Maplewood PD (MN) — May 2026 email thread in which the department forwarded a Data Practices Act request to LexisNexis and asked the company how to respond, and LexisNexis answered that records it holds are not producible and that it would determine redactions
Agency: Maplewood Police Department
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About this document
Email from Brian Burson, Central Regional Account Manager for State and Local Government / Public Safety at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, to Lt. Michael Hoemke of the Maplewood Police Department, concerning how Maplewood should handle a records request touching LexisNexis material. Burson is the same account manager named on Maplewood's 2025 AVCC Schedule A and on the April 2026 invoice.
Burson makes three assertions. First, that LexisNexis cannot advise a customer on how to comply with its own legal obligations. Second, that documents held by LexisNexis rather than by the agency are "not producible by LexisNexis since LexisNexis would not be covered under the standard public records request." Third, that where the agency holds documents LexisNexis drafted or that contain LexisNexis intellectual property, the company would want confidential material redacted, and that "would need to be determined by LexisNexis technical."
The second and third assertions sit uneasily with Minnesota law. Minn. Stat. Sec. 13.05, subd. 11 subjects a private contractor performing a government function to chapter 13 as if it were a government entity, and subd. 11(b) allows public data requests to go to the contractor precisely when the data are not available from the agency. Separately, the determination of whether data qualify as trade secret information under Sec. 13.37 belongs to the government entity, not to the vendor asserting the claim. Detailed analysis is in Analyst Notes.
The document's significance is not the legal argument itself but that it exists. It records a surveillance vendor communicating with a police department about the scope of that department's response to a public records request concerning the vendor.
No date is visible on the email as supplied.
Key language
On the scope of the agency's obligation: "From our perspective, my legal team advised that we cannot tell a customer how to comply with its obligations in responding to a document request under applicable law." On documents held by LexisNexis: "We can advise that if the requested documents are not in the customers possession but in LexisNexis's possession our view is that they are not producible by LexisNexis since LexisNexis would not be covered under the standard public records request." On redaction: "If these documents are in the possession of the customer and they are documents that LexisNexis has drafted or they contain LexisNexis intellectual property we would want to then make certain any confidential LexisNexis intellectual property is redacted when or if the requested documents are produced. That would need to be determined by LexisNexis technical." (Quoted verbatim from the email as supplied, including original punctuation and the missing apostrophe in "customers possession.")