Flock and ALPR Cameras by US State: The Count from OpenStreetMap

In January 2025 volunteers had mapped 7,622 license plate readers in the United States. On 28 September 2026 OpenStreetMap held 142,854, and 113,365 of them are tagged as made by Flock Safety. The count rose by 49,498 in the four and a half months since 1 May 2026 alone.

Our first article on Flock cameras explained what they are, how DeFlock maps them, and what the data shows for Europe. This one answers the question most readers in the US bring to it: how many are mapped in my state. We counted every state separately, set each count against its population, and measured how fast each state's map has grown since May.

The count, state by state

Counts come from Geofabrik's taginfo for each state extract, data until 28 September 2026. "ALPR objects" are everything tagged surveillance:type=ALPR, whatever the vendor. "Tagged Flock Safety" counts objects with manufacturer=Flock Safety. The last column comes from taginfo's history for the same tag.

A few patterns stand out:

• Two states hold more than a quarter of the map. California and Texas together account for 38,361 readers. The ten largest states hold 62% of the national total.
• Flock dominates the tagged hardware. 79% of the readers mapped in the US carry the Flock Safety tag. In 33 of the 51 extracts (the 50 states and Washington, D.C.) the share is 75% or higher, and in Texas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Arkansas and Iowa it is above 90%.
• The Northeast is mapped differently. The Flock share is lowest in New Hampshire (29%), Pennsylvania (39%), New York (48%) and New Jersey (50%). Those states have either more readers from other vendors or more cameras mapped without a manufacturer tag. The data cannot tell those two apart.
• Alaska is almost empty. It has 5 mapped readers, and none tagged Flock Safety. Vermont has 32, Maine 68 and New Hampshire 70.

In South Dakota more objects are tagged Flock Safety (170) than ALPR (160). The manufacturer tag can also sit on objects that are not tagged as license plate readers, so the two columns do not have to nest.

Per resident, Georgia leads

A raw count mostly measures population and mapping effort. Dividing by residents, using the US Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 population estimates, shows where readers are densest.

Georgia has 90.3 mapped readers per 100,000 residents, more than twice the national average of 42.0. Flock Safety is headquartered in Atlanta, and 91% of Georgia's mapped readers carry its tag. Kansas (71.3) and Illinois (63.5) follow. At the other end, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire each have about 5 per 100,000, and Alaska has 0.7.

Treat the ranking as a map of what has been mapped. A state with active DeFlock contributors will rank higher than a state with the same number of cameras and fewer people looking for them.

How fast each state's map is growing

Our first article went live in May 2026, when the worldwide count stood at 101,562 (1 May). Taginfo's history lets us rebuild that baseline for each state. Across the US the mapped count went from 93,047 on 1 May to 142,545 on 20 September 2026, the latest point in the history, a rise of 53%.

The largest additions were in California (6,639), Texas (5,940), Georgia (3,902), Florida (3,489) and Illinois (3,154). Among states that already had at least 500 readers in May, the fastest growth was in Pennsylvania, where the count almost tripled (+193%), then New Jersey (+122%), Arkansas and Tennessee (both +83%). Michigan grew least, by 20%, after its count had risen from 293 to 2,819 during 2025.

Longer term, the national curve is steep. The mapped US count was 7,622 on 1 January 2025 and 63,657 on 1 January 2026. The US now holds 92% of the 154,583 license plate readers mapped worldwide, which is why the European picture in our first article looks so different.

See the cameras in your state

Three ways, from quickest to most flexible:

1. DeFlock. maps.deflock.org shows the same OpenStreetMap data. Pan to your area.
2. Overpass. Paste this into overpass-turbo.eu and replace US-TX with your state's code, such as US-FL, US-CA or US-GA:

[out:json][timeout:120];
area["ISO3166-2"="US-TX"][admin_level=4]->.state;
nwr["surveillance:type"="ALPR"](area.state);
out center;

The result is every mapped reader in the state as a point, with its tags, ready to export to GeoJSON. Change the last line to out count; for the total. For Texas or California the result has more than 15,000 points, so run it once and save the export instead of re-running it. The public Overpass servers are shared.

3. A radius around an address. Once you have the GeoJSON, the radius map shows what lies within a given distance of a point, which is the practical question for a home or an office.

Method and limits

• Per state: objects (nodes, ways and relations) tagged surveillance:type=ALPR and manufacturer=Flock Safety in each Geofabrik state extract, data until 28 September 2026. Extracts include a small buffer at state borders, so a camera close to a border can count in two states. The 51 state rows add up to 143,364, against 142,854 for the US extract.
• Growth: cumulative totals rebuilt from taginfo's chronology for each extract. The chronology runs to 20 September 2026 and can differ slightly from the current count, so the growth figures use the chronology at both ends.
• Population: US Census Bureau Vintage 2024 estimates for 1 July 2024 (file NST-EST2024-ALLDATA).
• Worldwide total: taginfo.openstreetmap.org, data until 29 September 2026.
• What the numbers do not measure: how many readers are installed, whether a mapped camera still works, who operates it, or who can search its data. A state's count rises when contributors map it, which is not the same as when cameras are installed. The manufacturer tag is set by contributors and is not verified against purchase records.

For the same approach applied to speed and red light cameras, see our traffic enforcement camera dataset and the camera index. For what OpenStreetMap is and how its data can be reused, see what is OpenStreetMap.