Frequently asked questions

The Accurint Files is a collection of documents, datasets and reporting on one of the largest pipelines of local police data in the country. Records move from police departments into private data broker databases, and from there to ICE and other federal agencies.

It started as a single article. Tips, research and public records requests kept showing that local data sharing was far broader than previously known, so the project grew to track it. The agency directory, the data explorer, the document library and how it works are good places to start.

LexisNexis is one of the largest data brokers in the United States. Accurint is one of its products, a lookup tool that builds detailed dossiers on individual people in the U.S. Banks, private investigators, law firms, accountants and police departments all buy access.

An Accurint report can include a person’s name, Social Security number, date of birth, past addresses, social media accounts, voter registration, firearms and hunting permits, professional licenses, records from utility providers, and much more.

AVCC is an Accurint dashboard for law enforcement. It is also at the center of the controversy over how local police data is shared and used for immigration enforcement.

Behind it is a shared database, sometimes called the Public Safety Data Exchange (PSDEX), with hundreds of millions of records from police departments across the country. The records include details and narratives about crime victims, witnesses, 911 callers and bystanders, and link them (sometimes along with their vehicles) to a crime and the person accused of it.

ICE and other federal agencies pay for access to AVCC. That gives immigration authorities a way into local police records, sometimes around sanctuary laws written to keep them out of sensitive records about crime victims and 911 callers. More in how it works.

Despite its name, PSDEX is a private database owned and run by the data broker LexisNexis. It holds hundreds of millions of records from local police departments across the country, including details about victims, witnesses and 911 calls.

Police departments get into it by signing a contract that lets LexisNexis copy their local records into the database. LexisNexis then sells access to ICE and other federal agencies. In August 2026 ICE awarded LexisNexis a new sole-source contract that sends this data into Palantir, 404 Media reported.

It means LexisNexis keeps the right to use a city’s police data even after the contract ends.

The clause is in the AVCC XML Addendum, usually Section II.1, and grants LexisNexis an “irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license” to the records an agency contributes. Ending the contract stops new uploads. Records already contributed stay with LexisNexis unless the city asks in writing for them to be removed (Section II.6 in the addenda we’ve reviewed), and anything LexisNexis has already built from them stays either way. More in how it works.

Yes, though records already copied stay with LexisNexis (see the irrevocable license question above).

Agencies that sign the AVCC XML Addendum agree to let LexisNexis copy their records on a regular schedule. An agency stops contributing by ending the contract or changing it, and it doesn’t have to give up the search tool to do that. LexisNexis offers a version of the addendum titled “NO DATA CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSDEX.” Officers keep full access to Accurint, and none of the department’s records are copied into the database. Duluth, Minnesota signed that version in 2020.

Where residents have pushed to keep local data local, councils have used these options. Oklahoma City approved its 2026 renewal with an amendment restricting who can see its data. Agencies that search without contributing show up as “Reader Only” in our agency directory, and our guide for council members covers how to ask for it.

Check our agency directory first. Each agency has a confirmation status based on the documents we have, such as a signed data-contribution addendum, an order form or council records. The data explorer lists every agency in a publicly accessible dataset maintained by LexisNexis, with the date of its last upload and whether that feed also reaches the Accurint Virtual Crime Center.

An agency missing from the directory may still share. Usually it means nobody has asked yet. Check the county too. Jail booking records often go to LexisNexis from the sheriff rather than city police, and some cities join through a county-led consortium where the lead agency holds the contract.

To know for sure, ask for the paperwork:

• The LexisNexis contract and any “AVCC XML Addendum” or data contribution addendum
• Schedule A, the order form, which lists products such as “Accurint Virtual Crime Center” or “Database Interface”
• Twelve months of invoices from LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Our FOIA Builder writes that request for you, or you can ask us to file it.

Not necessarily. Records can leave a department without anything on paper called “data sharing,” so the answer can be sincere and still wrong. Some common ways it happens:

• Some records systems (CentralSquare and LETG, for example) turn on a LexisNexis feed through a “Database Interface” module, and Motorola has bundled contribution into an analytics tier. See how the contracts work.
• Online police-report portals and crash-report sites run by LexisNexis Coplogic are under separate contracts from the main Accurint order.
• The sheriff or jail may send booking records to LexisNexis or to a victim-notification vendor, under a contract the city never signed.
• A county or regional body can hold the master contract, with your department signing a shorter joinder agreement.
• Government systems like the FBI’s N-DEx or a regional records-sharing network aren’t companies, but records still leave the department, and federal agencies can search some of them.
• Flock and other license plate camera networks can make your city’s plate reads searchable by agencies around the country, depending on one sharing setting.

