One Minnesota police department cut its data feed to LexisNexis. Its neighbors chose share local data with a private data broker

In July, the Faribault Police Department shut off a data feed that had kept copying its police reports into a LexisNexis database long after the city stopped using the company's product in 2024. The department found out the feed was still running because FinePrint asked about it. By LexisNexis's own count, 130,563 Faribault records had gone in by the time it was switched off on July 2.

Faribault is the only agency on LexisNexis's own list that we can document cutting off its feed. In January, a LexisNexis account manager sent the Duluth Police Department a list headed "Minnesota Agencies Contributing Data to AVCC" that named 72 police departments and sheriff's offices. Faribault was one of them. The other 71 are still on that list, and nothing in the public record shows any of them has asked to stop.

Many of them were told they could. Emails and meeting materials released by LOGIS, the joint-powers cooperative that runs police records software for many of these cities, show LOGIS told member agencies in 2022 that their data would keep flowing to LexisNexis unless they asked to stop. It told them again on July 21 of this year, with a slide listing the agencies still sending data. "We believe LexisNexis might be using it on the backend," the slide reads. ICE is a paying LexisNexis customer.

How a police report ends up somewhere ICE can search it

The system is opaque, but it is easy to follow if you track the data one step at a time.

Step 1: Someone calls the police. An officer responds and writes a report. The report goes into the department's records management system, or RMS, which is the database where a police department keeps its incident reports. Those reports name suspects, and they also name victims, witnesses, the person who called 911, and sometimes children.

Step 2: A copy leaves the building. Many departments have an automated connection, which LexisNexis calls a Database Interface, that copies new reports out of the RMS on a schedule. Depending on the agency it runs every hour, every few hours, or once a day. Nobody at the department reviews what goes out. Think of it as someone photocopying every report written in the last hour and leaving the stack on a table for a courier to pick up.

Step 3: LexisNexis keeps the copy. LexisNexis is one of the largest data brokers in the country. A data broker is a company that collects information about people from many sources and sells access to it. Its police product is called the Accurint Virtual Crime Center, or AVCC, and the pooled records from contributing departments sit in a shared exchange LexisNexis calls PSDEX, the Public Safety Data Exchange. The company says more than 2,400 law enforcement agencies contribute.

Step 4: LexisNexis sells access. Police departments and federal agencies pay subscriptions to search the combined records of thousands of local departments. ICE has held a LexisNexis contract since February 2021, worth up to $22.1 million over five years. Usage logs obtained by Just Futures Law and reported by The Intercept show ICE ran more than 1.2 million searches in a single seven-month stretch of 2021. On August 31, ICE signed a new six-month, $2.9 million contract with the company without competition.

The department that supplied the records is not paid for them. The standard contract addendum for contributing agencies grants LexisNexis a "paid up, irrevocable, worldwide" license to "publish and distribute" the records to its other customers. Irrevocable means the license survives even if the department later cancels.

#### The Lexis Loophole

A sanctuary policy is a local rule that limits how much a city's police help federal immigration agents. Minneapolis and St. Paul both have them. These rules govern what officers and city employees do. Yet they say nothing about what a private company does with records once it has them.

A city can tell its officers not to hand anything to ICE, and the same city's police reports can still reach ICE through LexisNexis without any officer lifting a finger. ICE has written down why it needs LexisNexis. In a 2021 justification for buying LexisNexis jail data without competition, the agency pointed specifically to "the number of law enforcement agencies and state or local governments that do not share information about real time incarceration of foreign-born nationals with ICE," Colorado Newsline reported.

ICE has used this route. In a 2025 federal criminal case in Illinois, an ICE deportation officer wrote that he located a man by searching county jail bookings in LexisNexis. We covered that case in August.

What copying does to the people in the report

The people most exposed by this system are the ones who never did anything wrong. A typical police report has one or two suspects and a whole crowd of other people in it.

Victims and witnesses go in too. LexisNexis lets a department exclude records by type of crime. It does not let a department exclude people by their role in a report. Records the Dakota County Sheriff's Office released to FinePrint in October show the categories it is set up to send, including criminal sexual conduct cases with victims under 13, juvenile runaways, child protection calls, domestic calls, and mental health calls. If you request one of those reports from the department under public records law, it typically comes back with the victim's name blacked out. The copy at LexisNexis is not redacted.

