Undercover Minnesota officers suing oversight board have public LinkedIns, discipline and shootings

This story is being co-published by Sahan Journal and Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization in Chicago. Sign up for Invisible Institute’s newsletter The View from the Ground here.

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). 

That’s because one of their employing agencies, at one point, told the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) that the officers were serving in an undercover capacity. According to the MPPOA, that designation means that any information identifying the officers — including basic information like their names and employers that doesn’t otherwise reveal them to be undercover officers — is exempt from public disclosure under Minnesota law. In its lawsuit, the MPPOA is using the release of this data to argue for more restricted access to disciplinary files, and potentially broader swaths of data containing the names of officers.

The dispute arose after media outlets and investigative journalists pushed POST to release licensing and employment data on the thousands of officers whom the agency has issued a license to over the years. Even though POST explicitly said in its release the data did not include undercover officers; the MPPOA later notified POST that 257 officers included in the data were labeled as working in an undercover capacity, and should not have been identified.

This ignited a legal battle, with the MPPOA filing a class action lawsuit to prevent POST from releasing further data even though a review by the Invisible Institute shows that most of those officers have already been identified publicly through their own social media posts, through their employers, or in publicly-accessible court records.

A ruling by a Ramsey County judge in the MPPOA’s favor “threatens immediate, irreparable harm” to the public and media’s ability to access essential data on police in Minnesota, according to attorneys for a coalition of news organizations, which includes Invisible Institute.

One officer whose name was released has “reported a ‘hit’ placed for him since his identity as an Undercover Law Enforcement Officer was disclosed by the POST Board,” the MPPOA’s class action lawsuit claims without providing further detail. Another described the release of a spreadsheet showing licensed Minnesota police officers’ names and employers as “an absolute slap in the face” causing him “a lack of sleep and concern for safety.”

However, all but three of the 257, according to a review by Invisible Institute, had information available online linking their given name with being a police officer in Minnesota before the release of the POST data.

The public profiles of each of the 257 officers the MPPOA claims are undercover show a wide variety of information. Some of the officers maintain easy-to-locate public profiles containing their names and employers. Others have appeared in news clippings or press releases being praised as an officer of the year, or for testifying in court. Still others have detailed, easily accessible state or federal court records outlining their work in a particular case.

Experts raised concerns about the arguments made by the MPPOA.

“It’s not the fact that this person by this name is a police officer that’s really the crux of whether they’re going to be effective undercover,” said University of St. Thomas law professor Rachel Moran. “If this were used to prevent disclosure of anyone who has ever been undercover, that’s very problematic. When you’re balancing privacy rights versus public interest, if you are framing it too heavily in favor of privacy that doesn’t really have a valid justification when you get down to the details — that’s where my concern comes in.”

Who are the 257 officers?

Undercover officers, according to MPPOA, include:

• Former Albert Lea officer Jesus Cantu, who killed Joseph Roberts while responding to a mental health crisis call in 2019, and has a public LinkedIn profile.
• Former St. Paul officer Kevin Sullivan, whose beating of a man with a flashlight in 2012 resulted in a $95,000 settlement, and who is now, according to his LinkedIn, an insurance investigator.
• Two officers who are still active in local law enforcement — one of whom committed a high-profile fatal shooting in a Minneapolis suburb that was the subject of a civil lawsuit and protests, and another in southwest Minnesota who was sued for beating a man during a traffic stop, resulting in news coverage of the five-digit settlement. Both officers’ current jobs are publicly available in simple online searches of federal court records or municipal websites. 

Outside of officers involved in high-profile uses of force or accused of misconduct, the 257 also include high-ranking officials like Bridget Roddy, who is now the assistant special agent in charge for alcohol complaints of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Alcohol and Gambling Enforcement, and whose contact information is listed on a state website under a heading reading “Connect with our team.” 

They include a Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office sergeant who last year signed his name and position to a public letter supporting the nomination of a federal judge. They even include a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension special agent who appears on public webpages as leading “search and seizure” training sessions for an undercover drug investigation program put on by the Minnesota County Attorneys Association.

The MPPOA argues that each of these officers are undercover because their agencies notified POST as such, and their identities should be hidden from publicly released data until that designation changes.