Ask a broader question instead: does any system the department uses send records to anyone outside the department, under what agreement, and who can search them? A request for twelve months of payments to technology vendors also shows what the department actually buys.

Yes. Under LexisNexis’s standard contract terms, both the police reports residents file online through its DORS portal and the crash reports it sells through BuyCrash can travel well beyond the department that took them.

Crash reports are sold. In a 2023 San Diego contract, the city gives LexisNexis “the sole and exclusive right to sell the Agency’s crash reports online and to distribute data extracted from the Reports” through BuyCrash. Other LexisNexis companies can buy those reports and resell them, or data pulled from them, and the contract says those companies “shall not be bound” by the city’s agreement. LexisNexis can also sell pieces of a report, such as a vehicle’s VIN.

Online police reports travel two ways. Once an officer approves a report filed through DORS, it is exported into the department’s records system and goes wherever those records go, including to LexisNexis if the department contributes. The standard DORS order also says LexisNexis “shall provide Report distribution services… including an on-line Report distribution website such as LexisNexis BuyCrash.com,” and the standard agreement has the agency “allow access to Agency’s Reports by Participating Agencies” in exchange for access to theirs.

The reason is the business model. San Diego’s order grants the right to sell crash reports “in exchange for the Services provided to Agency,” and LexisNexis pays the agency a fee for each report it sells.

The reports go to people involved in a crash and their insurers and lawyers, to other law enforcement agencies that use the service, and to other LexisNexis companies.

Terms vary by city. A 2022 DORS order prepared for Kyle, Texas says LexisNexis “shall not be permitted to distribute or sell Reports received pursuant to this Order.” Seattle’s Inspector General found.pdf) the city’s own contract terms bar LexisNexis from using its reports for anything beyond the service, though they set no limit on how long LexisNexis keeps them. We haven’t found documents showing these reports go directly into Accurint or PSDEX.

To see what your city agreed to, request its complete Coplogic agreement and order forms, and the monthly report LexisNexis provides showing how many reports it sold on the city’s behalf.

IAFIS was the FBI’s national fingerprint system. The FBI replaced it with Next Generation Identification (NGI) in September 2014. FBI rules limit who can touch that data. A private contractor can handle it only under a written security addendum, and only for the job it was hired to do.

We haven’t found any evidence that FBI or state fingerprint records go to LexisNexis. Two related things do happen.

Jails can send booking records, including mugshots, to LexisNexis through a separate feed. LexisNexis advertises more than 140 million booking records and 38 million offender images in a jail booking search available through the Virtual Crime Center.

Booking fingerprints also reach immigration authorities, through the FBI rather than LexisNexis. The next question explains how.

To check your county, request the jail’s agreements with LexisNexis and any booking-data vendor, and look for a “Jail Booking Search and Report” line on the LexisNexis order form.

Usually in one of two ways, and both work in sanctuary jurisdictions.

The first is fingerprints. When someone is booked into a jail, their fingerprints go to the FBI, and the FBI’s system sends a copy to the Department of Homeland Security to be checked against immigration records at the same time. If there’s a match, ICE gets a notice and can ask the jail to hold the person. ICE’s own procedures describe the link between the two systems. A sanctuary policy can stop a jail from honoring ICE’s request, but it doesn’t stop the fingerprint check.

The second is jail data sold through private companies. Appriss runs VINE, the system many jails use to notify crime victims when someone is booked or released. Equifax bought Appriss’s data business, Appriss Insights, in 2021 for $1.825 billion. ICE’s LexisNexis contract was expanded that year to add real-time incarceration data from Appriss.

Cook County, Illinois shows how this works. The sheriff has sent real-time booking and release data to Appriss since 2015. A clause in the contract lets Appriss share that data with other companies, including LexisNexis, which packages it into Accurint, the database ICE pays to search. Advocates call it a digital loophole in the county’s 2011 sanctuary ordinance. According to the State’s Attorney’s Office, Equifax warned that cutting off ICE’s access could raise the contract price, Borderless Magazine reported.

An ICE officer’s sworn statement shows how fast it can move. In a 2025 Illinois case, he found a man by searching St. Clair County jail bookings in the Accurint Virtual Crime Center the day after Belleville police arrested him. The filing doesn’t say how those bookings reach LexisNexis. Read the affidavit.

