A LexisNexis Setup Document Shows the Vendor Prefers Raw, Unfiltered Access to Police Records Systems

A LexisNexis setup document shows the company installs software inside a police department's own network to copy records straight out of the agency's systems and ship them to LexisNexis servers. The six-page Technical Setup Requirements, written for agencies turning on Accurint Crime Analysis, the Accurint Virtual Crime Center, and Lumen, is the clearest description we have seen of how data contribution to the Public Safety Data Exchange actually works.

The mechanism is an automated pipeline. LexisNexis builds a custom interface it calls the PSDex Data Client on a machine inside the agency network. On a daily schedule, that client extracts read-only data from the Records Management System and Computer-Aided Dispatch, reformats it, and uploads it to LexisNexis over an encrypted transfer. To keep the job from breaking, the service account it runs on is set with a password that never expires. LexisNexis is given VPN access into the agency network to build and maintain the whole thing.

One line in the document is worth the price of admission. Under networking, it states that limited copies and filtered views are not preferred, and that raw access to the unfiltered records system is preferred. The default configuration is built to pull the whole RMS, not a curated slice of it. For a department that assumed it was sharing a narrow set of fields, that is the sentence to read twice.

The document also publishes the exact network destinations a department's firewall has to allow, among them PSTRANSFER, PSIMPORTER, and API.PSDEX at lexisnexisrisk.com, the Community Crime Map servers, and a Lumen environment hosted in Amazon's GovCloud. Those endpoints are a fingerprint. A police network that is talking to them is running the contribution pipeline, and an IT department can confirm that on its own without asking the vendor anything.

This is a generic vendor document, not a single agency's contract, so on its own it does not prove that any one department contributes. What it shows is the plumbing. The AVCC XML Addendum is the legal permission to contribute; this is the machinery that carries the records out the door. It is also a reminder that Community Crime Map is fed by the same client, which is why a public crime map is rarely just a map.