142,767 license plate readers, mapped.

A Flock camera is an automated license plate reader (ALPR) made by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that sells surveillance cameras to police departments, homeowners associations, and businesses. Its most common model, the Falcon, is a small black camera on a slim pole, usually powered by a tilted solar panel. It photographs every vehicle that passes and logs the plate, time, and location. Roughly 80% of the license plate readers documented on this site are made by Flock Safety.

Flock's cameras capture still photographs of passing vehicles and use computer vision to extract the license plate, state, vehicle make, type, and color, and distinguishing details such as bumper stickers, roof racks, and visible damage — a profile the company calls a "vehicle fingerprint." Records are timestamped and location-stamped, and are searchable by attribute even without a full plate. The company states its plate readers do not use facial recognition.

Flock Safety's default retention period is 30 days, after which footage is deleted unless it has been saved to an investigation. Actual retention varies by contract and by state law — Virginia, for example, caps ALPR retention at 21 days. Data accessed through inter-agency sharing networks may persist in other agencies' systems under their own policies.

There is no federal law governing automated license plate readers, and they are currently legal in most of the country. Roughly a third of states have statutes regulating how they can be used or how long data can be kept. Their constitutionality is actively being litigated: an ongoing Fourth Amendment challenge to Norfolk, Virginia's camera network is before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court's 2026 Chatrie decision on location tracking has sharpened the legal questions around long-term, warrantless location records.

Camera locations come from OpenStreetMap, where volunteers document license plate readers they observe, including the manufacturer and the direction the camera faces. Finding Flock refreshes its copy of that data, verifies its structure, and renders it here. The data is licensed under the Open Database License and is independent of any camera vendor, police department, or government agency. Because it is documented by volunteers, coverage lags reality: a camera missing from the map is not evidence there is no camera.

Add it to OpenStreetMap. Create a free OpenStreetMap account, drop a node where the camera stands, and tag it as a surveillance device of type ALPR — the map's editing tools and community guides walk through the exact tags. Once the edit is accepted, it will appear on Finding Flock after the next data refresh.

By May 2026, at least 80 American cities and counties had canceled, deactivated, or declined to renew Flock Safety contracts, according to the State of Surveillance tracking project, as reported by Newsweek. Reasons vary by city. A Los Angeles Police Department audit found a high rate of false-positive alerts; other councils pointed to reports of federal agencies accessing local camera data without authorization, to subscription costs, and to transparency concerns about how the systems were adopted and audited. Some cities later reinstated cameras under tighter policies.

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