Flock Cameras in Grant County: 39 on the Map, So Far

A three-part series on Flock cameras in Grant County.

• Part 1: The cameras — this report
• Part 2: The paper trail (coming soon)
• Part 3: The searches (coming soon)

What these cameras are

A license plate reader is a camera on a pole. The standard roadside units used by law enforcement are solar-powered, connect over cellular data, and need nobody to operate them.

Each camera automatically photographs passing vehicles — every one it can, whether or not the vehicle is connected to an investigation. The most common manufacturer, Flock Safety, advertises capture rates above 99 percent in good conditions. From each photograph the system stores the plate characters, the date, the time and the camera's location. It also stores a description of the vehicle — make, model, color, body type, and distinguishing features like a roof rack, a ladder in the bed, a bumper sticker, a missing hubcap, unrepaired damage. Flock markets that description as a Vehicle Fingerprint.

Flock's stated default is to delete reads after 30 days, on a rolling basis. Retention is a contract setting rather than a fixed rule, and Indiana agencies have set it differently: Fort Wayne keeps images 180 days, while South Bend and the Allen County Sheriff's Office keep 30. No Grant County agency publishes its Flock camera policies or settings.

What it can be assembled into is the part residents ask about, and it is answerable from the vendor's own product descriptions and from published audit logs.

Where one plate has been. The Lookup tool returns every sighting of a specific plate over the past 1, 7, 14 or 30 days. Within an agency's own cameras that is a local history; across a sharing network it reaches much further.

A vehicle with no plate. Visual Search finds vehicles by resemblance rather than by plate, and Flock's FreeForm tool accepts a plain-language description — the company's own example is "blue SUV with a racing stripe." A plate number is not required to begin.

Who you travel with. Convoy Search returns vehicles that repeatedly appear near a given vehicle. Flock describes the output as pattern-of-life associations: regular travel companions.

An alert when you pass. The Hotlist tool notifies an agency when a listed plate is seen. All six Grant County agencies had it enabled as of September 2025, in the Pittsboro account described further down.

Everything in one place. Flock Nova combines plate data with dispatch records, records management systems, video and open-source material.

The volume matters as much as the tools. The 18 Indiana agencies that publish their own detection figures report about 685 vehicles per camera per day between them, with individual agencies ranging from 125 to 1,916. Using that 685 rate, 39 cameras would log roughly 26,700 detections a day — around 800,000 in a 30-day window, and those are detections, not unique vehicles — one commuter passing two cameras twice a day generates four of them — in a county of about 66,500 people (Census estimate, July 2025). Those figures are arithmetic on other agencies' published rates, not a measurement of ours, because ours are not published.

What that adds up to, on the arterials and the highways where these cameras sit, is a record of the vehicles that passed them, when, in which direction, and — where one is captured repeatedly — a pattern in its movement.

Flock's retention policy, last updated January 9, 2026, adds a step worth knowing about here: if an agency wants to keep data longer than 30 days and its own state law does not already require it, Flock says it will extend retention up to one year only after the agency obtains approval from an elected official or a governing body. So a Grant County agency keeping images past 30 days would, by the vendor's own rule, have needed that approval first.

How common this is

Flock told The New York Times in August 2026 that it runs about 120,000 cameras, in every state except Alaska, under contracts with 7,000 law enforcement agencies — 40 percent of the police departments in the country, by the Times' count.

Cities and agencies are canceling Flock

In July 2026 the Los Angeles Police Department let its three-year Flock contract expire. Its chief information officer, Dean Gialamas, told TechCrunch why: “This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras.” He said the department was “discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

Smaller places have made the same call. About 23 communities have canceled a Flock contract or switched the cameras off since January 2026, and roughly 98 since 2021 — among them Harrisonburg and Elkton in Virginia, Framingham, Massachusetts, and Saranac Lake, New York. That tally is kept by DeFlock and was reported by the Washington Examiner on August 3, 2026. DeFlock is also the group behind the camera map this report links to, so it is both the mapmaker and the scorekeeper here, and nobody outside it audits either figure.

