Who operates these cameras

Read these as a sample, not a census. Most documented cameras carry no operator tag at all, so an operator’s figure here is a floor — the cameras somebody bothered to attribute — and a department with more cameras than another may simply have been mapped more thoroughly. Names are reproduced as volunteers entered them, so the same operator can appear under more than one spelling. Sorting them into public and private is our own classification of free text, not a field in the data: it reads keywords and known place names, and it will occasionally be wrong. Tell us when it is.

Private operators

89 non-government operators account for 4,191 documented cameras. These are the readers in retail parking lots, private communities, and commercial property — the part of the network that never appears in a city council vote. The readers in two national chains’ lots are covered in Flock cameras at Lowe’s and Home Depot. Whether a driver can decline to be read by one is its own question: there is no general opt-out, and the SafeList is not one.

Public agencies

Police departments, sheriffs’ offices, and other units of government. Agencies also leave: 45 cities, counties, and agencies have dropped, paused, or refused Flock contracts in the decisions we track.

Recorded as the vendor

Cameras whose operator was recorded as the manufacturer itself. In most cases that reflects how the camera was labelled in the field rather than who queries the data. The manufacturer index tracks the same companies by hardware footprint instead.

Operator names come from the operator tag on each OpenStreetMap node, aggregated across every documented camera. The underlying data is available in bulk on our download page, and the collection method is described in our methodology.