NEW YORK (WPIX) — Law enforcement agencies across the United States are increasingly teaming up with private technology firms, including Flock Safety, as surveillance camera networks continue to spread in communities nationwide.
That rapid expansion has also fueled public concern over privacy and government monitoring, leading one group to create a platform that maps and tracks where these cameras are installed.
What are Flock cameras?
Flock founder Garrett Langley has said the idea for his surveillance equipment company grew out of frustration in his hometown of Atlanta, where he believed too many crimes were going unsolved.
“Crime felt too easy to get away with,” Langley said during a TED talk in April. “It didn’t make sense that you could steal someone’s car… or you could kill someone and have a 50 percent chance of getting away with it.”
“So I did what engineers do. I built a license plate-reading camera,” Langley said.
Since then, Flock has expanded well beyond license plate readers, developing a range of what it calls “public safety technology,” including drones, gunshot and audio detection tools, and software products.
Still, the company’s camera systems remain the central focus of public debate. Across the country, 90 cities — including several in New York — have either turned down proposals for the cameras or canceled existing contracts.
DeFlock, the organization created to monitor the spread of the technology, says there are now nearly 100,000 automated license plate readers, known as ALPRs, in use.
How can you track Flock cameras?
DeFlock, founded by privacy advocate and software engineer Will Freeman in 2024, has a crowdsourced map showing where all recorded ALPR cameras are located across the country, not just Flock.
According to DeFlock, there are over 118,000 such cameras in the U.S. and over 3,300 in the tri-state area.
Below is the map you can use to see where the closest Flock and ALPR cameras are to your neighborhood.
There are well over 1,000 ALPR cameras in New York City alone, according to DeFlock data.
