How it works · Inside a report
What they can see when they run your name.
Type a name into LexisNexis and this is what comes back: your identity, your address history, your phones, your relatives, your associates, your vehicles, your jail bookings, and every police report your name has ever touched, pulled from more than 2,000 agencies in a single search. Every screen below is LexisNexis’s own product. Here is what your name looks like from the inside.
00First, two products
One name, two front doors.
LexisNexis sells law enforcement two related things, and the difference matters for accuracy.
Accurint for Law Enforcement is the identity report. Think of it as a long PDF dossier on a single person, stitched together from public records plus data LexisNexis buys from the companies that already hold information on you: mobile phone carriers, power and cable utilities, DMVs, and more. It pulls in addresses, phone numbers, relatives, vehicles, and licenses, with the full section list in the reference block at the bottom of this page. LexisNexis publishes a sample you can page through yourself: Example Report.
Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) is the dashboard. It takes that identity layer and adds contributed national law enforcement data, the records management system (RMS) and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) feeds from local police, plus jail booking data, link analysis, and crime mapping. Most of the screenshots below are AVCC, and they are labeled.
It remains unclear whether Accurint for Law Enforcement subscribers can reach the 100 million records contributed by roughly 2,100 law enforcement agencies across the country. AVCC subscribers can. Our reporting has so far been unable to confirm whether that same contributed police data is also available to standalone Accurint for Law Enforcement customers. Where a capability depends on contributed police records, this page says so.
01The scale
The size of the haystack.
LexisNexis combines 100 million records contributed by law enforcement with its existing 86 billion public data records to build a single dossier on a person.
The system draws on thousands of separate sources that were never designed to be connected, such as court files, motor vehicle records, utility hookups, and police reports from departments in different states. Any one of them reveals little on its own. Assembled together under a single name, they form a continuous profile of where a person has lived, who they are connected to, and every police report their name has appeared in. The reference block at the bottom of this page lists the categories a single report can pull together.
02A person search
What comes back on a single name.
A person search returns two stacked layers: public records, and contributed law enforcement data. Below is the same subject seen both ways inside AVCC.
A single query produces date of birth, the first six digits of a Social Security number, driver’s license details, current and prior addresses going back years, and a list of phone numbers. This was the most common thing ICE did with the tool. Of 1.2 million searches ICE ran from March to September 2021, about 60 percent were Advanced Person Searches.
LexisNexis’s own warning
“The Public Records and commercially available data sources used on reports have errors. Data is sometimes entered poorly, processed incorrectly and is generally not free from defect. This system should not be relied upon as definitively accurate. Before relying on any data this system supplies, it should be independently verified.”
This appears at the top of Accurint reports. By the company’s own account, the records officers see when they run a name may be wrong, and are not meant to be trusted without independent verification. The same data feeds the link charts, jail-booking hits, and nationwide narrative searches shown below.
A question worth asking
The Accurint for Law Enforcement report also includes Voter Registration, listing party affiliation. It is hard to see why an identity report built for policing needs a person’s voting history and party. The data sits in the same record as their criminal history, their relatives, and their home address.
03Associates and vehicles
Guilt by proximity.
This is the part most people never think about. The system links you to every person and every vehicle from any police contact you appear in, regardless of your role in it.
Call 911 to report a shooting and you can be linked to the shooter and the shooter’s car. Witness a traffic accident and file a report, and you are now associated with every vehicle and every person in that incident. The link does not record that you were the one who called for help. It records that your name and theirs appeared in the same report.
The witness and the suspect end up on the same web.
This is the mechanism behind one of the quieter harms FinePrint tracks. If cooperating with police can fold you into a permanent association map shared with 2,000 agencies and federal customers, some people will think twice before they call. That hesitation is the chilling effect, and it falls hardest on the communities that most need police to answer.
04Link analysis
The whole web at once.
Link analysis is the associate map drawn as a chart. A single subject sits at the center, ringed by every person, address, phone, vehicle, and incident the data ties to them.
This only works because the underlying records were contributed by local police. The victims, the witness, and the reporting party on this chart are there because their agencies’ RMS and CAD systems fed AVCC. A victim of a burglary in one town becomes a labeled node on a national chart they will never see, queryable by any of the 2,000-plus contributing agencies and by federal customers.
05Jail booking data
Booked, and the clock on the wall.
AVCC carries a national jail booking database. By LexisNexis’s figures it holds more than 140 million booking records and 38 million booking photos from around 2,000 law enforcement databases. Local booking data is available from 41 states and Washington DC, state corrections data from 27 states, covering by their account roughly 80 percent of US incarcerations.
