Flock & ALPR cameras in Albuquerque, NM

Albuquerque Police Department runs 265 mapped cameras here, 59% of the metro — 17th-highest concentration of the 251 metros tracked. Rio Rancho Police Department follows with 23.

Private businesses appear on Albuquerque's map: Lowe's (18), The Home Depot (14), Coronado Mall (1) sit inside the twenty largest operators, and of the cameras with a recorded operator type, 3 are privately run rather than public. Those cameras are not run by any police agency, though their reads can be shared.

Bearing coverage — the share of cameras whose facing is recorded — is 90% around Albuquerque, 146th of 251. Cameras without a bearing still show on the map, but the app cannot route around them with any precision.

The paper trail is thin. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance documents 1 agency using plate readers across this area, while the map records 15 distinct operators. That is a records gap rather than an absence of cameras, and it is why this page leans on mapped counts rather than agency filings.

The network is regional rather than municipal. Beyond Albuquerque Police Department, the operator table runs through Rio Rancho Police Department, Los Lunas Police Department, Albuqueque Police Department, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque Police Department and New Mexico State Police, with the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office at 22 — none of which individually dominates the metro.

Read from the live map on 3 September 2026. The underlying records are OpenStreetMap entries plus community submissions — nobody who operates a camera is obliged to declare it, so these are the documented minimum rather than the full picture. The metro is a box roughly 50 miles across centred on Albuquerque.

Albuquerque ranks 104th of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Savannah, GA and New Haven, CT, and 161st by operator count.

Mid-table on size; 146th of 251 on bearing coverage at 90%, and 17th on lead-operator share at 59%.

Ranked against the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks, every one read from the live map on 3 September 2026. Metro areas are drawn as a box around the city centre, so neighbouring metros can share cameras and these counts must never be added together.

These are all 15 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (228 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 50 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 22 of 450 mapped cameras name no manufacturer at all, which makes the actual distribution broader than shown. These count cameras on the map, not purchase orders.

Most readers sit on a dedicated pole a few metres up, angled at one lane of traffic, with a solar panel above. Where the mount is recorded around Albuquerque:

One camera covers one approach, so its heading is what decides which journeys end up recorded. Around Albuquerque the mapped bearings distribute like this:

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 47 mapped cameras have no recorded bearing.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Atlas of Surveillance. Summaries are the Atlas's own wording, trimmed to a complete sentence.

This page is part of the New Mexico camera hub, which counts every camera inside the state line rather than by metro box. New to this? Read what ALPR cameras capture, how long it is kept, and who can search it. Not in Albuquerque? Search the full map by any city.

ALPR camera maps for nearby and related cities: Tucson, AZ · Phoenix, AZ · Denver, CO · Provo, UT · Las Vegas, NV.