Nobody can tell you who looked. Departments generally cannot see who searched the records they contributed. "We are not aware of any function that will allow us to audit external agencies and how they used the data they see," the records supervisor for the Downers Grove, Illinois police department wrote in response to a records request. Flock Safety's license plate camera system at least produces audit logs, and those logs have turned up searches labeled "ICE detainer". LexisNexis does not appear to offer contributing agencies anything similar, and agencies that have been asked say they cannot see who viewed or used their records.

Every copy is another place to leak. Each time a record is copied into another database, it picks up a new set of people with access, a new set of servers to protect, and a new company's security practices to depend on. The department's original copy can be locked down perfectly and none of that protects the copy somewhere else. LexisNexis itself disclosed in May 2025 that someone took personal information on more than 364,000 people, including Social Security and driver's license numbers, from GitHub, a platform the company used for software development, according to The Record. The company says its systems and products were not compromised, and there is no indication police records were involved. It is still a company with a breach on file, holding millions of police reports from departments that cannot audit how those reports are used.

Nobody is watching the pipe. The LOGIS emails include a small example. Sometime around June 16, a job on LexisNexis's end that processes data from LOGIS agencies failed, and data stopped showing up. The problem was caught two weeks later by the Brooklyn Center Police Department, which noticed its incidents were missing from the company's public crime map and reported it. A LexisNexis engineer restarted the job on July 1 and confirmed the next morning they were "actively receiving data from all Logis Agencies." LOGIS staff then asked the company to confirm it would backfill every incident missed during the outage. The only documented check on the pipe came from a department that wanted its crime map current again.

The chilling effect. People stop calling the police when they know the interaction will be written up in detail and copied into multiple databases, including a private one ICE uses heavily. Police departments across the Twin Cities spent the winter trying to hold on to community trust, and advocates worry that departments quietly passing local records toward federal authorities undercuts that work.

Minnesota, during Operation Metro Surge

All of this was abstract in Minnesota until this past winter. Operation Metro Surge brought federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities from December 4, 2025 to February 12, 2026 and produced roughly 4,000 arrests. Agents shot three people and killed two, both U.S. citizens: Renee Nicole Macklin Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on January 24.

In the middle of that, on January 7, the Duluth Police Department asked LexisNexis for a summary of its services ahead of a January 12 city council vote on its LexisNexis contract. The same day, LexisNexis account manager Jeremy Bringle sent back the list of 72 Minnesota agencies "contributing data to AVCC." The list covers most of the Twin Cities suburbs, several sheriff's offices, Metro Transit Police, and a cluster of central Minnesota departments.

LexisNexis also publishes its own running count of how many records each agency has uploaded, on the public roster behind its Community Crime Map. FinePrint pulled that roster on October 26. Some examples from Minnesota:

• Roseville PD: 707,851 records
• Coon Rapids PD: 612,920
• Maplewood PD: 374,505
• Brooklyn Park PD: 335,974
• Shakopee PD: 318,221
• Bloomington PD: 156,511
• Maple Grove PD: 148,075

In total, 57 Minnesota agencies had uploaded records in October, and LexisNexis flags 49 of those feeds as also landing in the Virtual Crime Center. The real numbers may be far higher, because the public figures count only part of what agencies send LexisNexis. The Dakota County Sheriff's Office shows about 43,600 records on the public roster, but its own LexisNexis account page, released to FinePrint, shows more than 557,000 records sent once 911 and dispatch records are included.

DHS does not release logs of ICE's searches, and local police cannot see who searched their records. No public record shows ICE searching a particular Minnesota department's records during the surge. But ICE was running thousands of searches a day by 2021, and Minnesota agencies had put millions of records into the database, so it is likely that local records were pulled up during the surge. The data was available to search the entire time.

The middlemen: LOGIS and joint powers groups

Most people have never heard of LOGIS, and most of the cities in this story never voted on sending data to LexisNexis.

LOGIS (Local Government Information Systems) is a joint powers organization based in Golden Valley, founded in 1972. A joint powers organization, or JPA, is what Minnesota calls a group that several cities or counties create by agreement so they can share a service instead of each buying it alone. Under state law LOGIS is a government entity of its own, and each member appoints a director to its board. LOGIS also sells the state-mandated independent audits of police license plate reader programs, including audits of member cities whose officials sit on its own board, such as Bloomington. FinePrint's ALPR Audit Watch has reviewed 20 audits LOGIS conducted, and every one recorded zero findings. For police, LOGIS runs the shared dispatch and records systems many metro cities use. That makes LOGIS the builder of the first leg of the pipeline from local police records to ICE, since it builds and manages the database that LexisNexis copies from on a schedule. "LOGIS does not administrate this product as all of you are administrators for your individual agencies; we just ensure the data feed to LN," a LOGIS manager wrote to member agencies in 2022.

