Where this data comes from
FlockDetour publishes numbers about surveillance equipment, so it should be equally exact about where its own numbers come from. Every camera on the map arrived through one of the feeds below. Each one names its publisher, its license where it carries one, and when it was last pulled. Nothing here is generated, inferred, or padded.
The feeds
- City of Chicago — red-light camerasGovernment publication
The City of Chicago's own published red-light camera locations, from its open data portal.
- Feed
chicago_red_light- Attribution
- City of Chicago Data Portal — Red Light Camera Locations (thvf-6diy).
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Last ingested
- City of Chicago — speed camerasGovernment publication
The City of Chicago's own published speed camera locations, from its open data portal.
- Feed
chicago_speed- Attribution
- City of Chicago Data Portal — Speed Camera Locations (4i42-qv3h).
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Last ingested
- Community reportsCrowd-sourced
Structured reports submitted through the app. No report creates or removes a camera on its own — a human moderator is required — so this feed corroborates the others rather than competing with them.
- Feed
crowd- Attribution
- Community reports via Flock app
- License
- Not recorded on this feed
- Last ingested
- Never — no run recorded
- State DOT traffic-camera registriesGovernment publication
State department-of-transportation traffic-camera registries. These are traffic monitoring rather than enforcement, and are mapped as such.
- Feed
dot_traffic_feeds- Attribution
- Camera registry: OpenTrafficCamMap contributors; feeds are state DOT property.
- License
- CC-BY-4.0
- Last ingested
- OpenStreetMapOpen community data
OpenStreetMap's surveillance tagging — the man_made=surveillance nodes contributors have mapped, which is the single largest source of camera locations here and the one anyone can correct.
- Feed
osm- Attribution
- © OpenStreetMap contributors
- License
- ODbL-1.0
- Last ingested
- osm_flock_refreshOpen community data
- Feed
osm_flock_refresh- Attribution
- © OpenStreetMap contributors
- License
- ODbL-1.0
- Last ingested
- Flock Safety transparency portalsCrowd-sourced
A merge of official Flock Safety transparency portals onto mapped camera sites. This is what the per-agency pages are built from.
- Feed
ringmast4r_flock_dataset- Attribution
- Ringmast4r/FLOCK; public sources include OpenStreetMap, DeFlock, EFF Atlas, McClatchy Private Eyes and public records.
- License
- Not recorded on this feed
- Last ingested
The Flock transparency merge is the one with the most detail behind it: it carries per-agency camera counts, retention windows and search volumes straight from the portals Flock publishes. Those are broken out agency by agency.
How the data is used
- ALPR sites
- Mapped, and used for route avoidance
- Speed cameras
- Shown on the map, no alerts
- Red-light cameras
- Shown on the map, no alerts
- Plate processing
- Never — no plate is read, stored or matched
- Maximum detour
- 20% over the fastest route
This is server-configured rather than compiled into the app, so a legal change in one jurisdiction does not need an App Store release to take effect. FlockDetour never reads, stores or matches a license plate — it maps where the equipment is, which is a different thing from operating any of it.
Citing this
This page and the per-agency pages are written to be cited. If you are a journalist, a researcher, or a council member checking what your own department publishes, cite the underlying portal or feed rather than us — every page here links its source, and the source is the authoritative copy. Where we are the useful citation, it is for the aggregation, not the figures.
If a number here disagrees with the portal it came from, the portal is right and we are stale. Tell us and we will correct it.
Most recent ingest across all feeds: . Structured provenance for this page is published as schema.org DataCatalog JSON-LD in its head.