What happens to your 911 call data

Call 911 to report a crash, a stolen bike, or a relative in crisis, and a record gets created before the first responder is dispatched. Your name, your phone number, your address, and the reason you called go into the department's dispatch system, and from there into its records system. That part is normal and necessary. Police need records to do their jobs.

The part most people don't know is what happens next. More than 2,400 police departments feed their internal records into PSDEX, a private database run by LexisNexis. For many of them, the pipeline is automatic: software connects to the department's records system and copies new entries out on a schedule, every 15 minutes at some agencies, daily at others. Nobody reviews your record before it goes. In Federal Way, Washington, police get an email receipt from LexisNexis every morning confirming that another day of local records has been copied.

You don't have to be a suspect to be in the pipeline. Victims, witnesses, 911 callers, and registered vehicle owners all show up in police records, and the export doesn't distinguish. In Apple Valley, Minnesota, we confirmed that 911 caller details flow into the LexisNexis database. Report a stray dog, end up in a national database.

Once your record is in PSDEX, other subscribing agencies across the country can search it. ICE pays $22.1 million for access. The department that took your call may never know who searched for you, and in most cases neither will you.

Deletion is murkier than it should be. Under the standard contribution contract, even if your local department asks for its data to be deleted, any agency that already downloaded records is allowed to keep them.

None of this means you shouldn't call 911 when you need help. It means your city made a data-sharing decision on your behalf, probably without a public discussion, and you're allowed to ask about it. Ask your department whether it contributes records to LexisNexis PSDEX or the Accurint Virtual Crime Center, and what happens to caller information. Or search our Accurint Files tracker to see whether your department is already in it.