Quick question. When did you vote for this?
As of this week, volunteers at DeFlock — an open-source project that crowdsources the location of every license plate reader people can find — have mapped at least 2,899 automated license plate readers in Tennessee. Not traffic cameras. Not red-light cameras. Cameras that photograph every plate that passes, log where your car was and when, and pour it all into searchable databases.
And here’s the part that should make you sit up: 2,497 of those cameras — 86% — belong to one private company. Flock Safety. The same company we covered last month, whose network has been queried by federal agencies more than a million times through local police accounts, often without those departments’ authorization.
The rest of the Tennessee map: Motorola Solutions runs about 135, Genetec 46, and a scattering of smaller vendors — Axon, Rekor, Skycop — make up the tail. And remember: that’s just what volunteers have found so far. DeFlock has charted roughly half of Flock’s national network. The real number on Tennessee poles is higher.
Nationwide? 116,943 license plate readers mapped in the United States as of today, by DeFlock’s own counter. That’s not a pilot program. That’s infrastructure.
But here’s the good news — people are fighting back, and winning
DeFlock also keeps a running scoreboard of communities that looked at the cameras and said no. It currently stands at 89 cities and counties — contracts rejected, contracts canceled, cameras physically deactivated. Los Angeles canceled this month. Madison, Wisconsin, shut its cameras off. Ypsilanti, Michigan, banned ALPRs outright.
And one of those 89 is ours: Knoxville canceled its Flock contract in February 2026. A Tennessee city looked at the surveillance math and decided it didn’t add up. If Knoxville can do it, so can yours.
Want to know how many cameras are watching your street? Open DeFlock’s map, punch in your neighborhood, and count. Then maybe ask your city council the same question we opened with: when did anybody vote for this?
Sources:
- DeFlock — crowdsourced ALPR map (camera counts via DeFlock/OpenStreetMap data, retrieved July 18, 2026; Tennessee count 2,899, US count 116,943)
- DeFlock — city council victories tracker (89 communities; Knoxville, TN contract canceled February 2026)
- Freedom Beagle — The Cameras Don’t Need a Warrant. That’s the Problem.
- 404 Media — The Open Source Project DeFlock Is Mapping License Plate Surveillance Cameras