Police group sues state over release of undercover officers’ names

An organization that represents police across Minnesota is suing the state for releasing private information about undercover officers.

In August, the Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training sent independent journalist Tony Webster police licensing information in response to his data request, but the POST Board failed to remove the names of officers who work undercover.

In a lawsuit filed this week, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association alleges that the POST Board made public the names of 257 officers whose identities are considered private under the state’s Data Practices Act. MPPOA argues that the data release puts the officers at significant risk and could jeopardize investigations.

“I cannot understate the harm that would come if these undercover police officers’ identities are publicly disclosed — or even the fact of this disclosure becomes publicly known,” writes David Titus, MPPOA deputy director, in an affidavit filed along with the lawsuit.

“These undercover police officers serve in dangerous situations and if it becomes known that they are in fact working undercover, the targets of those investigations could retaliate or cause them harm. The investigations these officers are working on could also be prejudiced or completely undermined by this disclosure,” Titus said in the affidavit.

Erik Misselt, POST Board executive director, said once they were aware of the issue, the board notified Webster and other recipients and requested the data be destroyed.

“The POST Board also promptly notified all affected officers and their Chief Law Enforcement Officers of the incident and the POST Board’s steps to stop any further dissemination of the data. There were approximately 49,000 officers listed in the response and the dataset did not directly reveal or indicate those officers’ statuses as undercover. The POST Board recognizes the sensitivity of this issue. POST has been and will continue to work diligently to address and resolve concerns in connection with this incident,” Misselt wrote in an email to MPR News.

On his website, Webster writes that in August the agency “explicitly told me that they had removed undercover officers from the dataset,” and only informed him about the error on Tuesday.

“On January 21, 2025 — almost five months after the State gave me the data — I woke up to an email from the Minnesota POST Board director. I immediately got on the phone with him, and he told me that he had inadvertently sent me data identifying every undercover officer in the state,” Webster writes.

Webster said that he took the data offline but added that it had already been sent to news organizations and is “likely distributed beyond any assurance of effective recall.”

He added that the figure of 257 undercover officers may be inaccurate because many whom the Post Board identified this week as undercover “are publicly identified on government websites as police officers, and even maintain public LinkedIn pages identifying them as police officers.”

Webster said that he requested the data to investigate “traveling officers” with disciplinary records who move between law enforcement agencies frequently. The Illinois-based Invisible Institute published the information on its database of police employment information.

In an email to MPR News on Wednesday evening, the group said it removed the data that had included the undercover officers and replaced it with a new dataset that the POST Board provided.

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