Flock Cameras in Boston, MA: Locations, Map & Count

Look past the city force: Lowell Police (39) runs more mapped readers around Boston than Boston Police (18). Regional networks often outgrow the city that gives the metro its name.

Not every reader here belongs to a public body. The Home Depot (29) appears among the largest operators, and 12 of the cameras carrying an operator type are recorded as private.

91% of the mapped cameras around Boston (590 of 645) carry a facing direction — 119th 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 3 agencies using plate readers across this area, while the map records 57 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 Lowell Police, the operator table runs through Quincy Police Department, Weymouth Town Police Department, Tufts University, Tewksbury Police and Braintree Town Police Department, with the Norfolk County Sheriff's Office at 33 — none of which individually dominates the metro.

Read from the live map on 13 October 2026. Since 5 October 2026 the 10-mile count held at 273 and the metro-box count moved from 644 to 645 (+1). 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 Boston.

Boston ranks 80th of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Cambridge, MA and Las Vegas, NV, and 33rd by operator count.

On composition it ranks 243rd on how much of the metro its largest operator holds (6%) and 119th on the share of cameras with a recorded bearing (91%) — a spread-out network with strong direction data.

Ranked against the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks, every one read from the live map on 13 October 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 57 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (279 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 144 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 76 of 645 mapped cameras name no manufacturer at all, which makes the actual distribution broader than shown. 2 further manufacturers fall below the eight 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 Boston:

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

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 51 mapped cameras have no recorded bearing, and 4 are tagged as omnidirectional.

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 Massachusetts 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 Boston? Search the full map by any city.

ALPR camera maps for nearby and related cities: Providence, RI · Hartford, CT · New Haven, CT · Stamford, CT · New York, NY.