What ALPR is
Automated license plate reader systems recognize license plate text in imagery. Government deployments may involve separate hardware, recognition software, hosted services, and searchable networks.
What this tracker covers
This site publishes government entities, deployment relationships, counts, vendors, contracts, funding, historical events, and source evidence maintained by this project through evidence-backed research. Entities include cities, counties, police departments, sheriffs, school districts, universities, MUDs, and other government organizations. This list is open-ended.
Research and publication
The same project researches Texas deployments and maintains this website. Research prefers original government records, checks reporting against dated decisions and statements, and records unresolved discrepancies. A normalized dataset is validated before atomic publication. The website displays that dataset without filling unknowns or choosing between conflicting claims.
Earlier workbook research is preserved as attributed historical information. An imported claim is not labeled independently verified unless its source has been checked. Current operational quantities awaiting verification remain unknown and are excluded from reader subtotals.
The research process provides each source’s publisher, type, quality designation, dates, and notes. Original sources are linked prominently. Quality designations describe the export; the frontend does not rank them or choose a winner.
Counts retain their qualifiers
- Exact
- A specific quantity established in the research export.
- At least
- A known minimum; the actual count may be greater.
- Approximately
- An estimate, displayed with ≈.
- Reported
- A source-reported quantity with the research qualification retained.
- Unknown
- The export does not establish a quantity. It is never displayed as zero.
- Conflicting
- Evidence disagrees. Competing claims and their sources are preserved.
Operational, installation, contract, and funding statuses are separate
Active means the export establishes operating equipment. Disabled means equipment is not operating but may still be installed. Physically removed means the equipment was taken out. Pending means equipment has not yet reached the stated installed or operating stage. Unknown statuses remain unknown.
A canceled contract does not prove that cameras are offline. Disabled does not mean physically removed. Loss of grant funding does not prove that equipment stopped operating. Proposed, approved, and actually spent replacement funding are separate fields.
Ownership is different from access
An agency may own equipment, operate it, administer a network, or only have permission to search another entity’s network. These relationships are published separately. Search access is not counted as agency-owned hardware. A platform relationship does not automatically establish the hardware manufacturer.
Flock removal is different from ALPR removal
Flock Safety is one vendor. Ending a Flock contract may be followed by another vendor’s deployment. The old and new deployment records remain visible together. A sheriff ending ALPR does not establish that every other agency’s deployment in the county ended.
Conflicts remain visible
Where the research export contains competing claims, the site shows “Conflicting evidence” and the sources for both. Frontend logic does not resolve the disagreement. Null or conflicting quantities cannot become numeric totals.
Totals have an explicit scope
Entity, deployment, vendor, and contract statistics count records in the published dataset. Reader statistics are provided by the research export with included and excluded deployment IDs. The site does not calculate active readers by subtraction, combine mixed count qualifiers into an exact total, add statewide aggregates to their components, or include access-only networks in hardware totals.
Unless the export explicitly establishes complete statewide coverage, these are scoped tracked records, not a complete census. Counties without matching records are coverage gaps; they do not prove an absence of ALPR.
History, corrections, and provenance
History and evidence are append-only. Corrections reference superseded records, which remain available. A real-world status change uses its established event date, or an explicit unknown date. The date a fact was added is shown separately; discovering an old deployment today is a dataset update. The change feed separates operational, contract, funding, count, physical removal, and vendor events from historical discoveries, citations, corrections, and expanded coverage.
Privacy and location publication
This site tracks government deployments and public contracts. It does not accept plate observations, individual vehicle or travel histories, unrelated personal identifying information, or credentials in the public schema. The map shades county boundaries from jurisdiction metadata. Precise reader coordinates are not supported by the current export schema; publishing locations would require a separate design decision.
Coverage and historical research
The initial research publication preserves an earlier Texas workbook, adds independently reviewed sources, and expands beyond Flock Safety. Unverified legacy findings are identified in evidence and history. Coverage is incomplete; tracked entities include historical, proposed, access-only, and unresolved records.
Publication integrity
Complete exports must validate before publication. Stable IDs, referential integrity, declared record counts, history preservation, and statistic scopes are checked. Failed or competing imports preserve the last successful public dataset. Prior successful snapshots are backed up automatically.