There is no state list of automatic license plate readers in Texas. No agency publishes a count, and if you want to know how many cameras are operating in your city and where, you won’t be able to find it. And if you ask them for this information, according to the Dallas Morning News, they probably aren’t going to give it to you:
The exact locations are often withheld by police departments, including by Dallas police, in response to inquiries or open records requests.
So volunteers have been building one - 16,613 cameras mapped across Texas — all by people mapping information the government will not give out.
Those observations go into OpenStreetMap (tagged surveillance:type=ALPR), the open geographic database that is a wikipedia-like open map. DeFlock is a viewer on top of it.
The Texas Flock Camera Map
https://geopen.io/maps/texas-alpr-cameras.html
I pulled the Texas camera locations directly from OpenStreetMap on September 1st. There are a lot of them.
And just to be clear - this is not an official, perfect source of truth. These are submissions by volunteers - and the count of cameras is growing by the day as more people get out and document their locations (especially as this story has blown up).
You can even see which direction they point (if you keep zooming in):
According to Flock Safety’s transparency portal, Dallas has 684 of them. The City has now said they’re going to shut down 321 of them. Volunteers have mapped 920 within the limits of Dallas, which includes cameras owned by private businesses (Lowe’s and Home Depot are among the highest users).
In Dallas, there have been two votes for these cameras - both approved 15-0 by the City Council (one in 2022 and one in 2025).
Grants Map
The Texas Tribune found where this funding came from — in 2023 the legislature (unanimously) added $1 to every auto insurance policy in Texas to fight catalytic converter theft (SB 224). The fee has raised about $81 million. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority (a TxDMV agency) is giving out these grants. You can get a full list of the grantees at this url, or directly at this PDF.
I’ve mapped 148 of these 149 grants - and 39 of them mention cameras or plate readers.
https://geopen.io/maps/texas-mvcpa-grants.html
The response to this information has been swift - Greg Abbott has paused funding from the state and several local municipalities have ended their contracts with Flock.
I believe it feels to many people that
the government wants to spy on the public, but the government wants to make it very hard for the public to spy on them
They don’t want to publish the locations of the cameras and many of these votes for these contracts are hidden in dark corners of government information systems in difficult to find PDFs. You can read SB 224 here. It never mentions cameras.
My hope out of this is that the public starts to understand we need to fund better tools for the public to spy on the government. Not literally - I mean trying to persuade the government invest in technical transparency tools - things like open voting records, digital council agendas, public grant register open databases, .csv and .geojson open formats and digital geometries for locations, not text addresses - I could go on and on.
That kind of open information and transparency can help keep government officials and the public on the same page. That way in the future we never have to be so surprised about where tax dollars are being spent.
GeoJSON file
If you want a mapping file of these locations, here it is:
https://geopen.io/data/texas_alpr.geojson
(That’s a static file I generated on September 1st - but the map is being updated each day by OpenStreetMap contributors walking around mapping these).
You can also contribute Flock Camera locations to DeFlock and OpenStreetMap yourself through an app (instructions here).
Email me at robert@themap.io