Nothing like that has come to a vote here. None of the minutes Grant County's four boards publish records a vote to cancel a Flock contract, reject a camera or switch one off. The cameras are still up, and where they stand is the rest of this report.

The map below is volunteers' work, from OpenStreetMap, and it is incomplete: eight of the 39 were added in the week before this report. Four carry a tag naming a retailer and the other 35 carry no operator tag at all, so it does not say who reads most of this data. Read 39 as a floor.

Where they are

Two patterns.

Inside Marion, they sit on the streets that carry the city's traffic — Wabash and Spencer avenues, the numbered east–west streets from 9th to 38th, Boots, Gallatin, Western, Ivanhoe, River Drive, and the Riverwalk at Matter Park. Two of the Wabash Avenue nodes sit near Marion Health.

One of the River Drive nodes is not a plate reader on a roadside pole. It stands on its own solar-powered mast in the lawn along the Mississinewa Riverwalk in Marion. A public picnic shelter stands within its line of sight — OurWeek photographed the camera from underneath that shelter on August 11, 2026, with the camera lens in frame.

The housing is not the flat roadside box. It is a white unit with a black head that turns, mounted beside its solar panel. The housing carries a Flock Safety label.

It points into the shelter. OurWeek also observed it facing the path rather than the street on August 6 and August 8. The unit pans, so that is not necessarily a permanent setting.

Flock's plate reader looks nothing like this unit, and the line of Flock's products that matches this housing does live video and audio as well as plate reads. Which of the company's models this is has not been established — no record in Marion's files describes it, and neither the city nor the company has been asked on the record. What it records of people on foot is not established either.

Outside the city, cameras sit on numbered routes near the county's edges. Twenty-one of the 39 are within 270 yards of a state or federal route: seven near SR 18, seven near SR 9, six near US 35, five near SR 22, five near SR 15, four near SR 13 and two near I-69 — a camera close to two routes counts under both, so those figures overlap rather than sum. Several sit at county-road crossings: Strawtown Pike, North Huntington Road, East North 00 South, 900 South.

The arterials inside town, and the highways in and out. Every one of the 39 is in the table below, with a link to view its location in Google Street View.

A records request from 64 miles away

Grant County's agencies do not publish their Flock camera inventory. The numbers above come from somewhere else entirely.

In September 2025 the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a public records request with the Pittsboro Police Department, in Hendricks County on the far side of Indianapolis, 64 miles from Marion. That document is public: the Flock Safety shared-devices list obtained from the Pittsboro Police Department runs 930 pages and lists roughly 4,000 networks, and we keep our own copy of it. Pittsboro had a Flock Safety account, and because other agencies were sharing their camera data with Pittsboro, Pittsboro's own console held a list of those agencies and how many cameras each one ran. Seven of its lines are ours: six agencies and 37 cameras, counted a year before the map was. Marion has two lines because its two portable cameras sit on a separate account.

“Search: Enabled” is what the Pittsboro Police Department's Flock account held for every one of those lines as of September 2025. That is also the only reason the counts above are public: our camera numbers reached the public record through another department's paperwork, not our own.

One more thing about Pittsboro is worth noting, because it is the mirror image of the situation here. Pittsboro publishes a Flock transparency page. On August 10, 2026 it reported 13 cameras and 104,411 vehicles detected in a 30-day window, about 268 per camera per day; the page updates, so expect different figures. A resident of Pittsboro can look that up. A resident of Grant County cannot look up the equivalent for any of the six agencies above.

Who filed it, and why a small department's paperwork names Grant County

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil-liberties nonprofit that runs a standing public-records operation on police technology. Its Atlas of Surveillance catalogs which departments use which tools, agency by agency, and it is built by filing public records requests in bulk — hundreds of them, with students and volunteers processing what comes back. This 930-page list is one document out of that effort. Neither EFF's posting of it nor anything published since says why Pittsboro in particular was asked, so we are not going to guess at a reason.

