By the numbers
License plate reader statistics
No government publishes a count of automated license plate readers, so every figure below comes from the same place this site’s map does: 132,681 cameras documented in the field by OpenStreetMap contributors and refreshed every six hours. These are counts of what has been mapped, which is a floor, not a census. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite them — the terms are at the bottom of this page.
Snapshot of August 18, 2026
132,681
cameras documented nationwide
82.3%
are Flock Safety hardware, where a make was recorded
51
states and territories with documented readers
2,262
cities with ten or more documented readers
1.60
readers per square mile in the median indexed city
4.9×
more readers mapped than twelve months earlier
Growth since 2019
The series below counts ALPR nodes in OpenStreetMap at the start of each month, from 30 in January 2019 to 110,433 in July 2026.
This measures documentation, not deployment. A camera enters the count on the day a volunteer maps it, which may be years after it was installed, so the steep climb since 2024 reflects a mapping effort at least as much as a building boom. The series also covers the contiguous United States only. What the number can and cannot support is set out in our explainer on how many readers there are.
surveillance:type=ALPR in the contiguous United States, by month. This is a record of when cameras were documented, not when they were installed. Source: ohsome API over the full OSM history, © OpenStreetMap contributors.View the numbers as a table
| Month | Documented |
|---|---|
| January 2019 | 30 |
| January 2020 | 47 |
| January 2021 | 73 |
| January 2022 | 123 |
| January 2023 | 368 |
| January 2024 | 1,145 |
| January 2025 | 7,618 |
| January 2026 | 63,605 |
| July 2026 | 110,433 |
Who makes them
Manufacturer as recorded on each camera, across all 132,681 documented readers. “Unknown” is a camera mapped without a make; “other vendors” collects makes below the reporting threshold.
| Manufacturer | Cameras | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety | 109,224 | 82.3% |
| Motorola Solutions | 6,733 | 5.1% |
| Unknown | 6,030 | 4.5% |
| Other vendors | 5,949 | 4.5% |
| Genetec | 3,074 | 2.3% |
| Leonardo/ELSAG | 1,126 | 0.8% |
| Neology | 545 | 0.4% |
5 makes are tracked individually; each has its own page in the manufacturer index.
Where they are
States with the most documented readers
| State | Cameras | Share of US |
|---|---|---|
| California | 19,828 | 15% |
| Texas | 16,032 | 12% |
| Georgia | 9,270 | 7.0% |
| Florida | 9,171 | 6.9% |
| Illinois | 6,838 | 5.2% |
| Ohio | 6,571 | 5.0% |
| New York | 4,442 | 3.3% |
| North Carolina | 3,605 | 2.7% |
| Michigan | 3,574 | 2.7% |
| Indiana | 3,562 | 2.7% |
Cities with the most documented readers
| City | Cameras | Per sq. mile |
|---|---|---|
| Houston, TX | 2,345 | 3.7 |
| New York, NY | 1,217 | 4.0 |
| Dallas, TX | 878 | 2.6 |
| San Diego, CA | 727 | 2.2 |
| Chicago, IL | 705 | 3.1 |
| San Jose, CA | 551 | 3.1 |
| Atlanta, GA | 547 | 4.0 |
| Detroit, MI | 545 | 3.9 |
| Indianapolis city (balance), IN | 543 | 1.5 |
| Oakland, CA | 520 | 9.3 |
Density varies far more than raw counts: the median indexed city holds 1.60 readers per square mile, and 2,262 cities are ranked against each other on the camera index.
Who operates them
Most documented cameras carry no operator tag, so these figures cover the 20,579 readers attributed to 701 named operators — a sample, not a census. Of those, 617 are units of government running 14,518 cameras, 80 are private parties running 3,862, and the rest were recorded under a manufacturer’s own name. Sorting names into those groups is our own reading of free text, described on the operator index.
| Private operator | Cameras |
|---|---|
| Lowe's | 1,590 |
| The Home Depot | 1,031 |
| Simon Property Group | 122 |
| Meijer | 90 |
| Lowes | 71 |
Every one of these figures is a floor. Volunteers enter the operator by hand, so one company can arrive under several spellings that are tallied separately here, and cameras nobody attributed are not counted at all. A larger operator is not necessarily a more heavily surveilled one — it may simply have been mapped more thoroughly.
How they are installed
Where a volunteer recorded how a camera is mounted — 28,305 readers in indexed cities — 73% sit on a dedicated pole rather than reusing a traffic signal, street lamp, or wall. Where a zone was recorded, 71,780 readers watch traffic, far ahead of parking areas and entrances.
Both figures are floors, and for a structural reason: the pipeline keeps only each city’s five most-recorded mount and zone values, so anything past the fifth is not counted here.
Law and contracts
There is no federal ALPR statute. 19 states have one specific to the technology; 15 of those cap how long plate reads may be kept, from three minutes in New Hampshire to 30 months in Georgia, and 6 impose a warrant or court-order requirement on at least some access. Statutes were last verified August 8, 2026.
On the contract side, 14 US cities, counties, and agencies in our tracker have canceled, declined to renew, paused, or voted down Flock Safety agreements, each verified against a news report or public record.
How to cite this page
These figures are free to reuse, including commercially and for reporting. The camera data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, published under the Open Database License; please carry that attribution wherever you use it.
Finding Flock, “License plate reader statistics,” https://www.findingflock.com/stats. Snapshot of August 18, 2026.
Every figure refreshes every six hours, so quote a number with the date it was read rather than as a fixed total. The underlying tables are downloadable on the data page, and the collection method, limitations, and corrections process are described in our methodology. Questions and corrections: contact@findingflock.com.