Open data
Download the data
Everything this site renders comes from one snapshot, rebuilt every six hours. These are the same figures, in formats you can analyse. Free to use, including commercially and for reporting, under the terms below.
Snapshot of August 14, 2026 · 130,300 documented locations
| File | Format | Size | Contents |
|---|---|---|---|
| cameras-by-city.csv | CSV | 2,231 rows | One row per indexed city: camera count, land area, density, the vendor breakdown, a bounding box, and a link to the city page. |
| cameras-by-state.csv | CSV | 51 rows | One row per state and territory: statewide total, how many of those fall inside indexed cities, and the vendor breakdown. |
| cameras-by-city.geojson | GeoJSON | 2,231 features | The same city-level table as point features, centred on each place's bounding box, for dropping straight into QGIS or a web map. |
Every individual camera
The files above are aggregates. The full set of 130,300 individual points is published as a PMTiles archive — a single cloud-optimised file that a map client reads by byte range rather than downloading whole.
cameras.pmtiles — the archive behind our interactive map. The URL is versioned by build; re-read this page for the current one.
If you want the raw upstream instead, every location originates as an OpenStreetMap node tagged surveillance:type=ALPR, queryable directly through the Overpass API. Our methodology documents the exact query and every transformation applied to it.
Licence and attribution
Camera locations are © OpenStreetMap contributors and are published under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0. That licence travels with the data: you may copy, adapt, and redistribute it, including commercially, provided you attribute OpenStreetMap and release any adapted database under the same terms.
City boundaries and land areas come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 Cartographic Boundary Files, which are in the public domain. The aggregation, vendor classification, and city assignment are ours; a credit to Finding Flock is appreciated but not required.
One caveat worth carrying into any analysis: these are volunteer reports, not an official inventory. They show where cameras have been seen. Absence of a point is not evidence that no camera exists, and the record grows partly because mapping effort grows — we wrote about exactly that.