One undercover officer used his work as a supervisor of undercover officers on a sex trafficking task force to groom and harass a younger female officer, she later alleged in a lawsuit. In a lawsuit filed in 2023, Isabella Curtis, a former Washington County sheriff’s deputy, alleged that her sergeant, Keith Anderson, sexually harassed and groomed her during her time on the task force, culminating in a text he sent that read, “I’m into you.” 

Anderson claimed during his deposition for the case that Curtis sent him provocative photos before his confession that could not have been for purposes of the task force. In an affidavit, she stated that she only ever took and sent supervisors photos for use on the task force. In her undercover role, she would take photos for posts on online forums used by sex workers or sex traffickers.

“When we were talking, I didn’t understand what was happening and the grooming that was happening while it was happening, because it was manipulation,” she said in her deposition. “I wish I would have understood what was happening. Obviously, like, I don’t feel great about it. That’s the stuff that we investigate people to do. That’s the stuff that he specifically investigates people to do and he did it himself.”

An internal investigation found that Anderson had violated department policy, but he retired before it could become official and suffered no other consequences, Curtis said.

“I thought that by reporting it, that nothing would happen to my career. I thought there wouldn’t be consequences for me. And what I got was his … photo taken off the wall, and I’ve been dealing with it every day since then,” she said in her deposition.

Court records show that supervisors denied her the ability to continue working as an undercover officer after her work under Anderson ended, and she is not present in the 257 undercover officers in the lawsuit. She resigned from the sheriff’s office in 2023 and was hired by the FBI.

Anderson said in his deposition that he is not interested in continuing to work in law enforcement, and is currently facing the loss of his POST-issued license. A hearing on his POST license is scheduled for October. In April, a Wright County judge dismissed Curtis’s lawsuit, finding that the county had acted appropriately by investigating Anderson after her allegations were made.

In 2015, the Star Tribune reported on undercover Minneapolis police officers suing the city after their names became public due to their misconduct during sex work sting operations. “That provision can be abused in a way to conceal or cover up improprieties that the public through the media has a legitimate right to know,” employment law attorney Marshall Tanick told the newspaper. 

Jeffrey Dean, an attorney representing one of the victims of the sex work sting said the officers’ lawsuit made no sense to him: “The officer took the witness stand and without hesitation, in open court, stated his full name and occupation as an undercover police officer.”

In a statement, Cassandra Merrick, an attorney with the MADEL PA law firm representing the MPPOA, threatened legal action if the names of officers were published in association with the fact they had once been labeled as undercover. 

“We intend to take immediate action if you further publish the names of undercover officers,” she wrote, providing a copy of a January temporary restraining order that only bears on POST, not any other party. “It is befuddling that the Invisible Institute would double down on the release of personal information about undercover officers that it already published once (in a downloadable format that can never be fully remedied). This action risks lives and disrupts work that is both extraordinarily complex and critically important to community safety.

“While some officers may have some information online about them today or at different points in time, that is due to nuances in undercover policing assignments. What is true today may not have been true a year, two years, or more ago,” she wrote, adding that naming the officers opens them to “easy searching and targeting by very dangerous people.”

Merrick’s statement is partially reproduced at the bottom of this story.

Jane Kirtley, a journalism and law professor who directs the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota, identified the MPPOA’s legal threats as a form of attempted “prior restraint,” preventing news outlets from publishing information legally obtained. 

“Prior restraints are presumed to be unconstitutional. The entity seeking to stop publication carries the burden of justifying it,” she wrote in an email, noting she was speaking generally. “If information is already in the public domain, even if it is labor-intensive to retrieve it, it is very unlikely that an order prohibiting its further dissemination would be valid. And the public interest in knowing the information might outweigh any countervailing government interest in keeping it secret.”

Invisible Institute and Sahan Journal are publishing the names of a small number of the 257 officers in question — just four — as illustrative examples of the public profiles present for nearly all of these officers online. These particular officers are either in senior public-facing roles in which they solicit public contact, were involved in high-profile uses of force, or have been credibly and publicly accused of misconduct in a previous forum. 

