Atlas · State

Massachusetts

What is documented about automated license plate surveillance in Massachusetts — and what is still an open question.

Are automated license plate readers used in Massachusetts?

Yes. Volunteers have recorded 1,157 automated license plate reader camera locations in Massachusetts, across 15 counties. That is a floor, not an inventory — it counts what someone has mapped, not what exists.

Camera data retrieved Aug 15, 2026 · Most recent record Aug 11, 2026

1,157 Camera coordinates 1.0% of the 118,623 we hold nationally. Community-reported, not field-verified by us.
15 Counties with a mapped camera Assigned geometrically from Census county boundaries. A county with no entry has no mapped camera, which is not the same as none.
2 Documented decisions 2 ended, declined, or suspended · 0 adopted, renewed, or expanded.
0 Full dossiers Places researched down to retention, sharing, warrant standard, and audit policy — including the fields that come back unknown.

Known ALPR locations

Coverage incomplete

  • Camera coordinate
  • Jurisdiction record — no camera coordinates held
  • Program ended, declined, or prohibited

1,157 mapped camera coordinates · 42 jurisdiction records · 50 of 50 states have data. Camera coordinates © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Boundaries and roads: US Census, public domain. Roads are drawn for orientation only — a camera near a road is not a claim about which road it watches.

Pinned to Massachusetts. Open the national Atlas to compare with neighbouring states.

Who supplies the cameras

Vendor attribution as recorded by OpenStreetMap contributors. Where a contributor did not identify the vendor the record reads “Unspecified” — that is an unrecorded fact, not a vendorless camera.

Vendor Mapped cameras Share
Flock Safety 963 83.2%
Unspecified 138 11.9%
Motorola Solutions 18 1.6%
Neology 15 1.3%
Genetec 11 1.0%
Axis Communications 6 0.5%
Turing 2 0.2%
LiveView Technologies 1 0.1%
Axon 1 0.1%
Leonardo/Elsag 1 0.1%
Rekor 1 0.1%

Where in Massachusetts

1,413 mapped cameras assigned to the county containing them. The 3 remaining counties with at least one mapped camera are in the open data.

  • Middlesex 246
  • Providence 245
  • Norfolk 215
  • Essex 147
  • Hampden 126
  • Bristol 114
  • Worcester 106
  • Suffolk 81
  • Plymouth 72
  • Rockingham 27
  • Barnstable 20
  • Hampshire 9

What governments here have decided

Every decision we hold for Massachusetts, most recent first. The Decision Record exists because deployment databases record arrivals and not reversals.

Jurisdiction Decision Date Vendor Sourcing
Salem Declined Jul 23, 2026 Flock Safety Official agency
Framingham Declined Jun 25, 2026 Flock Safety Official agency

Signal

No Signal story yet names Massachusetts. That is a gap in our coverage rather than a quiet state — send us what you are seeing.

National developments that apply here

These are not about Massachusetts specifically. They govern the cameras in it.

Documented harms and verification

Incidents

None recorded in Massachusetts. Documented harms are hard to find without audit logs; requesting them is usually how one surfaces.

Verified Unsurveilled

What we don’t know about Massachusetts

2 open questions carried by records in this state. Each one is published rather than left blank, because an unresolved question a resident can answer is worth more than a page that looks finished.

  • Has Cambridge concluded its evaluation of ALPR technology, and with what outcome? Cambridge verification · council agenda
  • Does Cambridge access any regional or state ALPR database operated by another agency? Cambridge verification · public records request

Help close the gaps.

We hold records for 2 Massachusetts jurisdictions. There are far more than that. A single records request from a resident often establishes more than weeks of desk research.

Places in Massachusetts

The largest 40 of 215 places we can put on the map. Selecting one centres the map there. A place appearing here says nothing about whether it has cameras — it is a label, and the camera layer is separate and incomplete.