To check your county, ask the sheriff or jail for its VINE or Appriss contract, and look for language that lets the vendor share data with other companies.

Victims, witnesses and 911 callers are all included. Their records carry personal details, locations, and descriptions such as ethnicity, height and weight: anything police collect while responding to a crime, a medical call or any other interaction.

See what a single record looks like in inside a report, or follow one through the system in the 911 witness scenario.

We haven’t heard of anyone who has been able to see their own records in AVCC or PSDEX, or get them removed. LexisNexis’s position is that the data belongs to the police and the company is only holding it, even though its records are a copy of the originals, stored in its own private database.

The LexisNexis consumer opt-out doesn’t help here. It covers the company’s consumer products, and police data isn’t part of it.

Ask anyway. Request in writing that LexisNexis and your police department remove your information from AVCC and PSDEX, and send us what you hear back at tips@fineprint.report.

Probably not directly, but its records may still get there. Local sanctuary policies usually cover the direct routes: a 287(g) agreement, holding people on ICE detainers, or telling ICE when someone will be released. They usually don’t cover these:

• Fingerprints taken at a jail booking go to the FBI, which automatically checks them against the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration records.
• ICE has paid for Accurint and the Virtual Crime Center since at least 2021, and ran more than 1.2 million Accurint searches in seven months that year. In August 2026 it awarded a new sole-source contract that feeds LexisNexis data into Palantir. More on the ICE contracts.
• Federal agents, including ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, could search the CrimeTracer police network in Massachusetts until 2023.
• Local officers have run license plate searches on ICE’s behalf (see the Flock question below).

In Illinois, the trail is on the record. In a 2025 federal court filing, an ICE deportation officer swore he found a man by searching St. Clair County jail bookings on LexisNexis, and that “these jail bookings are part of the Accurint Virtual Crime Center data base used by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations.” Belleville police had arrested the man the day before. Read the affidavit.

Reporters have traced other Illinois deportations to local records. An Injustice Watch and Capitol News Illinois investigation found at least 150 people affected, through officers emailing records to ICE agents and booking fingerprints shared automatically, and ABC7 Chicago tied one man’s ICE arrest to fingerprints taken at a Chicago traffic stop.

To check your city, look it up in the agency directory and the data explorer, see whether your county is on ICE’s list of 287(g) agreements, and ask the department which outside systems receive its records and whether its plate cameras share data nationally. For those requests, start with MuckRock’s quick-start guide to reporting on ICE with public records.

Most sanctuary laws regulate what local officials do. They don’t address what a private vendor does with records it already holds.

A typical sanctuary policy tells police not to ask about immigration status, not to hold people on ICE detainers, and not to help with immigration enforcement. A LexisNexis contract doesn’t trigger any of those. The department sends its records to a private company under a license, often an irrevocable one, and LexisNexis sells access to ICE under a separate federal contract the city isn’t party to. On paper, no local official ever shares anything with ICE. We call that gap a sanctuary bypass.

Cook County, Illinois is the clearest example. Its jail bookings reach LexisNexis through a victim-notification vendor, and the county never signed anything with ICE. ICE’s Chicago office ran more than 13,000 LexisNexis searches for civil immigration enforcement in 2021, in a city and county with sanctuary ordinances.

Some state laws do cover data. Illinois bars sharing license plate reader data for immigration enforcement, and a 2025 Secretary of State audit found Border Patrol had accessed Illinois plate data in violation of that law. California’s Attorney General sued El Cajon in 2025 for sharing plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies. As far as we know, no court has decided whether a police records contract like the LexisNexis addendum complies with laws like these.

Cities can close the gap on their own. A department can sign the “no data contributions” version of the addendum, or amend its agreement to restrict who can see its data, as Oklahoma City did. Our guide for council members has motions a council can adopt.

There’s a lot of it. Flock says it has no contract with ICE or any part of DHS, but local agencies can search each other’s cameras, and the logs show many of those searches were for immigration enforcement.