Data sought to track ‘wandering cops’

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.

A restraining order

In January, shortly after the MPPOA’s lawsuit was filed, both sides agreed to a temporary restraining order signed by Ramsey County Judge Leonardo Castro that temporarily blocks the further release of undercover officer names. However, according to experts, the restraining order is worded in a vague and broad way — blocking the “dissemination of data,” not just data about undercover officers — that could potentially threaten the release of a much wider range of police records. In June, the judge issued another order siding with MPPOA arguments that could additionally limit public access to many POST disciplinary records.

The combination of the vague January restraining order with the June order “threatens immediate, irreparable harm” to reporters and the public, attorneys for the news media coalition write. They warn that access to POST’s data on all officers — not just those labeled as undercover — could be put at risk.

“Unless and until the district court’s decision is reversed (and the temporary injunction vacated), the plain language of the order purports to prohibit the POST Board from disseminating any data whatsoever to the press and public,” the media attorneys write. 

They note that POST has interpreted the January order as only blocking the release of information on undercover officers and continues to release other data, but “nonetheless, the language of the order stands.”

Leita Walker, an attorney with Ballard Spahr representing the media coalition, said in an interview that Invisible Institute’s findings show that local law enforcement agencies did not take the undercover designation as seriously as required, and that “if the district court’s [June] order stands, there’s potential for a couple things to happen.”

For one thing, Minnesota POST could make arguments similar to those made by police licensing bodies in other states and say that the potential presence of undercover officers in its data means that it will refuse to release data identifying any officers going forward and “really clamp down on what’s publicly accessible,” she said. 

Another possibility is that POST stops accepting department notices that their officers are undercover so they don’t inadvertently disclose this data — “a decision that would create an adversarial relationship between the POST board and individual agencies to the potential detriment of bona fide concerns for officer safety,” she said.

The June order, which could be read to conclude that POST data should be subject to the same access rules as disciplinary records of local police departments, could also mean that officers who are decertified by POST, cannot have any of their disciplinary records released — from POST or their employing agency — if they had first resigned from their agency before being fired.

What does it mean to be undercover?

Beyond the specific legal classifications of POST’s data, policing experts around the country were split when consulted by Invisible Institute on the question of whether the release of names of officers who may serve, or have served, in an undercover capacity — without any additional information identifying them as such — would put them in harm’s way, as claimed by the MPPOA.

Some organized criminal groups, like motorcycle gangs, will hire “private detectives and lawyers to help them do background checks on prospective members precisely because they want to find out if they’re undercover agents,” and the release of public employment data makes it more likely that undercover officers working to infiltrate such groups could be exposed — even though officers aren’t “supposed to be giving their real name” if they’re working in an undercover capacity, said Jacqueline Ross, a former federal prosecutor. 

“But it can happen that their real name comes out, and then the question is, if the real name comes out, say because a car can be traced to them, they can be traced to an address in which somebody by their name owns property,” continued Ross, who is now a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law professor working on a book comparing undercover policing in the U.S. and several European countries. “The problem is, there are lots of ways to get somebody’s real name now through public records.”

She conceded that criminal group infiltration is a “much more rare” form of local undercover policing than officers making low-level drug buy-busts or sex work stings, “but a lot of police departments do it, and people who may do infiltration have previously done buy-busts and have previously gone undercover sex crimes investigations.… Even if, right now, he’s undercover doing drug buy-busts, that doesn’t mean he isn’t undercover doing something more sophisticated at a later time.”

Dorothy Moses Schulz, a former New York transit police captain who has written about the need to regulate “wandering cops” for the conservative Manhattan Institute, said in an interview that the variation in U.S. police departments makes it difficult to make a determination. 

“Some agencies are more professional… They’re trained, highly trained. In other cases, they’re not so highly trained,” she said. “So it’s almost impossible to comment, because you’ve got 18,000 agencies deciding how they’re going to make these decisions.”

But several former police chiefs pushed back on the idea that the kind of undercover policing work that would necessitate such secrecy is still ongoing at local police departments in the U.S. 