To be clear, these are arrest records. They do not track whether anyone was convicted. A booking is an accusation at a moment in time, and it stays in the record regardless of what happened next.
Why this field matters
The record shows whether a subject is currently incarcerated and when they are scheduled for release. That is precisely the information an agency needs to be waiting when someone walks out.
ICE buys real-time incarceration and release data as an add-on to its LexisNexis Accurint subscription, and uses it to learn the release dates of people it targets for deportation. This is where the sanctuary bypass shows up most clearly. In jurisdictions such as Chicago and Cook County, local law bars jails from sharing booking information and release dates with ICE directly.
The data still reaches ICE, just not directly. When a local agency contributes its jail records to AVCC, that information sits in a private database ICE pays to search. In cities with sanctuary laws, handing data to ICE directly is prohibited. In cities without sanctuary laws, agencies still claim not to cooperate with ICE while they provide 911 call data, police report data, and jail booking and release data to ICE through the LexisNexis loophole. Privacy advocates claim that passively allowing LexisNexis to harvest a city’s data, and then allowing ICE to buy access to it, is a form of passive cooperation with federal authorities. Done directly, it may be unpopular or illegal. Done through LexisNexis, the handoff is undisclosed and its legality remains unclear. In its own contracting, ICE acknowledged as much, noting that sanctuary policies had reduced the number of jurisdictions willing to share release information directly, and that AVCC still supplies that data even where cities have stopped cooperating directly.
06Real-time phone search
Live, from the carrier.
The Real-Time Phone Search pulls a phone record live at the moment of the query rather than from a stored table. The results name the wireless carrier directly, including major providers such as T-Mobile and Verizon, alongside other sources.
The screen names the carrier directly, here T-Mobile, along with line status and whether the number was ported. ICE leaned on this tool heavily. The Real-Time Phone Search was the second most common query type in ICE’s 1.2 million searches, about 17 percent. From a single live result, an officer can pull a Phone Detail Report with the carrier, line status, and routing.
07Keyword search
Type a phrase, map the country.
Type a phrase such as “red tattoo,” and the system searches the full narrative text of roughly 100 million police records from some 2,100 law enforcement agencies for any report that mentions it, then maps the matches across the country. Any term, name, or phrase a responding officer ever wrote into a report becomes searchable nationwide.
The example is a useful tell in two directions. It shows the reach: free-text search across the call notes and report narratives of thousands of agencies, mapped on demand. It also shows the imprecision. The advertised “red tattoo” search surfaces records where “red” and “tattoo” merely appear near each other, a red jacket here, a tattoo there. A tool that broad, pointed at the entire country’s police narratives, is built for fishing as much as for finding.
08Concept search
Pre-built trawls.
Concept search is the keyword tool with the trawl-nets already tied. A concept bundles many terms under one label. The built-in “Explosive” concept expands to Bomb, Dynamite, Tannerite, and Molotov Cocktail in one query.
The sidebar is where it gets uncomfortable. Among the prepackaged concepts are “Homeless,” “Prostitute,” and “Tattoo.” Selecting one trawls the report narratives and call notes of more than 2,000 agencies to surface every record that happens to mention homelessness, or sex work, or a tattoo. The person in those notes was often not a suspect. They were a name a responding officer wrote down.
The accountability gap
Two questions sit under this feature. Why does any agency have standing access to fish through every other agency’s records? And why can a contributing agency see none of it? A department that feeds its RMS into AVCC has no window into who later queried that data, for what, or how often. The police department lets LexisNexis harvest its data, and in return gets no accountability into how that data is used or who is using it.
09Who is searching
The federal endpoint.
All of the above is contributed by local police. On March 1, 2021, ICE moved its officers off Thomson Reuters CLEAR and onto AVCC under a contract called the Law Enforcement Investigative Database Subscription, or LEIDS.
The email is blunt about what the agency gained: public records plus state and local RMS and CAD data from over 1,500 agencies nationwide, all in one search, with mapping and link analysis. The records that local departments contribute to “solve cases” became, in one procurement, a deportation tool.
The numbers from the FOIA records are not small. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations had capacity for more than 4,200 users on the platform. Between March and September 2021, ICE ran over 1.2 million searches. The heaviest field offices were San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. About 60 percent were Advanced Person Searches and 17 percent were Real-Time Phone Searches, the same tools shown above. ICE’s records also confirm access to the jail booking data.
