Flock & ALPR cameras in Sacramento, CA

1,048 mapped cameras are attributed to just 21 operators. Only San Diego, with 18, records fewer. At 49.9 cameras per operator Sacramento is the third-most concentrated network of the 21 metros we map, behind Houston and San Diego.

What makes it unusual is that the concentration does not come from one giant agency. In Houston a single department runs 49% of the metro’s cameras and in San Diego 58%; in Sacramento the largest operator, Sacramento Police Department, runs 199 — just 19%. Add the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department’s 151 and the top two together still account for only a third of the metro. Sacramento has few operators, each of them substantial: a flat network rather than a top-heavy one.

The vendor mix is less Flock-dominated than California’s other inland metros. Motorola Solutions accounts for 143 mapped cameras — 14% of the metro and the largest non-Flock fleet here.

There is also a visible gap between the records and the map. The EFF Atlas lists the California Highway Patrol among Sacramento’s documented ALPR operators, yet the CHP does not appear among the metro’s mapped operators at all. In San Francisco the opposite is true — there the CHP is the single largest mapped operator. Public records and public maps are two different, incomplete views of the same thing.

These come from the live map above — OpenStreetMap plus community submissions, sampled on 3 August 2026. Because the data is contributed rather than disclosed by anyone who runs a camera, the real totals sit higher. Read each figure as a floor.

Sacramento ranks 17th of the 21 metros by mapped cameras, between Indianapolis and Phoenix. On operator count it ranks 20th — second-fewest of all — which is what pushes it to 3rd on cameras per operator.

Against the rest of California it is the most consolidated metro we map: Los Angeles spreads a larger network across 113 operators and San Francisco across 77, against Sacramento’s 21.

Ranked against the 21 metros BanditKin maps in detail, all counted the same way on the same day. 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.

The 20 biggest of 21 operators appear above. Where the map records an operator we use it; where it does not, the camera is credited to the jurisdiction it stands in. That inference is well founded but it is not documentation, and 144 cameras carry no operator information whatsoever.

Source: EFF Atlas of Surveillance (CC-BY). Camera positions on the map come from OpenStreetMap and community reports — coverage may be incomplete. BanditKin is not affiliated with Flock Safety, any other vendor, or any agency.

This table counts mapped cameras rather than procurement records. A manufacturer tag is optional in the source data and 39 of 1,048 cameras here have none, so treat the split as indicative. Vendor names have been merged across spelling and legal-entity variants.

Plate readers are usually the small rectangular unit on a slim pole near an intersection, often with a solar panel and a squat cylindrical camera head. Where the public data records a mounting, this is how they break down around Sacramento:

Each camera reads plates from one direction, so the direction it points decides which trips it records. The mapped bearings around Sacramento fall out like this:

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 141 mapped cameras have no recorded bearing, and 2 are tagged as omnidirectional.

New to this? Read what ALPR cameras capture, how long it's kept, and who can search it. Not in Sacramento? Search the full map by any city, or see what BanditKin costs — free during early access.

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