“The days of true undercover officers, that are undercover for years and embedded in some criminal organization, have just gone by the wayside. That doesn’t happen anymore,” said Chris Burbank, a former longtime Salt Lake City police chief. “Undercover in most police across the country, we are working in plainclothes assignment in a narcotics situation, and go out every once in a while and just pretend to be someone else to buy narcotics. So there’s not the deep undercover situations.”

RaShall Brackney, a former Charlottesville, Va., police chief who did away with that department’s plainclothes unit during her tenure, made a similar point. 

“If I’m undercover at some point, I’m out in the community. I’m making an arrest. I’m going to court,” she said. The same argument about harm to undercover officers made by MPPOA “has always been out there,” said Brackney, who also previously supervised undercover officers while a commander with the Pittsburgh police. “We’ve yet to find statistics where that has occurred.”

Chris Magnus, who led the police departments in Tucson, Fargo, ND, and Richmond, CA, said in an interview that he found arguments about the presence of potentially undercover-serving officers in large datasets to be “a bit of a red herring.” 

“Whether police officers like it or not — and I understand why they wouldn’t like it — the reality is that [if] somebody’s really determined to figure out where they work, where they live, et cetera, that they’re probably going to be able to do it. And so should this be a way that bad officers are protected?” he said.  “I don’t think so.”

Moran, the University of St. Thomas law professor, conducted a survey in 2020 of police administrators about their opinions on the release of records showing misconduct by their officers. She said the only times chiefs raised issues about the names of officers was in the context of a small town where most people know each other. 

“It came up in a concern, not in the sense of any experiences that administrators actually had where disclosing names associated with misconduct data had caused any actual harm to officers,” Moran said. “But even in those conversations, it was always names associated with [misconduct] information, not just straight up, here’s a name of somebody who’s an officer.”

The director of Massachusetts’ POST agency — which, like Minnesota, publishes a database of certified law enforcement officers in the state — said that when his agency had considered publishing basic employment data on officers who may serve undercover at some point, it came away deciding in favor of disclosure. 

“I’m sympathetic to the point that there could be use of technology and to try to look at faces and from other sources and who knows, social media and things like that,” said Enrique Zuniga, the executive director of Massachusetts POST, in an interview with Invisible Institute. “That may represent a risk, but practically, it’s not been my experience that this has surfaced as a major concern in the stuff that we’re doing.”

Similar arguments to the MPPOA’s about the potential exposure of undercover officers have led some other state POSTs to withhold data on all licensed or certified law enforcement officers in a state, and some local agencies to argue that any of their officers serving in a capacity under a lieutenant or captain’s rank could go undercover at essentially any time, and therefore their names should all be withheld from rosters.

Across the country, some state and local agencies have made claims similar to the MPPOA’s to argue that the identities of wide swaths of law enforcement officers should be kept secret because undercover officers could be inadvertently disclosed, or officers could be prevented from working undercover in the future. Courts and other appeals bodies considering those claims, as the Minnesota Court of Appeals is now, have been split: in Utah and Virginia, in favor of disclosure, but in Pennsylvania, against it. Other cases considering the question are pending in New York and Wisconsin.

In one of the earliest cases, from 2007, the California Supreme Court ruled that employment data held by that state’s POST should be released, but that concerns about the presence of potentially undercover officers within the data requires the POST to consult with police chiefs about officers who should be removed from the data each time it is requested. Even so, those concerns “were not fully explored” at the lower court level, the Supreme Court wrote, and therefore “it is not clear whether the records… contain information that might threaten to reveal the identities of undercover officers.” 

Relatedly, last year, the city of Los Angeles walked back claims that hundreds of officers that it had inadvertently released headshots of were undercover and had their lives put at risk by the release of the photos. After being sued by a police union that used a more expansive definition of “undercover,” the city had tried to claw back the release of the photos by then suing the independent journalist it had provided the headshots to, before ultimately settling with him. 
“It’s important to remember that the LAPD did not submit a single piece of evidence that any officers were harmed by the disclosure of these photographs,” an attorney representing the journalist told the LA Times. “This was never about officers being harmed by disclosure of their photos. It was always about officers being mad that they be held accountable for their actions.”

Sam Stecklow is an investigative journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Follow him on Bluesky at @samstecklow.bsky.social.