Where this data comes from

Camera locations come from OpenStreetMap, the volunteer-maintained world map. Contributors who observe a license plate reader document it as a node tagged surveillance:type=ALPR, often recording the manufacturer, the operator, the mount, and the compass direction the camera faces. We retrieve every such node inside the United States through the Overpass API, normalize it, and render it on our map.

The result is independent of every camera vendor, police department, and government agency. It is also auditable: each camera’s detail panel on our map links to the underlying OpenStreetMap record, including its full edit history.

The dataset refreshes automatically every six hours: a scheduled job re-queries OpenStreetMap, validates the result, and republishes the map tiles and statistics. The data on this site was last refreshed on August 14, 2026.

Documentation lags installation. A camera appears here only after a volunteer records it. Absence from this map is not evidence a road is unwatched; new installations can take weeks or months to be documented, and some regions have few active contributors.

Removal lags too. Cameras that have been taken down may persist on the map until a contributor confirms the removal.

Details vary in completeness. Manufacturer is recorded for most cameras (about 82.4% are identified as Flock Safety), but operator and direction are present only where volunteers captured them. Duplicate reports of a single physical camera occasionally occur.

The national view is a rendering, not a census. At low zoom levels the map thins dense clusters for legibility; the counts shown in the side panel at street level reflect what is actually in view.

Camera data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and is available under the Open Database License (ODbL). If you reuse data from this site, attribute OpenStreetMap and share any derivative database under the same license. The basemap is rendered with OpenFreeMap using OpenMapTiles. Photographs of camera hardware on this site are from Wikimedia Commons under public-domain (CC0) dedications.

If a camera on this map is wrong, moved, or gone, the fastest fix is to edit the underlying record: open the camera’s panel on the map and choose “Fix it on OpenStreetMap.” Corrections made there reach this site with the next refresh, and every other project built on the same open data benefits as well.

Finding Flock documents where automated license plate readers are installed and how the technology works. Every statistic in our reporting cites a named source — a statute, a court record, a company statement, or published journalism — and figures drawn from this site’s own dataset are labeled as such.

We deliberately do not publish guidance on evading, disabling, or interfering with cameras or license plates. The purpose of this project is documentation: a public record of where this infrastructure stands and what it collects.

Corrections and challenges are welcome. If a statistic, claim, or camera location looks wrong, tell us — the about page explains how to reach us.

Finding Flock is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Flock Safety, Inc. or any surveillance vendor, and it accepts no funding from them. References to “Flock” are nominative: they identify the products being documented.