Flock cameras in California

21,970 mapped readersCamera map data

FlockDetour’s map holds 21,970 license plate reader locations in California, and 18,023 of them are attributed to Flock Safety by their source, as of October 4, 2026. These are documented locations from public sources, not an official inventory: unmapped and mobile readers are missing, and a few mapped sites may already be gone.

Mapped cameras in California

Mapped license plate readers
21,970
Attributed to Flock Safety
18,023
Other or unknown vendor
3,947

A site counts toward Flock Safety only when its source names the vendor. The rest are plate readers from other vendors or with no vendor recorded, and some of those are Flock cameras too. See how California compares with every other state in how many Flock cameras are in the US, or open the live map to see each location.

Flock camera maps for California cities

Each city page counts mapped readers within 10 miles of the city center, so neighboring circles overlap and should not be added together.

What agencies disclose

84 law-enforcement and public agencies in California had a Flock Safety transparency portal when The News & Observer captured them, between July 2023 and April 2024. These figures come from those portals and cover only those agencies, so they are far below the mapped total above.

Agencies with a portal
84
Cameras, across 84 of them
3,345
Retention, shortest to longest
30–365
Searches, last 30 days
29,581

3,345 cameras is the sum of what 84 California agencies publish, not an estimate for the state. The other 0 run Flock and publish no count, so the real total is higher by an unknown amount.

Retention across California runs from 30 days to 365 days. That range matters more than any single agency’s policy: plate data is routinely shared between departments, so the longest window in a region is closer to how long your driving stays searchable than the window your own town set.

A blank field means the agency does not publish that number, not that it is zero.

Every California agency with a Flock portal

Not the state you were looking for? Every state we have portal data for, or open the live camera map.

Where these figures come from

The mapped counts come from every public plate-reader record in FlockDetour’s database on October 4, 2026, with removed sites left out, placed in California by its state boundary. The records come from OpenStreetMap contributors and published datasets; the sources page lists each one with its license.

Flock Safety publishes a transparency portal for each customer agency. The agency figures were captured from those portals by The News & Observer / McClatchy (private_eyes) between July 2023 and April 2024 and are shown unchanged. Each agency’s page links its own portal, which is the authoritative copy.

Last synced into FlockDetour on . Full provenance and licensing for every feed is on our sources page.