People search / fusion

The city of Bloomington reached a settlement on Tuesday after claims that its officers incorrectly identified and jailed a man in 2021. The Minnesota Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the city agreed to settle a lawsuit over the wrongful arrest of Kylese Perryman. Bloomington agreed to pay Perryman monetary damages and change police training and policy. As part of the settlement, Bloomington agreed to adopt a procedure incorporating the KOPS alert guidelines contained in the BCA’s Minnesota Criminal Justice Information System Operating Manual, and to adopt a procedure stating that police officers are prohibited from issuing KOPS alerts as arrest warrants.

Former Fort Pierce police officer Josepher Crutchfield was arrested on September 8, 2026 on four felony counts of unauthorized computer access. Investigators said he accessed Flock license-plate reader databases 382 times between October 2025 and July 2026 to search a license plate registered to his ex-girlfriend, without a legitimate law enforcement purpose. He also searched other databases including FCIC, NCIC, DAVID and TLO. Crutchfield had resigned from the department on August 18, 2026. Chief David Smith said, “The conduct alleged in this case is unacceptable.”

A class action complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan alleges Thomson Reuters publicly displays five sequential digits of social security numbers through its CLEAR and Westlaw PeopleMap platforms, violating Michigan’s Social Security Number Privacy Act. The plaintiff seeks $1,000 per class member plus attorney fees. The complaint notes a prior similar suit, Nyman v. Thomson Reuters, was dismissed in state court.

On March 20, 2025 U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in the Northern District of Illinois granted final approval to a nationwide class settlement of consolidated Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and other state-law claims against Clearview AI, which built a database of tens of billions of face images scraped from social media and other websites. Rather than a cash fund, the class receives a 23 percent equity stake in the company, valued at about $51.75 million on an agreed $225 million company valuation as of January 2024, with an option to take 17 percent of revenue through September 2027 instead. The value is contingent on the class being able to monetize the stake. The deal followed the ACLU’s separate 2022 Illinois consent order barring Clearview from selling its database to private entities nationwide and to any Illinois entity, including police, for five years. European regulators have separately fined the company, including a €30.5 million Dutch penalty announced September 3, 2024.

Motherboard obtained procurement records showing the U.S. Secret Service paid about $400,000 each year from 2020 to 2022 for access to LexisNexis’ Virtual Crime Center, a system that links public records with agency data. The article also notes purchases by the State Department, FDA, and other agencies. LexisNexis sells the product under the Accurint brand for law enforcement and government.

In July 2022, Cook County held a public hearing on ICE’s use of data brokers. Records obtained by Just Futures Law and Mijente showed ICE’s Chicago field office ran over 13,000 people searches on LexisNexis between March and September 2021, generating over 1,800 reports. Cook County indirectly shares jail data with ICE through data broker Appriss, which supplies LexisNexis. LexisNexis holds a contract with ICE worth up to $22.1 million.

The City of Tacoma agreed to pay $311,607 to settle a public records lawsuit over its handling of records about a cell site simulator (Stingray) manufactured by Harris Corporation. The settlement, reached September 29, 2021, includes court-awarded penalties and an additional $75,000. The lawsuit was filed in 2016 by the ACLU on behalf of three residents, alleging violations of Washington’s Public Records Act. The dispute involved 11 withheld records and an operator’s manual. The city stated it believed resolving the matter was in the best interests of all parties.

In February 2018, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department purchased seven annual Dataminr licenses at a cost of almost $48,000, using State Homeland Security Grant program funds from the Department of Homeland Security. Six licenses went to the D.C. fusion center, and MPD had access to unlimited licenses for the first year, provided to the department’s Command Information Center.