LOGIS is not the only one. In Dakota County, the Criminal Justice Network (CJN) is a joint powers group that runs the records system for nine police departments and the sheriff's office. The sheriff's office is on LexisNexis's list, and its own LexisNexis account page, which we reported on in October, reads "Contributes to AVCC: Yes."

A data feed set up at the cooperative level can run for years without ever appearing on a city council agenda. The same structure means a single request to the cooperative can turn it off, which is what happened in Faribault.

What happened in Faribault

On June 26, FinePrint sent the Faribault Police Department a records request asking how it connects to LexisNexis and whether its data reaches other agencies through the Virtual Crime Center. We asked because Faribault was on LexisNexis's list and was still showing up on the company's public crime map.

The department's records manager answered on July 1 that the city no longer used LexisNexis. Faribault had launched its own Police Public Data Dashboard in 2024 and did not have access to the LexisNexis product. The next morning, July 2, LOGIS shut off Faribault's feed. A LOGIS technical analyst wrote to his colleagues that "Faribault's data feed was just turned off this morning," and that he would check the following week to confirm the data had stopped.

On July 7, not yet knowing any of that, FinePrint followed up with a screenshot showing incidents attributed to Faribault on the LexisNexis map as recent as June 25 and asked how they were getting there. The records manager's answer, posted on MuckRock:

"After your inquiry, I checked with LOGIS and determined that although we no longer were using LexisNexis, our feed to it had not been fully closed. It has been terminated now."

She added that the LexisNexis feed pulled from the department's RMS, "meaning only calls that generated a full police report were included." In other words, the feed drew on the department's official incident reports rather than raw 911 calls. LexisNexis's own public roster shows Faribault's last upload on July 2.

The city had moved on from the product in 2024. The data kept going because the feed at LOGIS had never been closed.

LOGIS asked. Twice.

The July 2 email that reported Faribault's shutoff opens with a recap of how LOGIS had handled this before.

In August 2022, LexisNexis started charging agencies for its Community Crime Map, which had been free. LOGIS wrote to every member agency's records manager on August 3, 2022 to explain what that meant. "Even though you likely do not have access, the data is still flowing to LN," the message said. "If you want us to stop the data feed, by agency, please let us know."

Two agencies said yes. Owatonna's police chief told staff to pull the map from the city website because, without access, it was no longer accurate, and the department asked LOGIS to remove its feed. LOGIS disabled it the same day. The Rice County Sheriff's Office asked for the same that December. Both requests answered LOGIS's price-change notice, years before Operation Metro Surge. Neither is on LexisNexis's 2026 list, and LexisNexis's roster shows Owatonna's last upload in August 2022 and Rice County's in December 2022. Every other agency on the LOGIS feed kept sending.

Then this summer, after Faribault, LOGIS raised it again. A slide prepared for the July 21 meeting of the LOGIS Police Executive Steering Committee, the committee of member agency representatives that oversees LOGIS's police systems, carried this reminder:

"Unless LOGIS Public Safety was notified to discontinue, your data is still flowing to LexisNexis. Likely it is no longer on the Community Crime Map but we believe LexisNexis might be using it on the backend. Please notify LOGIS Public Safety if you no longer want your data going to LexisNexis."

The next slide listed the agencies still contributing. The draft minutes from that meeting do not record any discussion of the item, and none of the July emails we received show an agency asking to be turned off.

LOGIS was also still maintaining the feed. Through July its staff worked a separate ticket with LexisNexis engineers about how incident times were formatted before being sent. The cooperative was keeping the pipe in good working order and telling its members how to close it, at the same time.

Who is still sending

LOGIS's July 21 slide named these agencies as still contributing:

Apple Valley PD, Bloomington PD, Brooklyn Center PD, Crystal PD, Faribault PD, Golden Valley PD, Lakeville PD, Maple Grove PD, Northfield PD, Orono PD, Richfield PD, Robbinsdale PD, and the Steele County Sheriff's Office.

Faribault had already been shut off by then. LexisNexis's own roster also shows Richfield's last upload on July 9, and the records do not say why. The other eleven were still uploading in late October.

LexisNexis's January list is broader. Here are the 71 agencies still on it after Faribault, with the company's misspellings corrected:

Sheriff's offices: Anoka County, Dakota County, Isanti County, Mille Lacs County, Ramsey County, Renville County, Scott County, Sherburne County, Stearns County, Steele County.