The clause that keeps it quiet
The same documents surface a contract term that helps explain why most people have never heard of this. LexisNexis bars its government customers from naming the company or referencing their use of its services in any press release or public statement. While the infrastructure is national, the acknowledgment of it is contractually suppressed.
This is the loophole. Sanctuary laws limit what police may hand directly to ICE. They do not limit what a private company may sell. The data crosses the line as a commercial transaction, and no warrant or local vote is in its path.
10Where it ends up
It does not stay in the system.
Once a report is generated, it can travel anywhere a document travels, including into the public court record where anyone can read it.
In one civil lawsuit against the retailer Ulta Beauty, a full Accurint report on an individual was filed as an exhibit. The case was later dismissed. The report stayed in the public docket, freely downloadable, long after the dispute ended. A document like that exposes the first six digits of a Social Security number, date of birth, current and prior home addresses, phone numbers, named relatives, and associates, all in one place.
We are not naming the case or the person, and we are not linking the document. Both the court and the individual whose data was exposed have been notified. A report built for an investigation became a permanent public record of someone’s private life through a filing they had no part in. And this is not isolated. Accurint reports surface repeatedly across federal court filings, searchable in bulk in the public court record.
REF The full record
What an Accurint for Law Enforcement report contains.
LexisNexis publishes a sample report. These are the sections it can include for a single subject. The counts beside each section in the original are omitted here.
- Names Associated with Subject
- Others Associated with SSN
- Address Summary
- Previous & Verified Addresses
- Phones Plus
- Possible Criminal Records
- Sexual Offenses
- Driver's License
- Motor Vehicles Registered
- National Motor Vehicle Accidents
- Concealed Weapons Permits
- People at Work
- Professional Licenses
- FAA Certifications
- FAA Aircraft
- Watercraft
- Voter Registration
- Hunting / Fishing Permit
- Bankruptcies
- Liens and Judgments
- UCC Filings
- Possible Properties Owned
- Possible Relative Summary
- Possible Associates
- Possible Relatives
- Neighbors
- Source Information
From LexisNexis’s own disclaimers. Accurint is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and may not be used for credit, insurance, or employment decisions. By its own warning, the criminal record data may include records that have been “expunged, sealed, or otherwise have become inaccessible to the public.” The company restricts permissible use to court, law enforcement, and government purposes. In short: the report can surface records the law has already ordered closed, and there is no consumer-side mechanism to correct or remove them.
SRCSource documents
Check it yourself.
Every claim above traces to one of these. The screenshots are LexisNexis’s own product and marketing materials.
- ICE recordICE ERO internal email announcing the LEIDS transition to AVCC, March 1, 2021. Obtained via FOIA litigation by Mijente and Just Futures Law. (Shown above.)
- FOIA analysisMijente & Just Futures Law, “New Records Provide Details on ICE’s Mass Use of LexisNexis Accurint,” fact sheet, June 2022. PDF
- ICE recordICE ERO Accurint summary and data subscription services information, December 2021. PDF
- ReportingTruthout, “ICE Is Using Data From LexisNexis to Skirt Sanctuary Laws and Deport Immigrants,” July 2022. Article
- ResearchAFSC Investigate, on LexisNexis / RELX and ICE’s use of real-time incarceration data via Justice Intelligence. Profile
- VendorLexisNexis product pages: Accurint for Law Enforcement · Accurint Virtual Crime Center · sample report sections
- Court recordAccurint reports filed in federal cases, searchable on CourtListener.
A note on sourcing. ICE’s use of AVCC, the search volumes, the jail booking access, and the gag clause are documented in ICE’s own records and the FOIA analysis cited above. The scale figures are LexisNexis’s own marketing numbers, noted as such.
→Help us document this
You can make the record stronger.
Have you used an Accurint product and want to submit a tip? If you have information not listed on this site, we encourage you to reach out.
Citizens can run their own name and find a relative tagged as the associate of someone they have never met. Maybe you witnessed a fender bender and turned up months later in a stranger’s link chart, or you hold a contract, an invoice, or a council agenda that shows how your department uses Accurint. If any of that is you, send it. Tips are confidential, and the record gets stronger every time someone adds to it.
Anyone can also request their own data and submit an opt-out or deletion request through LexisNexis. LexisNexis will not remove law enforcement contributed data, though, and other records tied to your identity may remain so that your data stays available to law enforcement and government clients. How the company complies with the various state privacy laws remains unclear.
If you have any relevant experience or tips involving LexisNexis or Accurint, we’d love to hear from you. Tips are confidential, and the record gets stronger every time someone adds to it.
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