Flock & ALPR cameras in Seattle, WA

The largest fleet on the map is not the city's own. Renton Police Department runs 58 mapped cameras against Seattle Police Department's 24 — a pattern we have seen in Denver, where Aurora outranks Denver PD, and in Cincinnati, where the county sheriff outranks the city force.

Private businesses appear on Seattle's map: The Home Depot (26), Lowe's (22) sit inside the twenty largest operators, and of the cameras with a recorded operator type, 13 are privately run rather than public. Those cameras are not run by any police agency, though their reads can be shared.

For the thing that actually matters when routing, Seattle is reasonably documented: 721 of its 853 mapped cameras — 85% — record which way they face, ranking 196th of 251 on bearing coverage.

Public records cover 19 agencies around Seattle in the EFF Atlas of Surveillance against 69 operators on the map — the difference between a records project and a mapping project, not a contradiction.

Sheriff's offices are prominent: Snohomish County Sheriff's Office sits in the top twelve, alongside municipal forces such as Washington State Department of Transportation, Tukwila Police Department, Federal Way Police.

Read from the live map on 3 September 2026. 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 Seattle.

Seattle ranks 63rd of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Alexandria, VA and Louisville, KY, and 26th by operator count.

On composition it ranks 242nd on how much of the metro its largest operator holds (7%) and 196th on the share of cameras with a recorded bearing (85%) — a spread-out network.

Ranked against the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks, every one read from the live map on 3 September 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 69 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (367 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 178 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 88 of 853 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.

Most readers sit on a dedicated pole a few metres up, angled at one lane of traffic, with a solar panel above. Where the mount is recorded around Seattle:

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

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 121 mapped cameras have no recorded bearing, and 11 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 Washington 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 Seattle? Search the full map by any city.

ALPR camera maps for nearby and related cities: Sacramento, CA · Salt Lake City, UT · San Francisco, CA · San Jose, CA · Provo, UT.