Police departments: Anoka, Apple Valley, Becker, Belle Plaine, Big Lake, Blaine, Bloomington, Brooklyn Park, Burnsville, Centennial Lakes, Columbia Heights, Coon Rapids, Cottage Grove, Crystal, Eagan, Eden Prairie, Elk River, Elko New Market, Ely, Farmington, Foley, Forest Lake, Fridley, Golden Valley, Hastings, Hopkins, Inver Grove Heights, Jordan, Lakeville, Lino Lakes, Maple Grove, Maplewood, Mendota Heights, Metro Transit, Minnetonka, Mounds View, New Hope, New Prague, Northfield, Orono, Osseo, Plymouth, Princeton, Prior Lake, Proctor, Ramsey, Robbinsdale, Rogers, Rosemount, Roseville, Savage, Shakopee, South St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Louis Park, Stillwater, West St. Paul, Woodbury.

Three entries are ambiguous as LexisNexis wrote them: "Rice PD," "Spring Lake PD" (likely Spring Lake Park), and "White Bear PD" (likely White Bear Lake). Brooklyn Center and Richfield appear on LOGIS's slide but not on LexisNexis's list.

The list is undated and LexisNexis maintains it by hand, so a department could have joined or left since it was written. That is a question each of these agencies can answer in one email to its records vendor. Every one of them had the same option Faribault had.

Cook County closed the gap with a law

Asking agencies one at a time is slow. Cook County, Illinois, tried something else.

Cook County's jail data reached ICE through a contractor. The State's Attorney's Office paid a company called Appriss to run VINE, the service that alerts crime victims when someone is released from jail. A clause in the contract let Appriss share that jail data with LexisNexis, which sold access to ICE. The county's sanctuary rules, in place since 2011, bound county employees and not the companies the county hired.

In October, the Cook County Board passed an ordinance barring every company with a county contract from giving residents' personal information to immigration agents without a criminal warrant or judicial order, and from passing it to data brokers at all. The ban lasts for the life of the contract and after it ends, and residents whose information is shared in violation can sue the contractor to stop it. The rule follows the data instead of the employee, which is the part sanctuary policies have been missing. We have not found a Minnesota city or county with a rule like it.

Duluth and Oklahoma City said no

The best evidence that this is a choice comes from two cities that decided to limit or cut off data sharing.

Duluth's police department has subscribed to the Virtual Crime Center for years. LexisNexis says Duluth has been a customer since 2015. Its 2020 contract carried a "NO DATA CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSDEX" version of the addendum, and its 2022 renewal paperwork carried the standard contributor version, with the obligation to contribute and the irrevocable license. By January 2026, it was unclear even to LexisNexis whether Duluth was sending data, and the company had to check with its engineers. When residents filled the council chambers during Metro Surge to ask about ICE, the chief told the council that the department does not put its data into LexisNexis and that "ICE does not have access to data from the DPD." After that meeting, the department signed a new NO DATA CONTRIBUTIONS addendum, and the city and LexisNexis double-checked that nothing was flowing.

Oklahoma City went further. This past winter, council member James Cooper asked that the city's LexisNexis renewal be pulled for review because of the company's ties to ICE. In February a civil rights attorney testified against it, and the council deferred the vote. On February 26, a city official forwarded a draft amendment to council members with a note that read, "LexisNexis agreed to all our requirements without changes." The council adopted it on April 21. It bars LexisNexis from giving any user outside the local consortium access to Oklahoma City police data, "including any state or federal entity," and it overrides the irrevocable license. LexisNexis's roster shows more than 2.5 million Oklahoma City records behind that fence.

We are not aware of activists raising the issue with any of the other 71 agencies on LexisNexis's Minnesota list, and police data flowing to private data brokers has not been taken up at the state level. That could change after Tuesday's election, in which the DFL won the governor's office and both chambers of the Legislature, according to AP results, giving one party the votes to act on it in the next session.

In both Duluth and Oklahoma City, the change came after people asked questions in public. In Oklahoma City, LexisNexis accepted the city's terms on the first draft. Faribault got its feed turned off with one request to LOGIS. The other 71 agencies on LexisNexis's list can do the same.

Every agency named here has a record in the [Accurint Files tracker](https://accurintfiles.fineprint.report), and the Minnesota feed counts are in the [data explorer](https://accurintfiles.fineprint.report/data-explorer).