ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — A St. Louis County police officer has been charged with five misdemeanors after police say she illegally used police databases to look up information about 17 other officers.
St. Louis County prosecutors charged Amy Loftus, 38, with five counts of misuse of official information by a public servant Monday.
St. Louis County police officers were “alerted” in April 2020 that Loftus had used the Regional Justice Information Service or REJIS to look up “sensitive and restricted information” about another police officer, according to court documents.
Her department then discovered she conducted 17 searches of fellow officers and one search of her mother between January and April 2020. Each of those searches included the Missouri Uniform Law Enforcement System or MULES database, according to the documents.
Loftus told St. Louis County investigators she was curious about whether one of the officers in question was older than she was, but that “is not a purpose in connection with her official duties or the performance of her job,” according to court documents.
St. Louis County detectives also interviewed the officers whose names were searched, and only one of them had a potential work-related reason why Loftus would have searched his name in connection with her official duties, according to the documents. The documents do not say what that reason could be.
As part of Loftus’s training and employment, she signed forms acknowledging that she knew that accessing such databases for personal use was impermissible and constituted a potential criminal violation.
St. Louis County police spokesman Sgt. Ben Granda said Loftus worked for the department starting in 2017 and ending last month. He said her last day was Dec. 8.
Granda did not comment on the charges.
There was no attorney listed for Loftus in online court records.
Editor’s Note: The mother of the officer charged is a non-news employee of KSDK.
