LexisNexis told police departments nationwide to call the company before answering our public records requests

The CEO of LexisNexis Government Risk Solutions sent a notice to police departments across the country on July 1 asking them to contact LexisNexis before responding to public records requests. They warn about the MuckRock campaign that FinePrint has been running for the past year focused on the flow of local police data to federal immigration, law enforcement, and military agencies.

FinePrint has filed 108 such requests on MuckRock, which simplifies the public records request process, and makes all responsive files available to the public. In fact, we chose MuckRock for that reason: to ensure researchers, advocates, and journalists would have access to the same files we use to write our stories. LexisNexis chose to warn law enforcement agencies about the records requests, with their next paragraph providing insight into why they chose to send this email nationwide.

"We want to make you aware of an ongoing effort utilizing the MuckRock public records platform to obtain records concerning Accurint, AVCC, and other public safety technologies used by law enforcement agencies nationwide," the email reads. It then asks every recipient to notify a dedicated address, LNFOIA@lnssi.com, "if your agency receives a public records request seeking our documents or information."

The email goes further than a request. It tells departments that giving LexisNexis a first look is already part of the deal: "As reflected in our agreements or in practice, agencies will provide LexisNexis with notice and, where permitted by applicable law, an opportunity to review and identify proprietary business information or other protected information before disclosure."

Public records laws put the disclosure decision on the government agency. The CEO, Haywood Talcove, acknowledges this in the next paragraph of the email, then offers to supply the material "agency counsel may wish to consider before disclosure decisions are made." By the end of the email, Talcove requests agencies check with LexisNexis for permission to produce relevant documents, and that they speak to agency counsel.

Before the email was ever sent, FinePrint received pushback on one of our requests to a police department in Minnesota. Months later, we obtained emails between that agency and LexisNexis.

When a department calls LexisNexis

We know what this process produces because we watched it happen two months before the CEO put it in writing.

On May 11, a FinePrint contributor filed a Minnesota Government Data Practices Act request with the Maplewood Police Department for the technical documents behind the system copying local data into LexisNexis's private database.

Maplewood PD then emailed their LexisNexis account manager. "We are not sure how to respond or what they are looking for, but I was hoping someone on your team could help us out."

LexisNexis's answer, a week after that, opens with a disclaimer: "my legal team advised that we cannot tell a customer how to comply with its obligations in responding to a document request under applicable law." The next sentence tells the customer how to comply. Records held by LexisNexis rather than the department, in the company's view, "are not producible." Records the department does hold, if LexisNexis drafted them or they contain LexisNexis intellectual property, would need the company's confidential material redacted, and "that would need to be determined by LexisNexis technical."

On June 1, Maplewood told us it had no responsive records.

Minnesota law does not read the way LexisNexis described it. Under the Data Practices Act, data a private contractor creates, collects or maintains while performing a government function is government data, and the agency, not the vendor, decides what counts as a trade secret. Whether the mapping tables sit on a server in Maplewood or in Alpharetta, Georgia, the police department is the party that has to answer for them.

Maplewood has paid LexisNexis for AVCC since January 2025, and its records system sends data to the company every hour. A feed like that does not configure itself; someone specified which fields would be copied and documented the extensive work needed to automate hourly data copies. Maplewood's first answer was that whatever was written down was not in Maplewood's possession.

Note: After Maplewood's initial refusal, FinePrint requested that they conduct an additional search, while also submitting another records request. The same lieutenant that spoke to LexisNexis and originally stated there were no responsive documents changed course and provided a lengthy and insightful written response, and produced several important documents providing insight into how agencies set up and choose what data to share with LexisNexis. Less than a month after these documents were released to FinePrint, LexisNexis sent out the nationwide warning.

Other departments found the file

Maplewood is an outlier for how little it originally produced. Dearborn, Michigan received a similar request and returned a spreadsheet listing all 1,405 categories of report the department generates and whether each one is shared. Every category was. Medical assists, juvenile suicide attempts, child abuse reports and a category labeled Illegal Entry - Immigration are all marked viewable by law enforcement through LexisNexis. Other departments have produced the same kind of classification sheet. It is a document LexisNexis generates for its customers, which is the category of record that LexisNexis told Maplewood to treat as the company's property.

What the CEO's email says versus what the contract says

Talcove's notice makes two claims about the platform. Both appear to contradict the terms of LexisNexis's own contracts with local police departments.

First: "agencies retain control over their data, including how it is used and who is authorized to access it." Maplewood's own contract, the AVCC XML Addendum it signed in January 2025, grants LexisNexis a "paid up, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, compile, aggregate, create derivative works, transfer, transmit, publish and distribute" the department's contributed records. The license survives cancellation of the subscription. A department can stop sending new records. It cannot get the old ones back, and it does not choose which of LexisNexis's other customers, including federal agencies, can search them.

Second: "comprehensive auditing and accountability capabilities help agencies monitor system use." While documents reviewed by FinePrint show agencies can audit how their own police search LexisNexis, multiple agencies have stated they have no idea how their local records are searched, used, or downloaded by the tens of thousands of users outside the department who have access to the data. "We are not aware of any function that will allow us to audit external agencies and how they used the data they see on their instance of AVCC," the Records Supervisor of the Downers Grove police department in Illinois wrote about whether they can audit how their local data is used. She added "we are not aware of any way to restrict AVCC contributions," responding to a request about whether they can choose who sees their data. Any agency that LexisNexis chooses to sell data access to will see the local records.

Illinois' state law reads:

"Unless presented with a federal criminal warrant, or otherwise required by federal law, a law enforcement agency or official may not...

(4) permit immigration agents use of agency facilities or equipment, including any agency electronic databases...

(5) enter into or maintain any agreement regarding direct access to any electronic database or other data-sharing platform maintained by any law enforcement agency..."

Instead of sharing directly with ICE, local agencies launder their data through LexisNexis, providing indirect access to immigration authorities seeking to identify and deport individuals based on interactions with local police. In Illinois, an ICE agent admitted to using this system to deport a man.

What comes next

The July 1 email confirms something we had inferred from the pattern of responses: when a department receives our request, their first call is often to LexisNexis. Despite what state laws say, LexisNexis may claim that the requested records belong to them and are not releasable. That is now LexisNexis's position, in writing, from the CEO.

Every department that received Talcove's email has a copy of it, and every department that followed its instructions has a message to LNFOIA@lnssi.com. Both are public records, and FinePrint has requested them from dozens of departments.

Documents: LexisNexis Important Notice Regarding Public Records Requests (July 1, 2026): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28590019-lexisnexis-important-notice-re-public-records-request/

Maplewood PD email chain with LexisNexis (May 2026): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28591122-lexisnexis-email-about-data-request-maplewood-pd-mn/