San Luis Obispo police signed an agreement feeding local records into a national LexisNexis database

San Luis Obispo Police Department signed an agreement in 2019 committing its records to a national LexisNexis database that federal agencies can access. We obtained the signed agreement through a public records request. The full document is on DocumentCloud, linked below.

Some background for readers who are new to this. LexisNexis Risk Solutions sells police departments a software platform called the Accurint Virtual Crime Center, or AVCC. The platform's pitch is search: it lets a detective run a name against billions of commercial records, addresses, utility hookups, and the pooled records of other police departments. That pool is the Public Safety Data Exchange, or PSDEX, a private database LexisNexis compiles from the agencies that use its products. Departments join the pool by signing a short contract called an addendum. In exchange for access to everyone else's data, the department agrees to contribute its own. The contribution is the price of admission, and it rarely appears as a line item anywhere a city council or the public would notice.

San Luis Obispo signed the standard contributor version of that addendum on May 29, 2019. Captain Jeff Smith executed it for the department. Section I.2 states the department "agrees to contribute public safety information that may be used for analysis, investigations and reporting." Section II.1 grants LexisNexis "a paid up, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license" to use, aggregate, and distribute that data in PSDEX "and all successor databases." Irrevocable means what it sounds like: canceling the subscription does not claw the data back. The addendum also states that all data "will be retained by LN and remain accessible by other PSDEX customers" unless the department indicates otherwise. City purchase orders show the AVCC subscription remained active through at least 2024.

Why this matters here. San Luis Obispo is covered by SB54, the California sanctuary law that restricts local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. LexisNexis also holds contracts with federal agencies, including a widely reported 2021 ICE contract for investigative data services. A department that cannot hand records to federal immigration authorities directly can still feed a private database that sits outside those restrictions. That structural gap is what this project documents. To be clear, we have not documented a specific incident involving San Luis Obispo data reaching a federal agency, and the department may not have understood the contribution terms as anything more than software boilerplate. The signed agreement is the record of what the city committed to, and now it is public.

The addendum is on DocumentCloud, and the records request that produced it is public on MuckRock.