a broker hit on your home address, it becomes a full profile that starts from your name and ends at your front door.

The public Clery crime log is not the leak people assume it is. Federal law requires UT to keep a public log of campus incidents, but each entry lists the nature, date, time, general location, and disposition of a report, not the officers involved. The identity exposure, where it exists, comes from staff directories and from any university or local news coverage that happens to name command staff or officers, not from the crime log itself. How much a given officer is named in public UTPD material varies, so the risk is worth checking rather than assuming.

FERPA, the federal law that protects student education records, does not cover staff, so it will not help you here. What helps is checking your UT directory privacy settings with human resources and keeping any public-facing UTPD bio to the minimum.

What Texas law does for you

Texas Government Code §552.117 keeps a peace officer's home address, home phone number, and family information out of records released under the Texas Public Information Act. It covers current and honorably retired officers. File the written election under §552.1175 with UT's public-information office, not only with UTPD, because university HR and the department do not always share the paperwork.

Texas Tax Code §25.025 lets a peace officer restrict the home address that shows on the county appraisal roll. File Form 50-284 with Travis Central Appraisal District. Current and former officers and their spouses qualify, and the restriction holds until you rescind it in writing.

Two more programs sit in the background. The Driver's Privacy Protection Act, a federal law, limits who can pull your name and address from motor-vehicle records. The Texas Address Confidentiality Program gives a substitute address to enrolled survivors of stalking, family violence, and similar crimes, which can apply to an officer who has been targeted. Neither program binds commercial data brokers. That gap is where removal work happens.

What still leaks

1. Court records. The Travis County District Clerk publishes civil and criminal dockets online, the same as for any Austin officer.
2. Out-of-state brokers. Sites like Spokeo, Whitepages, and BeenVerified pull from national aggregators that do not apply Texas exemptions.
3. Directory settings left on default. Most new hires never change them.
4. Records already copied. Anything a broker captured before you filed an exemption can persist until it is removed directly.

Your household is on the same pages you are

A broker listing is rarely just you. These profiles group people by shared address and family ties, so the page that carries your home address usually carries the names of whoever lives there and often relatives who never did. Property records add the deed with your name on it. Anyone who looks you up by name, including a student or a member of the public who saw you on campus, reaches the same address and the same list of names. Your home and the people in it are not public property. We work the household alongside the officer, not as an afterthought.

What we do for UTPD members

We scan the broker landscape for your information, file removals where you appear, and keep checking so we can refile when you resurface. Reappearance is normal: brokers repopulate from public feeds, and a change on the Travis County appraisal roll can push your address back into circulation. We handle most of the process and tell you clearly when a site needs something only you can provide. We cannot remove the public crime log or court dockets, which stay public by law. What we can close is the commercial layer that ties your name to your address.

If UTPD or the UT System wants to offer this as a member benefit, talk to us.