What makes any one department's list worth having is that the sharing is reciprocal. A department that wants to search other agencies' cameras has to share access to its own — Flock's chief executive confirmed that arrangement to The New York Times. So a roster of who shares with one department doubles as a roster of what that department can search. EFF's own description of this document says almost 4,000 agencies were sharing plate-reader data with Pittsboro, and that Pittsboro therefore held a record of all of those agencies' camera networks. That is how a town of 3,682 people comes to hold the paperwork that names six Grant County agencies.

EFF has put the same gap in numbers elsewhere: it counts more than 1,800 agencies as having deployed plate readers, while at least 4,000 can run searches through agencies in Flock's network.

The shared-devices list covers agencies and nothing else. Four of the mapped cameras here carry a tag naming a retailer rather than a police department, and a privately owned camera sits outside that list entirely — so whether those four feed anything an agency can search is not established either way. A tag entered by a volunteer records who a mapper took to be the owner. It does not record who can run a query.

How to check this yourself

Look at the map, and correct it. The DeFlock and Eyes Off Indiana maps are built from OpenStreetMap, which anyone can edit. A camera you can see and photograph is a camera that can be added; eight were added here in the first week of August.

Search the audit logs that exist. Have I Been Flocked collects Flock audit logs that agencies have released and makes them searchable. No Grant County agency has released its own log to it. But Marion appears there anyway, in at least 11,000 searches, because of how the logs work: when an agency releases a network audit, that file lists the outside agencies that searched its cameras. Marion IN PD shows up inside other departments' releases as the agency running the search. All six Grant County agencies have a page there, and what the full exports show is the subject of the third report in this series (coming soon): at least 21,800 searches by all six, none of it released by any of them. Note that the site's on-page tables and its per-agency CSV download do not show the same thing — the tables carry the subset the site has flagged into its own categories, and the download carries everything. We used the download.

Ask for the logs that have not been released. Agencies can generate organization and network audit reports from the Flock software themselves. Those can be requested under Indiana's Access to Public Records Act — but whether a particular agency has to produce them, and what it may withhold, has not been tested here, and it is not settled by the fact that the software exports a file. In Washington, researchers report that some agencies refused these very reports on the theory that they had never generated them and so held no such record. Indiana's answer may differ; nobody has asked yet. APRA's procedures also changed on July 1, 2026 under HEA 1360, so check the Public Access Counselor's current guidance before filing. Hoosier Watchdogs has filed those requests with the City of Muncie and Delaware County. Whether Grant County's agencies will release theirs has not been tested.

The four questions. For each of the six agencies, four things would settle most of what this report has to leave open: how long reads are kept, which agencies and networks can search them, whether federal sharing is on, and what the written policy says. None of the four is answered anywhere we could find. Any of them could be answered in a sentence by the agency that set it.

This report is a standing page, not a one-time story. It will be updated as those answers turn up, and the dated notes at the end of this page say what changed and when.

Next: the paper trail

In March 2023 Fairmount's clerk-treasurer presented purchase order 3648 to Flock Group Inc. — $5,700, the earliest Flock purchase in any published record here, six months before Marion's police chief mentioned the cameras at a council budget hearing. Sweetser and Swayzee recorded prices, pole approvals and wait times, meeting by meeting.

Marion, which runs the most cameras here, has two entries in its whole published record, and neither is a contract or a vote on the cameras. In all 3,049 sets of minutes the county's four boards publish since 1997, the cameras surface three times: an ALPR ordinance removed from one agenda and tabled twice, each a single line with no discussion in the minutes.

The smallest governments here kept the fullest account of what was bought, for how much, and on whose poles. The second report is that record, in its own words. It is coming soon.