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The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) recently learned that some records were accessible on the state’s public criminal history website when they should not have been. The issue that caused this error has been corrected.

The majority of the records affected were cannabis-related records that qualified for automatic expungement under the Adult Use Cannabis Act. These records were public until they were sealed in May 2024. The remaining 15 records were not public for a variety of reasons.

Criminal history records held by the BCA are kept in the Minnesota Criminal History System (CHS). A computer process copies public records from CHS to the public criminal history website.

This computer process did not function as intended, causing some records to be accessible on the public website in error.

• A total of 166 not public records were viewed on the public criminal history website.

• A total of 1,957 not public records were accessible on the public criminal history website. 1,942 were accessible May 13 – July 9. The remaining 15 records were accessible for varied amounts of time.

• 10 vendors received these records in response to data requests for all public criminal history data.

The BCA made updates to ensure that only public data is accessible on the public criminal history website. In addition, the BCA provided corrected data to all vendors that received the data and ensured that the incorrect data was destroyed. Additional safeguards are also in place to prevent this issue from occurring in the future.

The BCA will prepare a report. To receive a copy of the report, send an email to BCA.DataResponse@state.mn.us and indicate whether you want a copy sent via email ormail. Please provide the appropriate contact information.

“The BCA takes the security of data in all of our systems very seriously and regrets that this occurred,” a press release states.