A federal jury last week awarded Minnesota police officer Amy Krekelberg $585,000 after colleagues unlawfully accessed her private information online.
Officers from the Minneapolis Police Department searched for Krekelberg’s photograph, address, age, height, and weight via the state’s driver’s license database, the Associated Press reported.
She suffered years of harassment and emotional distress; in at least one instance, other cops refused to provide Krekelberg with backup support, her lawyers said.
Sadly, Krekelberg is not alone: This is one of several federal lawsuits against police departments for unlawful access of a co-worker’s intimate details in driver’s license directory.
“The Minnesota case shows that without strong protections, police officers may abuse their data access—even by invading the privacy of their fellow officers, particularly women,” according to Sarah St. Vincent, US surveillance and law enforcement researcher at non-profit Human Rights Watch, who observed the trial.
“As Congress and states consider adopting stronger data protection,” she continued, “they should limit what police can do with personal information.”
Krekelberg filed her lawsuit in 2013, after receiving a notice from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, alerting her that an employee had abused his access to a government driver’s license database and snooped on thousands of people in the state—mostly women.
When she asked for an audit of accesses to her DMV records, Krekelberg learned that her information had actually been viewed nearly 1,000 times over the previous decade, Wired announced.
More than 500 of those lookups were conducted by “dozens” of other cops—many of whom searched for her in the middle of the night, the magazine said.
The invasions of privacy occurred while Krekelberg was a Minneapolis Park Police officer, and after she joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 2012.
As noted by the AP, court records show that Krekelberg reached earlier settlements with several other Minnesota communities—including St. Paul, which agreed to pay $29,500 in 2017.
Her case against the city of Minneapolis came to a close last week, when a jury awarded her $585,000. More than half of that is punitive damages from two defendants, who supposedly looked up Krekelberg’s information after she rejected their romantic advances.
“We are disappointed in this verdict, but the city takes very seriously the importance of data privacy,” Minneapolis City Attorney Susan Segal told Wired.
“We are exploring options for challenging the verdict,” she added in a statement to the AP. “The allegations in these cases involve lookups that happened many years ago, and the city and the police department in particular have taken many measures since then to make sure that we are protecting data privacy.”
Krekelberg now works a desk job.
The problem, Wired pointed out, goes beyond DMV databases: Law enforcement officials and private tech companies have abused their access to sensitive information for years, tracking people’s cell phones and spying on users without their consent.
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