San Antonio Licence Plate Readers
At least 540 automated licence plate readers have been mapped across Bexar County, 500 of them made by Flock Safety. None of that came from the agencies that operate them, because none of them publish it. This page is an inventory of what volunteers found and a plain account of what the record does not say.
Read this first: these are the ones somebody found. No agency that operates a licence plate reader in Bexar County publishes where they are, so there is no total to compare this against and no coverage rate can be calculated. 540 is a floor. The real number is unknown, and larger.
Nobody official will tell you this
The City of San Antonio publishes 166 open datasets and runs a public GIS service with hundreds of layers. Not one of them is a camera. There is no inventory, no count, and no map of these devices from any agency that operates them. What is on this page came from volunteers walking and driving around and recording what they saw, in OpenStreetMap.
Where the mapped readers are
Every mapped reader is drawn, including the 210 outside the shaded city area: Live Oak, Universal City, Converse, Selma and Windcrest run their own. A dot means a volunteer recorded a device there on some date. It is not a claim that it is still there, and it says nothing about what the device does.
Who operates them is mostly not recorded
This is the single most important gap in the data. Of 540 mapped readers, 464 carry no operator at all. Only 14 distinct operators are named across the rest.
| Operator | Readers |
|---|---|
| Live Oak | 20 |
| Universal City | 12 |
| Converse | 7 |
| Lowe's | 7 |
| Academy Sports + Outdoors | 5 |
| The Home Depot | 5 |
| Terrell Hills | 5 |
| Selma | 4 |
| City of Windcrest TX | 3 |
| Windcrest | 3 |
| VILLAGE GREEN HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATION | 2 |
| City of Live Oak | 1 |
| Not recorded | 464 |
No figure on this page supports a sentence of the form "the police department operates N cameras". The record does not say. Note also that not every operator here is a police force: retailers and private businesses appear in this list, and a camera in a shop car park is a different thing from one on a public road.
The operator field is free text, so the same body can appear under more than one spelling. They are listed exactly as tagged rather than merged, because deciding which spellings are the same organisation would be our judgement rather than the record's.
What was mapped, and by whom
| Manufacturer | Readers | Share of mapped |
|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety | 500 | 92.6% |
| (not recorded) | 21 | 3.9% |
| Motorola Solutions | 12 | 2.2% |
| Rekor | 4 | 0.7% |
| Axon Enterprise | 3 | 0.6% |
Share of what has been mapped, never a share of what exists.
How current this is
Contributor edits run from 2024-11-13 to 2026-08-28, and 461 of the 540 were touched in the last twelve months. A record is a volunteer observation with a date on it, so the map lags both installations and removals.
Look at it closely
The map loads on demand. Until you press the button, no map service is contacted.
Take the data
Counts as CSV, the full cube as JSON, or through the public API. Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, retrieved 2026-08-28, licensed ODbL 1.0. Unlike the government records behind the other tools on this site, this data is not public domain: anything you derive from it carries the same licence and the same attribution requirement. Cite it as: OpenStreetMap contributors, via brandshyp.org.
What this page is, and is not
An inventory, assembled from the only public source that exists.
An automated licence plate reader photographs every passing number plate, converts it to text, and records it with a time and a place. They are mounted on poles at junctions and on approach roads. Flock Safety is the largest vendor in this market and sells to police departments, homeowner associations and private businesses alike.
This page takes no position on whether they should be there. It answers a narrower question: what is on the public record, and what is missing from it. On this subject the answer is unusually stark. Every other tool on this site audits a government dataset. Here there is no government dataset to audit.
What exists instead is OpenStreetMap, where volunteers, many working through the DeFlock project, have recorded devices they observed. That is a genuine public record and it is checkable: every point can be inspected, edited and disputed by anyone. It is also, unavoidably, incomplete.
Read this before you quote a number from it
This is the weakest evidence base of any tool on this site, and that is worth being blunt about.
There is no denominator, and that is different from the usual complaint
Elsewhere on this site the phrase means there is no traffic count to divide by. Here it is worse: nobody publishes how many readers exist, so there is no total to compare the mapped ones against and no coverage rate can be worked out at all. Every count here is a floor.
Who operates them is mostly unrecorded
Most mapped readers carry no operator tag. No number on this page supports a sentence of the form “the police department runs N cameras”, and nothing here should be read that way. Some tagged operators are private businesses rather than any police force.
Presence only, never behaviour
A record means somebody saw a device at a place on a date. It says nothing about what any camera records, how long anything is kept, who it is shared with, or whether it is even switched on. None of that is in this data and none of it is inferred here.
Plate readers only
The filter is devices tagged as automated plate readers. Ordinary surveillance cameras are excluded by it, including those around federal facilities, which are not published on this page.
Seen one that is not on the map?
The count on this page is a floor, and the only people who can raise it are the ones who drive past these things.
Every reader on the map was put there by a volunteer who noticed one and recorded it. No agency publishes a list to check that against, so the map is not a census and cannot become one. What it can be is less incomplete. If you have seen a reader, the form below records it in a way that keeps every refusal this page already makes: it asks for a part of town rather than an address, it does not ask which way the camera faces, and it does not ask you to guess who operates it.
Why an IT contractor built this
Because the interesting problem is not the map, it is the absence. A city can publish 166 datasets and hundreds of GIS layers and still have nothing at all to say about a network of several hundred cameras. Finding that out took one query against the catalogue and one against the GIS services, and the answer was zero both times.
Working out what a record cannot support is the same discipline whether the record is a permit file, a dispatch log or an empty shelf. See our capabilities or get in touch.
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