• Flock audit logs obtained by 404 Media in May 2025 showed more than 4,000 national and statewide lookups by local officers, with stated reasons like “immigration,” “ICE+ERO” and “ICE WARRANT.”
• In August 2025 Flock acknowledged “limited pilots” with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations, and said it had paused them.
• An Illinois state audit in 2025 found Border Patrol had accessed Illinois plate data in violation of state law. One suburb searched a neighboring town’s cameras 28 times for “immigration violation.”
• In Washington, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights found Border Patrol searching the data of at least 10 agencies in 2025 that had never authorized sharing with it.
• In Bend, Oregon, federal immigration agents searched police plate data 279 times in three weeks in June 2025, because a sharing setting had been left at its default, “National.”
• In Virginia, reporters found nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches of the state’s cameras over a year, about 90 percent by out-of-state agencies. The state has since limited access to Virginia agencies.
• Flock isn’t the only vendor. ICE contracted for access to Vigilant’s national plate database from 2017 to 2020, with 80 local agencies sharing data into it, and paid Thomson Reuters for plate data in 2025.

To check your city, request the department’s Flock Network Audit and Organization Audit logs and its current sharing settings, including whether National Lookup is turned on.

Not clearly. CrimeTracer works the same way: participating agencies pool police reports, dispatch logs, jail bookings, citations and field-interview cards into one network that every member can search. SoundThinking, the company formerly called ShotSpotter, says it holds more than a billion records from more than 2,100 agencies. It was called COPLINK X until ShotSpotter bought its maker, Forensic Logic, in 2022 and renamed it.

It has its own ICE history. Under the COPLINK name, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations had broad access to Massachusetts police records, according to documents reported in 2018. Federal agencies including HSI, the FBI and the DEA could search the Massachusetts network until 2023. We haven’t found anything public on who has federal access today.

CrimeTracer also mixes in commercial data. Through a partnership with Thomson Reuters, it can show records from CLEAR, a product Thomson Reuters also sells to ICE, next to police records.

What each city chooses to share makes a big difference. Somerville, Massachusetts holds back immigration-status information. Cambridge holds back sexual assault, domestic violence and juvenile reports.

Whatever platform your city uses, ask the same things: which records are shared, who can search them, and whether the city can see an audit of those searches. Our CrimeTracer letter asks all three.

Under your state’s public records law. The federal Freedom of Information Act only covers federal agencies, so a request to a police department or sheriff goes under state law. Send it in writing to the department’s records office, ask for electronic copies and name the documents you want.

Before you file, search MuckRock. It files and tracks requests in public, and its agency pages show what others have already asked your department for and what came back. You can see our requests there, including Downers Grove, Illinois and Cambridge, Massachusetts. If ICE is your focus, MuckRock also has a quick-start guide to reporting on ICE with public records.

The FOIA Builder drafts a request for you, and there’s a LexisNexis version ready to go. Or ask us to file it and we’ll handle the back-and-forth and publish what comes back.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance shows which surveillance technologies your agency is already known to use, which helps when deciding what else to ask about.

Ask for documents by the names the agency and vendor use. For LexisNexis, these matter most:

• The data contribution addendum, which goes by “AVCC XML Addendum,” “AVCC/ACA/CCM Addendum,” “PSDEX Addendum” or “Data Contribution Addendum.” It is the document that grants LexisNexis the data.
• Schedule A, the order form listing what was bought, and the master terms and conditions it hangs from
• Any amendment restricting or ending data sharing
• The Data Classification export, a spreadsheet the agency’s LexisNexis administrator can produce in minutes. It shows which incident types are shared and which are held back.
• Usage and audit logs showing who searched what
• Twelve months of invoices, a quick payment-history query for the finance office
• If a county or regional body holds the contract, the consortium agreement and your agency’s joinder

Keep the first request short. Two asks (the agreements and the invoices) usually come back. A long list often comes back as a big fee estimate. Once you know what exists, follow up for the rest.

Yes. A “no responsive records” answer usually means the search didn’t match how the documents are labeled. The paperwork almost never says “data-sharing agreement.” The sharing usually sits in an addendum to a LexisNexis order, a line item on an order form, a module inside the records-system contract, or a consortium joinder the county holds.

When you refile:

• Name the documents (see “What exactly should I ask for?” above) and give search terms: “XML Addendum,” “AVCC,” “PSDEX,” “Virtual Crime Center,” “Database Interface,” “irrevocable.”
• Add requests that are hard to come back empty on, like twelve months of payments to LexisNexis Risk Solutions and emails to or from lexisnexisrisk.com addresses over a set date range.
• Ask for the records-system vendor’s interface or export documents, and any firewall or IT change requests naming LexisNexis.
• Say why you believe records exist. Point to the agency’s listing in LexisNexis’s public data, a council agenda item or an invoice.
• Send a parallel request to the county sheriff or the consortium’s lead agency.

