What’s actually out there
These are the automated license plate readers volunteers have recorded in the Phoenix East Valley. Most people who drive past one every day have never noticed a single one.
Point at any reader to see its vendor. Switch off Flock Safety to see what a campaign aimed at one company would leave standing.
598 mapped readers · snapshot 2026-08-15 · data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
Read this before relying on the map
This map is incomplete, and we cannot tell you by how much. It shows readers that volunteers have found and recorded in OpenStreetMap. Nobody has surveyed every road. A blank area means nobody has mapped there yet — it does not mean the area is unwatched.
It is a snapshot of a moving target. Cameras are added, moved, and removed. This snapshot was taken on 2026-08-15. Chandler’s cameras, for example, were deactivated on August 7, 2026 but the hardware remains physically installed pending removal, so it still appears here.
This is not a route-avoidance tool, and we do not endorse interfering with any of this equipment. Damaging or obstructing it is a crime, it is not what we are asking anyone to do, and it would set our argument back rather than forward.
Photographing and recording publicly visible government infrastructure from public roads is ordinary civic documentation. It is the same activity that produces any public asset map. We publish this because residents cannot evaluate a surveillance system they cannot see.
What the picture actually shows
Look at where the dots cluster. They are not distributed evenly, and they are not concentrated around crime scenes. They sit on arterial roads and city boundaries — the routes ordinary people use to get to work, school, church, a clinic, or a relative’s house. That placement is deliberate and it is the point: the system is designed to record everyone who moves between places, not to watch a suspect.
The vendor mix matters too. Of 598 mapped readers, 540 are Flock Safety and 58 are not — hardware from Motorola Solutions, LiveView Technologies, and readers no mapper has attributed, some operated by private parties rather than police. A campaign aimed at one company would leave those 58 in place. That is precisely why our campaign is Warrant Required rather than a demand aimed at a brand.
Where this data comes from
Every point here comes from OpenStreetMap, the collaborative public map, where contributors tag surveillance equipment they observe. We query it, take a dated snapshot, and render that snapshot as a static image at build time — which is why this page contacts no other server, exactly like the rest of this site. For the interactive national view, with filters and a drill-down to every jurisdiction we hold a record for, see the Atlas. It is built the same way: self-hosted geometry, no tile provider, no third-party requests.
Much of the ALPR mapping effort in OpenStreetMap has been driven by DeFlock, an independent project that builds tools for finding and recording these cameras. It is not affiliated with us. If you want a live, zoomable map you can explore and contribute to, theirs is the place to go — and if you spot a reader that is not on it, adding it is a genuinely useful thing to do with ten minutes.
Check your own town
This snapshot covers the East Valley because that is where we work. The same public data exists for the whole country. Our resources page explains how to find what is deployed where you live, and how to request the contracts and policies behind it.