Explainer
How it works.
A complete walkthrough of the data pipeline that connects your local police department to federal customers through a private broker. Plain-English, with the contract terms cited inline.
American policing used to run on scattered local files. It doesn’t anymore. Two LexisNexis products, the Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) and the Accurint Public Safety Marketplace (PSM), now stitch those files into a single privatized intelligence network, wiring billions of commercial records together with public data and live police feeds. That quietly rewrites the old rules about who has a “right to know” and a “need to know.” Police records that were supposed to stay local, including sensitive details about crime victims and minors, get pulled into a commercial database that thousands of agencies can search, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement among them. Accurint Files maps how that system is built, what its contracts actually say, and what it means for the people whose names end up inside it.
The system is called AVCC.
The Accurint Virtual Crime Center, or “AVCC” for short, is a LexisNexis Risk Solutions product. It’s sold to law enforcement agencies as a crime-mapping and intelligence platform. Agencies that subscribe get access to a national pool of police data: incident reports, jail bookings, traffic stops, and, when contributed, the narrative fields of those reports.
The agencies themselves fill the national pool. LexisNexis doesn’t stock AVCC with its own data; it pulls the records straight out of the records management systems (RMS) that contributing agencies already run. That aggregated pool has a name: the Public Safety Data Exchange, or “PSDEX.”
Here’s how the money works. An agency pays a subscription for AVCC access. That subscription includes a “Database Interface,” the technical connection that lets LexisNexis ingest the agency’s data automatically. The data contribution gets folded into the subscription, so it never shows up as a separate paid feature.
Three signals identify a contributor.
When we read a LexisNexis contract pulled from FOIA or procurement records, we look for three specific signals. All three showing up together is a strong sign the agency is feeding PSDEX rather than just searching it.
1. Database Interface line item
In the contract’s Schedule A, the section that enumerates purchased line items, look for:
AVCC Annual Subscription Fee shall include one (1) Database Interface
Database Interface is the bidirectional technical connection. Its presence indicates a data feed is configured.
2. Customer Data Contribution clause
In the AVCC XML Addendum, usually Section I.2, look for:
Customer hereby agrees to contribute public safety information (“Customer Data Contribution”)…
This is the contractual commitment to feed the database.
3. Irrevocable license
In the AVCC XML Addendum, usually Section II.1, look for:
[an] irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, compile, aggregate, create derivative works, transfer, transmit, publish and distribute the Customer Data Contributions…
This grants LexisNexis perpetual rights to the data, even if the agency later cancels the contract. Termination ends new contributions; it does not retrieve the data already contributed.
What gets uploaded.
The contracts are crystal clear about the rights LexisNexis gets. They’re much vaguer about which data fields actually go into the upload. To know what a given department sends, you need another document: an Interface Control Document (ICD), or its equivalent, a field-mapping table or data-translation schema.
ICDs rarely show up in FOIA returns by default. When you do get one, it usually shows the upload pulling in incident report fields, jail booking fields, person records, vehicle records, narratives, and supplementary report data. The narrative fields are the part to watch: narratives routinely name victims and witnesses, even when “victim” and “witness” aren’t column headers anywhere.
For the language to request an ICD, see the action page.
Who reads the data.
PSDEX is a multi-tenant database. Once data is contributed, it becomes searchable to other AVCC subscribers and to non-AVCC LexisNexis Accurint users via licensed access. The user base spans roughly:
- Local police departments with AVCC subscriptions
- State investigative agencies
- Federal agencies: ICE, FBI, DHS, ATF, CBP, USMS, DEA
- Prosecutors and public defenders
- Private investigators, attorneys, and insurance investigators with Accurint licenses
Federal access is the part that matters most. The FBI’s and ICE’s contracts with LexisNexis are public, and they grant federal users the right to query the aggregated pool, contributions from local agencies included, sanctuary jurisdictions among them.
Loophole-as-a-Service: Sanctuary Laws
Sanctuary policies are built around one assumption: that local police decide whether and how to share data with federal agencies. Most of them say nothing about selling or transferring data to a third party, especially one framed as a service provider rather than an information recipient.
On paper, a local department that uploads to LexisNexis is just a customer buying a service from a private vendor. What the vendor does next, selling access to that same data to its other customers, ICE included, under a separate commercial contract, counts as a different transaction entirely. Lined up that way, nothing about it breaks the letter of most sanctuary policies.
We call this gap data laundering. A city’s sanctuary commitment gets quietly undone by a procurement decision, often one signed off in a different office than the one answerable for sanctuary compliance in the first place.
The opt-out you keep hearing about.
LexisNexis publishes a consumer opt-out form, and it does what it says: it pulls you out of the company’s consumer-marketed products. By LexisNexis’s own published policy, it does nothing for the law enforcement, government, or fraud-prevention products.
The data PSDEX holds on you, as a victim, witness, or subject of a police report, sits in that law enforcement tier. The consumer opt-out doesn’t touch it.
What you can do about it.
The real leverage is at the city or county level, before a contract is signed or renewed. Sanctuary ordinances that explicitly cover third-party data sales, which a handful of jurisdictions have started to pass, close the gap. Procurement rules that require council review of data-broker agreements force the whole thing into the open.
At the individual level, you can FOIA your local department for their AVCC agreement and ICD, and you can ask your council member or county supervisor whether the contract excludes victim and witness data.
The action page has templates for both.
Where the project goes from here.
We’re documenting contributors one agency at a time, with primary sources for each. The agencies directory holds every agency we’ve published a confirmed or strong-signal record for. The document library indexes the contracts and FOIA returns we’re working from.
If you have a contract, an ICD, a council packet, or a FOIA return that should be in here, the tip line is open.