Sam Stecklow for the Sahan Journal
September 24, 2025
A professional organization representing Minnesota police officers is suing a state licensing agency after the names of 257 undercover officers were disclosed to media outlets alongside other officers’ names. But research shows that all but three of them have been previously identified publicly, usually by themselves or their departments.
The police officers have LinkedIn profiles. They have photos posted by their agencies on Facebook or in press releases to celebrate promotions and drug busts. They testify in open court about their arrests. Some of them have been involved in high-profile uses of force, or have been sued for civil damages.
And all 257 of them should have their names hidden from the public, according to court filings by the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association (MPPOA).
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The data on Minnesota police employment history was sought by journalists working as a collaborative to collect police certification and employment history data across the country. The first requests were made in 2022 and 2023 by reporters with American Public Media Research Group and Invisible Institute. POST responded that it could only reproduce data kept in its own license lookup tool, which only includes the current employer of officers and not any of their previous agencies. (The MPPOA later alleged that those releases, too, included officers marked as undercover.)
The collaborative sought the assistance of Tony Webster, a local investigative journalist and law student, who filed a new request with POST seeking police employment history data and negotiated the release of the full employment history data, which POST told him had undercover officers removed. Webster then shared the data with Invisible Institute and other local journalists in Minnesota.
In January, Invisible Institute released the data on a tool called the National Police Index, which houses data from over two dozen of POST’s peer agencies around the country. Developed by Invisible Institute, Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and Innocence & Justice Louisiana, the NPI seeks employment history data from state POST agencies to track, among other questions, the issue of so-called “wandering cops” who move from department to department after committing misconduct.
After a story was published by the Star Tribune about the launch of the database in Minnesota, a police officer noticed an undercover officer was present in the data and notified the MPPOA, according to a declaration filed in court by Merrick.
In Minnesota, the POST board did not have the authority to revoke an officer’s license unless they had committed a felony or certain misdemeanors until 2023; therefore, as the Star Tribune previously reported in 2017, many officers with criminal or other misconduct histories have historically been able to maintain their licenses and find work at another agency. POST’s employment history data is the one place in the state where this information is centrally kept.
After MPPOA notified POST that the data it released to Webster included undercover officers, Invisible Institute removed it from the National Police Index, and replaced it with another file provided by POST that had the undercover officers removed. POST also requested that Invisible Institute destroy the files previously released.
Invisible Institute does not intend to publish any names of officers MPPOA claims are undercover beyond those in this story. It is not, however, under any legal obligation to destroy the data that had previously been released, and possession of the two files allowed reporters to identify the officers MPPOA claims are undercover and analyze their online presences.