Scenario 01
You witnessed a crime and called 911.
You gave your name and address to the dispatcher. Here's where that information goes next.
Imagine a Wednesday afternoon. You see a man punch a woman in a parking lot, then run. You dial 911. The dispatcher asks who you are, where you’re calling from, and what you saw. You give your name, your address, your phone number, and a description of what happened.
The dispatcher enters that information into the police department’s computer-aided dispatch system. The officer who responds writes a report when they get back to the precinct. That report — your name, your address, your account of what you saw — becomes a record in the department’s records management system.
What you don’t know
If your local police department has signed an Accurint Virtual Crime Center agreement with LexisNexis, that report — and the report from every other call your department took that day — is automatically uploaded to LexisNexis’s servers. The upload happens on a regular interval, often every fifteen minutes. The contract that authorizes the upload is called the AVCC XML Addendum, and it grants LexisNexis an irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license to use, aggregate, transmit, publish, and distribute the data.
Your name is now in a private database that LexisNexis sells access to. The buyers include other police departments, state-level agencies, and federal agencies. ICE and the FBI are among LexisNexis’s customers.
What you can do
You can ask. You can FOIA your local department for their AVCC XML Addendum and ICD (Interface Control Document). You can ask your city council whether they reviewed the data-sharing terms when they approved the contract. You can ask whether the contract excludes victim and witness data from the upload — most do not.
The action page has templates for each of those asks, prefilled with the language to use.
The relevant contract language
Customer hereby agrees to contribute public safety information (“Customer Data Contribution”) […] including an irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, compile, aggregate, create derivative works, transfer, transmit, publish and distribute the Customer Data Contributions.
That is the standard text of AVCC XML Addendum Section II.1. It appears in every contract we’ve obtained.