Flock Safety: 80,000 Cameras, 20 Billion Plates
Flock Safety is the largest automatic license plate reader operator in the United States. With 80,000+ cameras across 49 states, the company scans approximately 20 billion license plates per month, creating one of the most comprehensive vehicle tracking databases ever built.
How Flock Safety works
Flock Safety cameras are small, solar-powered devices mounted on poles at intersections, neighborhood entrances, and along roads. Each camera photographs every vehicle that passes, extracting the license plate, vehicle make, model, color, and distinguishing features.
The data feeds into Flock’s cloud platform, where it’s searchable by any participating law enforcement agency. Departments can search for a specific plate, set alerts for plates on watchlists, or browse all vehicles that passed a camera during a time window.
The data-sharing network
What makes Flock uniquely powerful is its inter-agency sharing network. A camera operated by one police department automatically shares its data with hundreds of other departments through interconnection agreements.
This means a vehicle spotted in a small town in Georgia can be tracked across the entire national network. The FLOCK dataset in Sentinel includes visualization of 113,829 inter-agency data-sharing connections.
Scale comparison
| Operator | Cameras | Plates/Month | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety | 80,000+ | 20 billion | 49 US states |
| Vigilant (Motorola) | 60,000+ | Unknown | 35+ states |
| Genetec | Unknown | Unknown | Primarily Canadian |
Combined, commercial ALPR operators in the US scan more plates per month than there are registered vehicles in the country (290 million). The average plate is scanned multiple times per day.
Sentinel maps 51,689 ALPR cameras
Our database includes ALPR readers from Flock Safety, Vigilant, police-operated systems, and toll cameras. Open Sentinel and filter for ALPR to see them.
The cameras don’t go away. But now you can see them.