Flock Cameras in Washington, DC: Locations, Map & Count

Fairfax County Sheriff's Office is the dominant operator, with 152 of the 955 mapped cameras — 16% of the metro, ahead of Anne Arundel County Sheriff's Office on 72. That lead share ranks 176th of the 251 metros BanditKin tracks, so Washington is a comparatively spread-out network.

Private businesses appear on Washington's map: The Home Depot (22), Lowe's (13), Brookfield Property Partners (10) 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.

Bearing coverage — the share of cameras whose facing is recorded — is 89% around Washington, 152nd of 251. Cameras without a bearing still show on the map, but the app cannot route around them with any precision.

Public records cover 1 agency around Washington in the EFF Atlas of Surveillance against 53 operators on the map — the difference between a records project and a mapping project, not a contradiction.

The network is regional rather than municipal. Beyond Fairfax County Sheriff's Office, the operator table runs through Alexandria Police Department, Metropolitan Police Department, Metro Police Department and Fairfax Police Department — none of which individually dominates the metro.

Read from the live map on 13 October 2026. Since 5 October 2026 the 10-mile count moved from 443 to 435 (-8) and the metro-box count moved from 958 to 955 (-3). 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 Washington.

Washington ranks 55th of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Birmingham, AL and Chandler, AZ, and 42nd by operator count.

Its cameras-per-operator figure of 18.0 ranks 102nd, its lead operator's 16% share ranks 176th, and its 89% bearing coverage ranks 152nd — all of 251.

Ranked against the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks, every one read from the live map on 13 October 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 53 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (627 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 224 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 55 of 955 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 Washington is mounted, the split is:

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

Bearings come from public map data and describe an approximate capture zone, never an exact field of view. 96 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.

Washington sits outside any state hub; the Virginia and Maryland hubs cover the surrounding counties. New to this? Read what ALPR cameras capture, how long it is kept, and who can search it. Not in Washington? Search the full map by any city.

ALPR camera maps for nearby and related cities: Richmond, VA · Philadelphia, PA · Allentown, PA · Trenton, NJ · Virginia Beach, VA.