Police Cameras Scanned 210 Million License Plates — LAPD Just Pulled Out
The short version: SecurityEvolution reports LAPD logged 210 million Flock plate scans and then exited the network — proof that even police eventually balk at the scale of this surveillance.
Our Take
Credit to SecurityEvolution for putting a number on what most of us suspected: Flock Safety's cameras in Los Angeles weren't just catching the occasional stolen car, they were logging on the order of 210 million plate reads. That's not targeted policing, that's a dragnet — every car, every driver, every trip, timestamped and stored in a database that can be queried by agencies far beyond LA's city limits.
What makes this story worth your attention isn't just the eye-popping scan count, it's that LAPD apparently decided the arrangement wasn't worth the exposure and walked away. When a major police department pulls back from a surveillance vendor, that's not a sign everything's fine — it's a sign the scale and liability got too obvious to ignore. The data already collected doesn't just vanish, and the network of readers run by other agencies and HOAs in the region keeps humming along regardless of what LAPD decides to do.
This is exactly the pattern we track: quiet expansion, eye-popping scan totals, then a scramble when the public or an agency itself realizes how far the net has spread. Check our camera map to see what's logging your plates right now, and hit take action if you want to push back on ALPR creep in your own city.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of SecurityEvolution, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.