You can also ask the agency how it searched: who looked, where and with what terms. If your state has an appeal process for records denials, use it at the same time.

In many states, when a request covers a vendor’s documents, the agency has to tell the vendor, and the vendor can argue that parts are trade secrets or confidential business information. Texas makes this a formal process. The agency has 10 business days to ask the Attorney General for a ruling and must notify the vendor, which gets 10 business days to send arguments. The Attorney General then has 45 business days to rule and can take 10 more, so a simple request can stretch to about three months.

You can’t always avoid a review, but you can shrink it:

• Ask for records that can’t be withheld. Signed contracts, order forms, data-sharing terms, invoices and payments are hard to keep secret. Texas law says the total price, what was bought, the parties and the dates can’t be withheld as trade secrets (Gov’t Code §552.0222).
• Leave out what vendors fight over, such as technical specifications, proposals, pricing breakdowns and product manuals. Request those separately if you need them.
• Send the signed agreement and invoices as their own request so they aren’t held up by the contested part.
• Ask for records the agency has already released. In Texas and many other states, a record given to one requester generally has to be given to you too.
• Check earlier rulings. The Texas Attorney General publishes its letter rulings, searchable from late 2023. If it has already ruled on the same kind of LexisNexis document, cite the ruling in your request.
• Answer clarification requests quickly and in writing. In Texas, a clarification request restarts the agency’s clock, and a request is treated as withdrawn if you don’t reply within 61 days.

If it does go to the Attorney General, the vendor has to copy you on its arguments, and you can send your own written comments on why the records should be public.

Probably not. LexisNexis sells police many products under separate contracts. A contract with LexisNexis Coplogic Solutions usually covers its online citizen-reporting portal (often called DORS), the BuyCrash crash-report site, or electronic crash and citation tools. The data contribution behind the Virtual Crime Center and PSDEX normally sits in a separate addendum to an Accurint order.

That contract still matters. Coplogic agreements carry their own sharing terms, explained under are online police reports and crash reports shared. Ask for:

• The complete Coplogic agreement, including any end-user license agreement and data-use terms
• Any Accurint or Virtual Crime Center order, Schedule A and data contribution addendum, under any LexisNexis company name
• Twelve months of payments to every LexisNexis company, including LexisNexis Risk Solutions and LexisNexis Coplogic Solutions
• The records-system vendor’s documents for any LexisNexis connection
• The county sheriff’s LexisNexis agreements, if the county runs the jail

Ask for the estimate in writing, with how it was calculated. Then narrow the request so the cost drops:

• Shorten the date range, or ask only for the most recent version of each agreement.
• Ask for electronic copies of documents that already exist, rather than printed or newly compiled ones.
• Ask for the agreements and invoices first and the rest later.
• Ask whether the agency can release records in batches as they’re ready.

Many states allow fee waivers or reductions for requests in the public interest, and some let you inspect records in person for free. If the wait is long, ask for a date for the first batch and follow up when it passes. Filing through MuckRock keeps a public record of every deadline.

Make the case for control rather than against crime fighting. Most officials agree a department should know who reads its records, and most don’t realize theirs can’t.

• Frame it as public safety. When people believe a call to police can reach immigration enforcement, they stop calling and stop serving as witnesses. A 2013 University of Illinois at Chicago survey found 44 percent of Latinos were less likely to contact police after a crime for that reason, which means fewer witnesses and fewer solved cases.
• Ask questions they can’t answer: who can search our records, can we audit those searches, and what happens to the data if we cancel? Our council questions are ready to send.
• Bring your own agency’s addendum and show them the irrevocable license language in it.
• Point to documented misuse. Federal immigration agents searched the Bend, Oregon police department’s license plate data 279 times in three weeks in 2025 without the department’s authorization, and a Texas officer ran a nationwide plate search for a woman who had self-managed an abortion.
• Offer a middle path. A city can keep the search tool and end or limit what it contributes. Oklahoma City amended its agreement to restrict who can see its data.
• Bring people officials already listen to, such as domestic violence advocates, immigrant service groups, public defenders and faith leaders.

Our guide for elected officials, Before You Vote on AVCC, makes the full case and includes four motions a council can adopt.

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The Accurint Files is the name of this project and its web address. To avoid confusion, we recommend citing the specific article or page, or FinePrint as the publication.