Sanctuary city Culver City sends its police records to a LexisNexis database that ICE pays to search

Culver City has called itself a sanctuary city since 2017, meaning it limits how far its police cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Its police department also sends records to the Accurint Virtual Crime Center, a national police database run by the data broker LexisNexis, and ICE is one of that database's customers.

LexisNexis's main law enforcement product is Accurint, a people-search tool that compiles addresses, relatives, vehicles and phone numbers from public and commercial records. The Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) adds police records on top of it. Departments that subscribe upload their own dispatch and incident records, and in exchange they can search the records every other contributing department has uploaded. Any AVCC customer can search that shared pool. ICE has paid LexisNexis for Accurint since 2021, and in August it posted notice of a roughly $6.7 million contract that names the Virtual Crime Center directly. In other words, a city can send police records into a database that federal immigration agents search without ever handing anything to ICE itself.

Culver City is on the contributing side. A publicly accessible dataset maintained by LexisNexis lists the department as an AVCC contributor, shows it uploading records as recently as October 25, and counts 64,800 Culver City records covering every crime category LexisNexis tracks.

The department gets AVCC through the City of Hawthorne, which runs a shared records system for several South Bay police departments. A 2020 LexisNexis price quote put Culver City's share at $17,795.39 a year and listed five data connections as included: records, dispatch, offender, crash and license plate reader data. Neighboring Hermosa Beach joined the same arrangement in 2019 by signing paperwork that commits it to contribute dispatch records, incident narratives and offender records, and gives LexisNexis a worldwide license to share them that the city cannot take back. Culver City's version of that paperwork has not been made public.

Crash reports take a separate route. In May 2021, Police Chief Manny Cid and City Manager John Nachbar signed a contract giving LexisNexis the exclusive right to sell Culver City's crash reports online, with the city receiving $15 for each one sold. The same contract shares the city's reports with other participating police agencies, lets LexisNexis keep selling the reports it already holds if the city cancels, and renews automatically every year.

California's Values Act limits what local police can share with immigration authorities, and state law asks agencies to keep their databases, including ones run by vendors, from being used for immigration enforcement. Culver City added its own sanctuary resolution on top of those protections in 2017.

The full Culver City record, including the Hawthorne arrangement and the 2020 price quote, is on the Accurint Files: FinePrint