Flock Cameras in California: Map, Locations & Count

The 21,105 cameras mapped in California belong to 563 operators, with San Diego Police Department at the top on 670. That makes the state widely spread by ALPR standards. Because these are counted inside the border rather than by metro box, the number is directly comparable with other states on this site. 5,220 of the 21,105 cameras carry no operator at all, so the operator shares above are shares of the attributed cameras. Since 13 October 2026 the in-state count moved from 21,334 to 21,105 (-229).

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Riverside, San Jose, San Diego, Sacramento, Fresno have full pages with operator, vendor and direction breakdowns; the other metros are covered by the live map. Bounding-box counts around each city centre — good for ranking metros, wrong for summing. The only clean state total is the polygon-counted figure in the headline.

There is a clear leader — San Diego Police Department, 670 cameras — and then a long, flat tail of 562 other operators. Retail and private operators show up in the top twelve (The Home Depot, Lowe's), which is worth knowing: those cameras are not run by any police agency.

Names are drawn from OpenStreetMap tags, falling back to the jurisdiction the camera sits in (11,756 of 21,105 here). A camera's operator is not always the body that paid for it.

Of the 19,029 cameras in California with a recorded manufacturer, 16,059 are tagged Flock Safety (84%); Motorola Solutions is the largest alternative at 1,768. 1,842 cameras carry no manufacturer tag at all.

Where a mount is recorded, California's cameras sit on: pole (4,799), street lamp (1,246), post (50), wall (18). 18,899 of the 21,105 cameras have a recorded facing direction, which is what makes route avoidance possible — a camera with no bearing shows on the map but can't be avoided with any precision.

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