Who watches my town?
Automated license plate readers photograph every car that passes them and keep the record. Type a US town or county below and see which law enforcement agencies have been documented operating Flock ALPR cameras there.
A town or county name is enough. Nothing you type here is stored, and we never ask for a street address — at the resolution this data has, a street address would tell us nothing a town name does not.
Read it as a floor, never as a ceiling.
Every agency this returns is one somebody researched and cited. That makes a result a minimum: these agencies operate the technology, and others may too. It is not a register of everything watching a place, and an empty result is not a clean bill of health — it means the research has not reached there yet.
Nothing here is about a person. This holds agencies and jurisdictions. No plates, no drivers, no searches, no individuals — not withheld, simply never collected. If you want to know whether your own plate was searched, that is a different question over different records, and we cannot answer it. See §3.
What is in the pile we search.
2,662 law enforcement agencies across 45 states are documented as operating Flock automated license plate readers. 2,453 of them are matched to a US Census place or county, which is what makes them findable by town name — the remainder are in the data but not yet placed, so they will not appear in a lookup even where they operate.
That last number is a limit on this tool, not on the agencies. An agency we have not mapped is not an agency that is not watching.
“Was my plate searched?”
It is the first thing many people want to know, and this is the wrong tool for it. We hold agency-level records; that question needs individual search logs. Have I Been Flocked takes a license plate and returns the searches run against it — which agency, when, and the stated reason — assembled from public records requests. It is a separate project, fiscally sponsored by the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. We are not affiliated with them, we do not ingest their data, and we are pointing you at them because it is the truthful answer.
The transparency portals would not let us read them.
Flock offers agencies an optional “transparency portal” publishing camera counts, retention windows and data-sharing lists. Those figures would make every answer above far more useful, so we went to collect them. In our own records, 493 of these agencies have a portal address cited in the research.
On 21 August 2026 we requested them, identifying ourselves honestly in the User-Agent as our transparency crawler. Every request returned HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare challenge that did not clear. So did robots.txt — the file whose entire purpose is telling automated visitors what they are permitted to do.
We did not work around it. No spoofed browser fingerprints, no disguised User-Agent, no challenge solvers. We ask as ourselves or we do not ask. What we can report is that a public transparency page, reachable by any person with a browser, is not reachable by an identified researcher collecting it systematically — and that is worth stating plainly rather than quietly working around.
This is a description of what happened when we asked, on one date, from one network. It is not a claim about anyone’s intent, and the configuration may be a default rather than a decision. If it changes, this section changes.
Where this comes from.
Agency records come from the Atlas of Surveillance, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, used under CC BY 4.0. Each entry there was compiled by researchers from cited public sources, and every agency we show links to the source the Atlas cites. Town and county names come from the US Census Bureau gazetteer. Matching an agency to its jurisdiction is done by name against that gazetteer, and refuses rather than guesses when a name is ambiguous — a wrong match would name the wrong police department, which is worse than no match at all.
Dates shown beside an agency are the date its Atlas entry was cited, not today. Where no date was recorded we say so rather than implying the record is current.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Flock Safety, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Have I Been Flocked. How we cover this, in full — or jump to which agencies say their data reaches federal agencies and the guardrails audit. Corrections: [email protected].