Where this data comes from

7 feedsProvenance

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
  • OpenStreetMap — regional ALPR updatesOpen community data

    Regional imports of automated license plate reader locations recorded by OpenStreetMap contributors, including Flock Safety and other vendors. An import timestamp is not a field verification of every device.

    Feed
    osm_flock_refresh
    Attribution
    © OpenStreetMap contributors
    License
    ODbL-1.0
    Last ingested
  • Ringmast4r/FLOCK — combined public datasetCrowd-sourced

    A combined dataset assembled from OpenStreetMap, DeFlock, EFF Atlas, McClatchy Private Eyes and public records. These imported locations are not all official Flock Safety portal records. Consult the original source before attributing a mapped device to an agency.

    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 separate agency directory presents historical Flock transparency-portal records, including reported camera counts, retention windows and search volumes. Those records were collected through the McClatchy Private Eyes dataset and related joins; they do not establish the current operator of every mapped camera. Check the dates and linked portal agency by agency.

How the data is used

Global defaultglobal
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.