How many Flock cameras are in the US?
138,636 ALPR (automated license plate reader) camera locations are documented across 50 US states as of September 4, 2026, including Flock Safety cameras and those from other vendors.
That is a floor, and the distinction matters. It counts cameras that a volunteer has physically observed and recorded in OpenStreetMap. The true national number is unknown — not estimated badly, genuinely unknown — and anyone quoting a precise figure is either citing Flock Safety's own marketing about its own hardware, or guessing.
- 138,636
- Documented ALPR cameras
- 50
- States with documented cameras
- September 4, 2026
- Count last refreshed
A floor, not a total
Why there is no official count
ALPR cameras get bought one contract at a time. A police department here, a city council there, a school district, a homeowners' association. Each purchase is its own procurement, often approved in a routine consent agenda, and none of them report into any central register. Flock Safety, as a private company, discloses what it chooses to disclose. There is no equivalent of a licensing body or a public infrastructure inventory.
So the public number is assembled from the outside: public-records requests, council minutes, local reporting, agency transparency portals, and — the part FlockScanner draws on — volunteers who photograph and map cameras they can see from the street.
What the 138,636 figure counts
- Cameras tagged in OpenStreetMap as
surveillance:type=ALPR. - All vendors, not just Flock Safety — Rekor, Motorola/Vigilant and Genetec build comparable hardware.
- Fixed and mobile ALPR units, plus traffic cameras recorded as also reading plates.
- United States only. Canadian coverage is tracked separately on the Canada page.
What it does not count
- Cameras nobody has mapped yet — the single largest source of undercount.
- Cameras installed since the last volunteer survey of an area.
- Private ALPR systems on commercial property that aren't visible from a public street.
- Mobile readers mounted on patrol vehicles, which have no fixed location to map.
It also, in the other direction, may still list a camera that has been physically removed — a real and growing category, as more cities cancel their contracts.
Documented cameras by state
| State | Documented cameras |
|---|---|
| California | 20,632 |
| Texas | 16,740 |
| Florida | 9,996 |
| Georgia | 9,763 |
| Illinois | 7,219 |
| Ohio | 6,805 |
| New York | 4,423 |
| Indiana | 3,733 |
| North Carolina | 3,679 |
| Michigan | 3,664 |
Related
Common questions
How many Flock cameras are in the US?
Nobody publishes an authoritative national total. FlockScanner documents 138,636 ALPR (automated license plate reader) camera locations across 50 US states as of September 4, 2026, sourced from OpenStreetMap contributors who observed each camera from a public street. Flock Safety has publicly described its own network in the range of tens of thousands of cameras across thousands of US communities, but it does not release a location list, and its figures cover only its own hardware — not competing ALPR vendors. Treat 138,636 as a verified floor across all vendors, not an estimate of the true total.
Why does nobody know the exact number of Flock cameras?
Three reasons. Flock Safety is a private company and is not required to disclose deployment figures or locations. Cameras are bought by individual police departments, cities, school districts and homeowners' associations under separate contracts, so there is no central registry to consult. And no federal or state agency has been given the job of maintaining one. What exists publicly is assembled piecemeal from public-records requests, city council records, and volunteer mapping.
How many Flock cameras are in my state?
Documented counts vary widely by state — currently led by California (20,632), Texas (16,740), Florida (9,996). FlockScanner publishes a page for every US state with its own documented count and city breakdown. Bear in mind that a state's count reflects how thoroughly volunteers have mapped it as much as how many cameras are installed there.
Is the number of Flock cameras growing?
The documented count on FlockScanner grows for two different reasons that are worth keeping apart: new cameras being installed, and existing cameras being mapped by volunteers for the first time. Separately, a growing number of US cities have voted to cancel or pause their Flock contracts and remove cameras, which reduces real deployment without necessarily showing up in the mapped count until someone updates OpenStreetMap.
As of September 4, 2026, FlockScanner maps 138,636 documented ALPR (automated license plate reader) cameras across 50 US states, including Flock Safety cameras, sourced from OpenStreetMap and refreshed nightly. That figure is a lower bound on the number actually installed — it counts what volunteers have mapped, not what exists.
Camera location data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL).