Flock & ALPR cameras in Austin, TX

Austin Police Department runs 218 mapped cameras here, 29% of the metro — 97th-highest concentration of the 251 metros tracked. Round Rock Police Department follows with 65.

Not every reader here belongs to a public body. Lowe's (15), The Home Depot (13) appear among the largest operators, and 21 of the cameras carrying an operator type are recorded as private.

94% of the mapped cameras around Austin (708 of 751) carry a facing direction — 68th of the 251 tracked metros. Bearings are what make camera-aware routing possible, so the higher that share, the more the avoidance layer can do here.

The paper trail is thin. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance documents 9 agencies using plate readers across this area, while the map records 41 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.

Sheriff's offices are prominent: Travis County Sheriff's Office and Hays County Sheriff's Office sit in the top twelve, alongside municipal forces such as Round Rock Police Department, Pflugerville Police Department, Cedar Park Police Department.

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 Austin.

Austin ranks 69th of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Dayton, OH and Wilmington, DE, and 70th by operator count.

Upper third on size; 68th of 251 on bearing coverage at 94%, and 97th on lead-operator share at 29%.

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 the 20 largest of 41 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (515 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 142 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 36 of 751 mapped cameras name no manufacturer at all, which makes the actual distribution broader than shown. These count cameras on the map, not purchase orders.

Look for a slim grey or black box the size of a shoebox on its own pole, usually paired with a small solar panel, at intersections and on the approaches to shopping centres. Recorded mounts around Austin:

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

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 43 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 Texas 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 Austin? Search the full map by any city.

ALPR camera maps for nearby and related cities: Houston, TX · Dallas, TX · Fort Worth, TX · San Antonio, TX · Oklahoma City, OK · Baton Rouge, LA · Tulsa, OK · Little Rock, AR · New Orleans, LA.