Flock & ALPR cameras in Washington, DC

Fairfax County Sheriff's Office is the dominant operator, with 154 of the 935 mapped cameras — 16% of the metro, ahead of Anne Arundel County Sheriff's Office on 73. That lead share ranks 182nd 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 90% around Washington, 131st 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 54 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 Anne Arundel County Sheriff's Office, Alexandria Police Department, Prince George's County Sheriff's Office, Arlington County Sheriff's Office and Metropolitan Police Department — none of which individually dominates the metro.

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 Washington.

Washington ranks 55th of the 251 metro areas BanditKin tracks by mapped cameras, between Camden, NJ and Akron, OH, and 42nd by operator count.

Its cameras-per-operator figure of 17.3 ranks 102nd, its lead operator's 16% share ranks 182nd, and its 90% bearing coverage ranks 131st — all of 251.

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 54 operators. Where OpenStreetMap names an operator we use that name; otherwise the camera is attributed to whichever jurisdiction it stands in (659 cameras here), which is a sound inference rather than a confirmed fact. 170 cameras record no operator of any kind.

Manufacturer is a free-text field, so spellings and legal names have been consolidated here. 57 of 935 mapped cameras name no manufacturer at all, which makes the actual distribution broader than shown. 1 further manufacturer falls 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. 83 mapped cameras have no recorded bearing, and 6 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 · Virginia Beach, VA · Trenton, NJ.