Automatic License Plate Recognition (ANRP) and Vehicles Counting
The short version: A developer tutorial on building ALPR and vehicle-counting systems shows just how cheap and easy this surveillance tech has become to replicate.
Our Take
Raja Ahsan's walkthrough isn't about Flock Safety specifically, but it's a useful reality check: building a license plate reader and vehicle counter is now a weekend project for anyone with a GitHub account and a camera. The same open-source computer vision models powering hobbyist tutorials like this one are the backbone of commercial ALPR networks that log millions of plates a day. When the barrier to entry is this low, it's worth remembering that the surveillance infrastructure blanketing American streets isn't exotic technology — it's off-the-shelf code wrapped in a corporate subscription and a law enforcement contract.
That's exactly why scale and oversight matter so much. A single developer running this on a test video is a demo. The same pipeline, deployed on thousands of networked cameras feeding a searchable national database, is a mass surveillance system — one most residents never consented to and often don't know exists in their own neighborhood. Credit to Ahsan for the technical walkthrough; the bigger story is what happens when this capability gets bolted onto municipal budgets and shared across agencies with little public input.
If you want to see how far that buildout has already gone where you live, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch it happen, our take-action guide has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Raja Ahsan, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.