You're leaving a domestic violence situation.

You left. You found a new apartment. You went to the police station the next day and filed a report. The officer asked for your new address so they could follow up. You gave it to them because they asked, and because the system requires it.

That address — your new, supposed-to-be-safe address — is now in your local department’s records management system. If that department has signed an AVCC XML Addendum with LexisNexis, your new address is in PSDEX within fifteen minutes.

Who can see it

LexisNexis Accurint is licensed to hundreds of thousands of users across law enforcement, government agencies, attorneys, insurance investigators, and private investigators. Every one of them can run an Accurint search for your name and see your current address.

We have not yet documented every data field in the automated RMS upload. We have documented that narrative fields — the free-text part of an officer’s report — are part of the contributed data set in multiple agreements. Narrative fields routinely contain victim addresses, victim phone numbers, and details that could identify a victim’s workplace, children’s school, or family.

Address confidentiality programs

Roughly 40 states operate Address Confidentiality Programs (ACPs) for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. The programs assign participants a substitute address for use on public records.

ACPs were designed to keep your real address out of voter registration, court records, and DMV databases. Whether ACPs reach into a local department’s RMS — the system that feeds LexisNexis — varies by state and is often poorly enforced. We are actively researching which states’ ACPs successfully suppress data from the LexisNexis upload, and which do not.

What you can do today

If you are in an ACP-eligible situation, enroll in your state’s program before filing any police reports if at all possible. Ask the responding officer to use only your substitute address in the report. Ask whether your local department uploads RMS data to a third-party platform. If they say yes, ask whether the upload excludes ACP-protected addresses. Most departments cannot answer that question.