Flock Cameras in San Francisco, CA: Locations, Map & Count

San Francisco Police Department is not the biggest operator around San Francisco. That is California Highway Patrol, with 444 mapped cameras to the city's 443; a neighbouring agency out-camera-ing the core city is common in the metros BanditKin maps.

Of the cameras with a recorded operator type around San Francisco, 27 are privately operated — a small but real share of the network that no police agency runs.

96% of the mapped cameras around San Francisco (2,616 of 2,736) carry a facing direction — 47th 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.

Public records cover 2 agencies around San Francisco in the EFF Atlas of Surveillance against 79 operators on the map — the difference between a records project and a mapping project, not a contradiction.

Sheriff's offices are prominent: San Mateo County Sheriff's Office sits in the top twelve, alongside municipal forces such as San Francisco Police Department, Oakland Police Department, Daly City Police Department.

Read from the live map on 1 November 2026. Since 13 October 2026 the 10-mile count moved from 1,030 to 1,071 (+41) and the metro-box count moved from 2,667 to 2,736 (+69). 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 San Francisco.

San Francisco ranks 8th of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Plano, TX and Arlington, TX, and 23rd by operator count.

Its cameras-per-operator figure of 34.6 ranks 26th, its lead operator's 16% share ranks 173rd, and its 96% bearing coverage ranks 47th — all of 251.

Ranked against the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks, every one read from the live map on 1 November 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 79 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (1,090 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 411 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 224 of 2,736 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.

They are easy to miss and hard to unsee — a small rectangular box on a narrow pole near a junction, generally with a solar panel and a stubby barrel lens. Where the data records how a camera around San Francisco is mounted, the split is:

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

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 117 mapped cameras have no recorded bearing, and 3 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 California 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 San Francisco? Search the full map by any city.

ALPR camera maps for nearby and related cities: Los Angeles, CA · Riverside, CA · San Jose, CA · San Diego, CA · Sacramento, CA · Fresno, CA · Las Vegas, NV · Salt Lake City, UT · Provo, UT · Phoenix, AZ · Seattle, WA.