Philadelphia Police Department

The Philadelphia Police Department does not appear to use any LexisNexis products directly. It has its own crime mapping system, its crash reports go through a Pennsylvania state portal (not LexisNexis), and as of late 2023 it had no online civilian crime reporting system.

However, there is an indirect pathway worth watching. When PPD arrests someone who is detained, that person goes to Philadelphia Prisons — the city’s jail system. Philadelphia Prisons connects to Pennsylvania’s statewide victim notification network, called PA SAVIN, which is operated by a private company called Appriss Insights (owned by Equifax). In other states — most notably Cook County, Illinois — Appriss has included a ‘Risk Solutions’ clause in its contracts that allows Appriss to share jail booking data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions. LexisNexis then packages that data into Accurint, which ICE has used to identify and track people for immigration enforcement.

Whether Pennsylvania’s contract with Appriss contains the same clause is not yet known. If it does, then every person booked into a Philadelphia jail — including crime victims who were themselves arrested, or witnesses detained as material witnesses — could have their information flowing to LexisNexis and from there to ICE. Philadelphia is a sanctuary city, and this would represent a direct bypass of those protections.

A public records request has been filed targeting the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD), which manages the PA SAVIN contract, to determine whether this clause exists.