Independent
A camera that reads every car
Flock Safety, an Atlanta company founded in 2017, sells solar-powered cameras that photograph every vehicle that passes and turn each picture into a searchable record. The cameras don’t only read plates; police can search by a car’s make, color and other features, and, in some cases, by describing it in plain English.
The company
About 120,000 cameras, by the company’s count
No government counts license plate cameras. Flock says it has . Volunteers who map the cameras on OpenStreetMap, most of them through a project called DeFlock, have found , which makes the company’s figure plausible as a floor.
Three ways to count Flock cameras
The highest figure comes from a researcher’s December 2025 list of Flock device records, obtained through an exposed company access token and reported by Jalopnik and The Intercept. Nobody has audited it, and it may include inactive units. TMI did not download it.
Mapped cameras by state
Cameras volunteers have found and tagged as Flock, not an official count. A low number can mean few cameras or little mapping.
Flock’s share of mapped plate readers
Who buys them
Bought locally, searched nationally
What sets Flock apart is the network. A department can share its cameras one-to-one, statewide or nationwide, and search everyone else’s in return. Flock told a senator that 75% of its police customers were enrolled in its National Lookup.
Two accounts of the Texas search
How far a search reaches
Federal agents, through local cameras
Federal immigration work reached Flock data mostly through local police searching on agents’ behalf, and sometimes through direct access. What audits and reporting have found:
What Flock has changed
Officers tracking partners
Most misuse cases that have come to light involve officers using the cameras to follow current or former partners. TMI does not name the officers or the people they tracked.
How many? It depends who’s counting
Flock says 99.99% of officers use the system properly. Its new audit tool flagged some recent cases; most earlier ones surfaced through victims’ complaints, the Institute for Justice found.
Other problems on the record
Red states, blue cities, and Congress
Opposition crosses party lines. In August, Texas paused state funding for the cameras and Florida ordered license plate readers off state highway land. A Republican senator held a hearing; the president said he likes them.
Cities and counties ending or rejecting license plate camera contracts, by month
Who said what
Public opinion
Reuters/Ipsos, September 2026, 1,167 adults: support or oppose Flock cameras in your community. Republicans and people 55 and older were in favor; Democrats and independents were against.
In court
State laws on license plate readers
Current law only, read from official statute and bill text. “None found” is not proof that no rule exists. Six states passed new license plate reader laws in 2026: Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, New Jersey, Connecticut and Kentucky.
Good at leads; less clear on crime
Police credit the cameras with finding stolen cars, missing people and suspects in major cases. The independent evidence that they reduce crime is thin: one multi-agency study, not yet peer reviewed, found fewer vehicle thefts and no significant effect on other property crime.
Cases police cite
How we got here
From the company’s founding to this week. Filter by who acted.
What the record can’t settle yet
Where credible sources disagree, and what would settle each question.
How we built this
Method
Camera counts compare Flock’s own figure with a TMI query of OpenStreetMap on Oct 15, 2026, counting plate readers tagged with Flock as the maker. Volunteers map cameras they see; the map is not a census, and a low count can mean little mapping. County and state rates use Census 2025 population estimates.
Contract endings come from the Institute for Justice’s tracker, which starts in mid-2025 and counts terminations, non-renewals, cancellations before installation and defunding, not pauses. No one publishes how many new contracts Flock signs, so this page does not show endings as a share of customers. State laws were read in official statute and bill text; only laws in force are mapped.
What we leave out
No camera locations: the map shows county totals only. Officers in misuse cases and the people they tracked are not named. A leaked list of Flock devices is described as reported, not used. Statements from Flock are labeled as company claims; advocacy groups, including those suing over the cameras, are labeled as such.
Map: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), mapped largely by DeFlock; US Census cartographic boundaries via us-atlas. Connecticut now reports by planning region, so its counties are shaded at the state rate.