Refreshed once a day
Every searchthe archive has read stays on the record.
Each Flock portal only publishes the last thirty days of data. We capture every portal every day and keep every copy.
Every Michigan department we know of that publishes a Flock portal, grouped by county. A county’s figures count each outside organization once, even when several of its departments share with it.
How many cameras an agency runs, how often its officers search, and who else can search its cameras. Each one links to the agency’s live portal and to every copy of it the archive has kept.
A department can let other agencies search its cameras, and its portal names every one. Many of them are nowhere near Michigan. The portals give no addresses, so each dot is placed from the organization’s name. Search for an agency near you to see whether it is on any list.
Every state with at least one organization that can search these cameras, and how many it has. A plate read here can be looked up from any of them.
Each department decides for itself who may search its cameras, and neighboring departments have decided very differently. Each county’s bar combines its departments’ lists and counts every organization once.
A portal can publish two lists: who may search the department’s cameras, and whose cameras the department may search. Side by side, they show that most of these relationships are not mutual.
Not every camera on this network is a government’s. Apartment communities, property managers and stores can buy Flock cameras too, and can let the police search them. The portals’ lists name those that do. It does not run the other way: no company can search the police cameras.
Grouped by what the owner is, read from its name. Campus police and public hospitals count as public bodies. A dot means that department’s portal lists the owner as one whose cameras it can search. Only departments that publish this list have a column. The last column is how many of the owner’s cameras appear on the DeFlock map under its name.
A live portal shows today’s lists and nothing else. Every addition and removal here comes from comparing one day’s read with the next, which is the only place these changes can be seen.
One portal dropping an organization is that department’s own decision. The same organization disappearing from several portals within two weeks is that organization leaving the network, which only reading every portal can show.
Every time an officer looks up a plate or a vehicle, the portal logs a search. This chart counts them per day, as far back as the archive holds.
Officers pick a reason from a fixed list each time they search. Beside each reason is how often that kind of search went far past the region, to more than a thousand camera networks.
Searches by hour of the day and day of the week, in Michigan time. Brighter is busier.
A search can stay on the department’s own cameras or reach thousands of other networks across the country. Each bar compares a department’s searches with the widest search that same department has run, so a small department is measured against itself rather than against a large one.
The bar spans the middle half of each department’s searches; the tick is the typical search.
Each department has its own mix of search reasons. The table scores how far apart two departments’ mixes are and names the reason that separates them most; brighter is more different. Departments with too few searches to compare are listed underneath.
Each Flock customer’s cameras form one camera network, and every search records how many networks it reached. The widest search on a given day shows how big the national pool was that day. Two departments with very different partners report nearly the same number.
This is the official figure: each portal states how many cameras the department operates. It never says where they are. The count can change over time, and this archive records every change it sees.
DeFlock is a volunteer project that maps license plate cameras. Its map is built on OpenStreetMap, an open map anyone can edit, and this archive reads the same data once a day. Volunteers often leave the owner blank, and nothing here comes from the departments. Each dot is a mapped camera and each outline is the area a department polices.
The portal counts the department’s own cameras. The map counts every Flock camera volunteers have found in the department’s area, whoever owns it. So the comparison gives a floor, never an exact figure. More on the map than on the portal means some belong to someone else, or have come down. Fewer means some are not mapped yet.
Every mapped camera whose owner is recorded as a company rather than a police force or the vendor, and whether that company appears on any department’s list of cameras it can search.
Only the portal’s count says a department added or removed a camera, and it never says which one. The map says where, but its date is when a volunteer made the edit, which can be months after a camera went up.
A hotlist is a list of plates the system alerts on, mostly stolen vehicles and outstanding warrants. Each portal publishes how many vehicles its cameras saw in the last thirty days and how many alerts they raised. Dividing one by the other gives a rate that can be compared between departments.
Each score comes from the department’s own portal. A department that doesn’t publish the figures a score needs is left off that list, not scored zero. Hover over or tap a bar to see what went into it.
Every figure on this page comes from these public pages, which Flock Safety hosts for each department. Each portal shows only the last thirty days, so the archive keeps a copy of every daily read on GitHub, where anyone can check a figure against its file.
The archive reads every portal once a day. A portal that stops answering or stops changing shows up here, so a quiet week can be told apart from a portal that has gone stale.
The newest searches, and any outside organization that gained or lost access to a department’s cameras since the day before. The timeline goes back through every earlier day.
Every department uses the same template from Flock. What each one fills in, and which uses of the cameras it rules out in writing, is its own choice.
Present on every portal in the archive, so none of it sets one department apart from another.
Optional under the same template, as of the latest read. A portal can stop publishing a figure; the table above notes when one did.
Checked against every page. The gaps are the same everywhere.