Apple Valley sends 911 caller details to a private database searched by ICE and the FBI

Call Apple Valley police to report a crash, a stolen bike, or a relative in a mental health crisis, and your information is copied into a private database that law enforcement agencies across the country can search, including ICE and the FBI. We asked the Minnesota city who has been looking at its residents' records. The department said it "does not audit how other agencies are accessing and using our data."

Apple Valley feeds both police records and 911 caller data into the Public Safety Data Exchange, the national database operated by the broker LexisNexis.

Who is actually in the data

Most of what flows in has little to do with criminals. Police records are full of 911 callers, victims, and witnesses: a parent reporting a missing teenager, someone locked out of the house, a hang-up call, a welfare check on an elderly neighbor. Apple Valley sorts its calls into dozens of categories, and the department's own records show it went down that list deciding which to send and which to hold back. Calls for suicides are held back. Medical calls, child protection, mental health crises, missing persons, lost pets, and juveniles in a park after hours all go in.

The license does not expire

Apple Valley granted LexisNexis a perpetual worldwide license to that data. Cancelling the contract does not claw it back. Records already transferred stay in the exchange, searchable by any agency that pays for access.

Nobody is watching

Apple Valley cannot say who has accessed its data or what they did with it, and it does not audit its own officers' use of the platform either. That gap matters because of what happened at the other end of the comparison. When Flock Safety added tools that let agencies see how their license plate camera network was actually being used, the audits turned up widespread misuse, followed by arrests, resignations, and dozens of departments cancelling contracts. LexisNexis does not appear to offer comparable audit capability. An absence of documented misuse in a system that cannot be audited is not evidence that none occurred.

Where it ends up

ICE searched LexisNexis databases more than 1.2 million times between March and September 2021, according to records obtained by Just Futures Law and reported by The Intercept. The agency's contract runs to $22.1 million. Pulling this kind of information on someone normally takes a warrant or a subpoena. Buying it from a broker skips that step, which is how a federal agency reaches around state sanctuary laws written to keep local police data out of its hands.

National implications

Apple Valley is one of 72 Minnesota departments feeding LexisNexis, and one of roughly 2,400 agencies nationwide. Ten years ago, getting another department's sensitive records meant picking up the phone and justifying the ask, sometimes going to a judge. Today that burden of proof costs a subscription fee. Search one suspect and up come the victims, witnesses, vehicles, and 911 callers tied to them. You can become a person of interest and never know it.

Apple Valley is one of dozens of agencies that provided records and comment for the Accurint Files project. Their records staff pulled and sent the files.