Discussion

snailmailman: This is a quite scary map. They are all over my local area. It may technically be possible to route a drive around them, but if you take the most convenient path between any two points at least one camera will spot you. I'd have to leave my neighborhood through back roads and enter local shopping areas through sidestreets.This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.

CGMthrowaway: > It may technically be possible to route a drive around themThat's an interesting idea...

cdrnsf: Remember, according to Flock's CEO, Deflock is a terrorist organization.

runjake: Great site.Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.

CGMthrowaway: DeFlock is powered by crowdsourced data from the OpenStreetMap community. The map is incomplete! New locations are always being added. Know of a missing ALPR? Contribute to the map: https://deflock.org/report/id

bigwheels: When your car gets stolen, suddenly nobody can access the data.Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?

dylan604: When your gets stolen, even with camera data, the police will not do anything.

glitcher: In my area I'm seeing a few random ones on roadways, but mostly clusters of them in the parking lots of Home Depots, Lowes, and Wal-Marts.

drunken_thor: Haha Sudbury and Napanee are the only places in Canada to have them. They are tiny cities where nothing happens. Bored police officers imagining situations where they are needed.

cm2012: What I am seeing is room for a lot more in my local neighborhood. Barely any coverage.

pwg: If you know where some of them are, you can add the data yourself: https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance

cm2012: I'm not saying the map is missing cameras, I am saying I would personally like to see more in my neighborhood (for crime reduction reasons).

mikece: Yes, and according to Steve Ballmer (back in the day) Linux Torvalds was a terrorist. People are allowed to say stupid things.

jLaForest: People are allowed to say stupid things....and those people should be held accountable for the stupid things they say

iamtheworstdev: wow. quite literally the only ones in my area are surveilling the county park / community center. that's creepy. I'll just have to assume they're doing something creepier at the public library.

ssl-3: Can you elaborate upon the kinds of crime reduction that these systems provide?

whimsicalism: Much prefer camera driven enforcement to cop-on-beat driven enforcement.

burningChrome: >> This is a quite scary map.It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.

ghouse: But the cameras that the law enforcement officers canvas in the area aren't centrally aggregated and tagged with meta data such that they can be queried at scale.

LordGrey: Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.[0] https://www.ketk.com/news/crime-public-safety/new-traffic-ca...[1] https://www.beltontexas.gov/news_detail_T11_R1277.php

qup: The odds are 100% that it will be abused.

craftkiller: Huh, none on the upper west side in NYC. Interesting.

technol0gic: by "say stupid things," you of course mean "tell bald-faced lies"

bob1029: The only flock cameras indicated in my town are the canonical Home Depot arrangement. I'm pretty sure it's part of their standard operating procedures at this point. The effect these have had on the in store experience (at my location) is the primary thing that has me interested in limited deployments. Shopping at HD prior to the ALPRs was a horrible time. I think they finally caught the guy who was stealing the little screws out of the irrigation vacuum breakers. You can actually get a complete, unopened factory product most of the time now.

segmondy: Interesting ... the police in this case are claiming to be the owners of the camera.https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...

hsuduebc2: Everyone who is not content with the way I do business must be a terrorist for sure. o_o

hsuduebc2: Lol, sure it is. Ridiculous.

Firerouge: Do you have a source to your Bryan claim?If you look at the map, there are zero flock cameras reported in that region.None in Moscow Idaho where the murder happened, none in Pullman where he lived, and none showed between the locations.

zythyx: There's a disclaimer when you first open the page that the map is incomplete and that users need to submit the data. It's possible that data hasn't been submitted/parsed yet

ImPostingOnHN: There have been numerous instances where cops used it to stalk exes, etc. If it isn't already, it will be used to stalk a blacklist of dissidents. It will continue to happen as long as the system exists.

birdo-wordo: All tools and systems can be abused. Eg: Anonymous tip lines are abused and cause Swatting.Law enforcement needs reform for sure but I just don't understand the hate against these plate capture cams specifically.

unclad5968: Weird. The city I live in has cameras, but only a few at random intersections. Most of the cameras are on a university campus, home depot, Lowes, and target. Are these normal places to put flock cameras for other cities?

tmshapland: How do we make this site mainstream? The public would really start to push back if they could so viscerally experience that they are being surveilled multiple times per day.

seniorThrowaway: I think you overestimate the public.

birdo-wordo: The community around deflock promotes and condones theft and vandalism on these devices.The T word is out of line, but I think that's the spirit of what he meant.

array_key_first: A more generous term is civil disobedience. I think the argument is the original theft was using tax payers dollars on fancy tracking devices in the first place.

birdo-wordo: It's not civil if it's law breaking.

array_key_first: That's literally exactly what civil disobedience is.

david_shaw: It would be an interesting and potentially useful project to combine these camera locations with Maps routing -- similar to "avoid toll roads," we could "avoid surveillance cameras."

danny_codes: Enforcement is one way to reduce crime. Another way is to reduce poverty. Which will we choose? One road leads to South Africa. The other, Denmark.

array_key_first: These cameras aren't even enforcement, just surveillance.I think we all know even with the best technology in the world the police aren't gonna get off their lazy asses if your car gets stolen. This is just a way to burn money.

slg: Just anecdotally looking around my city, it's noticeable that the camera's locations have a much stronger correlation with areas of high wealth rather than high crime.

nomel: Generally, only addicts steal from poorer people.And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.

downrightmike: wage theft is a much larger crime

xXSLAYERXx: > However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stopAt what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.

mulmen: [delayed]

debarshri: Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.

carefulfungi: You should assume every police cruiser has a plate reader, too.

tonymet: I volunteer for my city & county , and I'm a privacy advocate, so I have an ambivalent opinion on Flock cameras. Given the completely untenable demands on law enforcement, and extreme driver recklessness , the only practical way to enforce law and order with drivers is some sort of automated surveillance.Since covid, driver recklessness has been out of control. Running reds, extreme speed, escaping police are all common. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths remain extreme. At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law.Imagine you are a policy maker, with worse driver behavior, and police force that are less able to enforce the law. What tools would you use to maintain law and order?If you don't want surveillance, you will have to make some other tradeoffs to allow human beings to better monitor the public and enforce the law. They are not omnipotent and omniscient creatures.

boelboel: Police just aren't doing their job in the US, who even knows what they're doing at this point. Basically no country had the post-covid driver issue as much as America. Some states basically halved fines lol, make them do their jobs.

dawnerd: Seriously. People run reds in front of cops and they do nothing. I was tboned and the person that hit me had no license or anything to identify and ran a red and still was let go without anything.

doctor_radium: Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.

dawnerd: I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo pr about them being essential for the safety of their employees.

andoando: Why dont they put up a couple drones up high in the sky

birdo-wordo: No that's uncivil disobedience. The difference is inaction vs action.