UT Austin police are the first university force confirmed to feed records into LexisNexis's national data exchange

The University of Texas at Austin signed its police department up to contribute records to the LexisNexis Public Safety Data Exchange, making UTPD the first university police force confirmed as a contributor to the private national database.

The commitment sits in a 26-page agreement package, fully executed August 1, 2024, that FinePrint has published on DocumentCloud. The key document is titled "Accurint Virtual Crime Center/Accurint Crime Analysis/LexisNexis Community Crime Map/AVCC XML Addendum - Consortium Sub-Agency." Section I.2 carries the obligation: "In exchange for good and valuable consideration, including access to PSDEX, Customer hereby agrees to contribute public safety information (the 'Customer Data Contribution') that it and other PSDEX customers may use for analysis, investigations and reporting or other applications to accomplish their mission."

Every submission counts. Under the addendum, each submission to LexisNexis "with respect to an incident or subject constitutes a Customer Data Contribution." And the license does not expire: Section II.1 grants LexisNexis "a paid up, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, compile, aggregate, create derivative works, transfer, transmit, publish and distribute" those contributions to other PSDEX customers. By LexisNexis's own 2024 count, PSDEX pools records from more than 2,100 agencies.

The price tag explains the business model. The university's own addendum to the agreement caps total compensation to LexisNexis at $0 for the term. No money changes hands, because the department pays with its records: access to the national pool in exchange for feeding it.

The same envelope points in two directions at once. The University Addendum requires LexisNexis to hold "Confidential Student Information" in strict confidence under FERPA, and states that the contractor "will not provide any of University's Data to anyone except University." Twenty pages later, the AVCC addendum licenses the police department's data contributions to every other PSDEX customer, irrevocably. The clauses may reconcile, since the University Addendum defers to LexisNexis's Master Terms on data provided through the services. Nothing in the package spells out for a student how both can be true.

UT signed as a consortium sub-agency. The lead agency named on the addendum is the City of Austin/Austin Police Department, which procured the Accurint Virtual Crime Center for the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, the Central Texas fusion center, under a five-year cooperative contract worth up to $1.8 million. The UT addendum is the first executed member-level contribution agreement from that deployment to reach the public record, and it confirms how the deployment works: member agencies ride on Austin PD's master contract but individually sign the full contribution obligation. Austin ISD's school police, Georgetown PD, Round Rock PD, and the Travis County Sheriff's Office were named in the same procurement and can now be asked for the same form by its exact title.

One checkbox is easy to miss. UT initialed the option stating it "will not provide a de-identified subset of its data to third parties." That opt-out keeps UT records off public-facing crime maps. The data still flows to the exchange, where PSDEX customers are permitted to "search and access information beyond their jurisdiction." The public sees nothing; more than 2,100 agencies can query.

What the package does not show is exactly which fields leave campus. A campus police department's records are records about students at a university that enrolled a record 55,000 of them in fall 2025: the ones suspected of crimes, and the ones who call to report an assault, a theft, a stalker. The addendum makes each incident-level submission a contribution and names a UTPD lieutenant as the submissions contact, but the field-level schema, including whether victim and witness names and contact details ride along, is not in the public record. LexisNexis has sold Accurint access to federal customers, including a contract with ICE that ran through early 2026. Whether records contributed by a university police department surface in federal queries is the question this paperwork raises and does not answer.

Those answers exist on paper. Agencies configure the automated feed with data translation guides and field-mapping documents, and those records are reachable under the Texas Public Information Act.

Source: Executed agreement, LexisNexis Risk Solutions FL Inc. and The University of Texas at Austin (UT Police Department), July 24 to August 1, 2024. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28497426-fe_agreement__lexisnexis_risk_solutions_fl_inc_-_ut_police_department/