Flock & ALPR cameras in North Carolina

The 3,703 cameras mapped in North Carolina belong to 308 operators, with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department at the top on 161. 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. 927 of the 3,703 cameras carry no operator at all, so the operator shares above are shares of the attributed cameras.

Charlotte and Raleigh have full pages with operator, vendor and direction breakdowns; the other metros are covered by the live map. These are bounding-box reads around each city, useful for comparing metros but not for adding together — boxes overlap and spill across state lines. The headline figure is counted inside the border and is the honest state total.

The top of the North Carolina table is Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department at 161. What matters for anyone reading the map is how long the tail is — 308 operators in total, so most cameras belong to agencies that individually run only a handful. Private businesses appear too: of the cameras with a recorded operator type, 96 are privately operated.

Where the map has no operator tag, the operator is inferred from the surrounding jurisdiction; that applies to 2,550 of 3,703 cameras in North Carolina. Treat names as likely, not certain.

Vendor tags exist for 3,573 of North Carolina's cameras, and Flock Safety takes 91% of those — but Axis Communications runs 150, which is why the map reads 'ALPR', not just 'Flock'.

3,116 of 3,703 cameras (84%) carry a facing direction; the rest are shown as omnidirectional. Recorded mounts run pole (531), street lamp (62), post (21), building (6).

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