How to find the Flock cameras near you

To find Flock cameras near you, open a map built from the OpenStreetMap ALPR dataset and centre it on your location. It documents 127,344 license plate readers across the US. The Flock Camera app does this on your phone, shows which way each camera faces, and warns you before you reach one.

The short version

There is no official public list of Flock Safety camera locations. Flock Safety does not publish one, and in most states the police departments that operate the cameras are not required to either.

What exists instead is a crowd-sourced map. Volunteers — organised largely through the DeFlock project — record camera positions in OpenStreetMap, the same open database that powers thousands of other maps. Anyone can read it, and anyone can add to it.

That dataset currently holds 127,344 plate readers across the United States and 137,416 worldwide. Of the US total, 104,883 are tagged as Flock Safety equipment; the rest are Motorola Solutions, Genetec, Axis, Leonardo, Rekor and a dozen other brands that do the same job.

Three ways to check your area

1. The map on this site

The camera map plots every documented reader in the dataset. Search an address or let it use your location. It works in any browser, on any device, with nothing to install.

2. Your town's page

We publish a page for over a thousand US cities and towns, each with the camera count, the brands in use, the agencies operating them, and a map of the exact positions. Start at coverage by state and drill down to your town.

3. The app, if you drive

A web map answers "where are they". It cannot help you while you are driving. That is the gap the app fills.

Why direction matters more than position

This is the part most camera maps get wrong. A plate reader is not a motion sensor with 360° coverage. It is a camera pointed one way down one approach of one road. Whether it photographed your car depends on which way you were travelling relative to the lens.

The OpenStreetMap dataset records a direction tag for 121,036 of the 127,344 US cameras — about 95%. Almost every mapped camera has a known facing. Most maps discard that field and draw a plain dot. Flock Camera draws the view cone, so you can see what each camera actually watches.

A camera 40 metres away pointing away from you has not seen your plate. A camera 300 metres ahead pointing straight at your lane has. Position alone cannot tell you which situation you are in.

How to do it in the app

1. Open the Map tab. It centres on you. Red pins are Flock Safety cameras; amber pins are every other ALPR brand.
2. Zoom to street level. The pins grow view cones showing the direction each camera faces.
3. Tap any pin for the brand, the operator, the compass bearing, what it watches, and when a volunteer last verified it on the ground.
4. Pull up Area Stats for a count of every reader in the region you are looking at, broken down by brand and operator.
5. Arm alerts in the Alerts tab if you want a warning while you drive. Choose a distance from 200 m to 1.5 km.

The entire camera database ships inside the app and stays on your phone. Your location is compared against it locally and is never transmitted, so the map works with no signal and no account.

What to do if your area looks empty

An empty map means nobody has mapped your area yet — not that there are no cameras. Coverage follows volunteer effort, so it is dense in cities where the DeFlock community is active and thin in rural counties.

Roughly 24,000 of the US cameras sit outside any city boundary entirely, on county roads and interstate approaches between towns. If your town page shows a low number, the readers on the highway leading into it may still be mapped.

If you spot a camera that is not on the map, you can add it to OpenStreetMap. Every app and website using the dataset improves at once, including this one.