The LAPD dropped Flock… West Hollywood now has 37 times as many Flock cameras per square mile

The Los Angeles Police Department let its contract with Flock Safety expire in July 2026. Its chief information officer, Dean Gialamas, told reporters the sticking point was who owns the data once the cameras collect it, and the department cited “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues.” On July 14 the Board of Police Commissioners voted to suspend deployment pending more oversight and public input. A motion from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, introduced in late May, had already asked the commission not to sign anything further with the company.

By the department’s count, 138 Flock cameras sit on city property. Volunteers have mapped 305 Flock readers inside the city, more than twice as many, and the ones bolted to apartment complexes, homeowners’ associations and private developments were never covered by a city contract. Mapped Flock readers turn up in 79 of the county’s 88 cities.

The count

Los Angeles County has no public register of license plate readers, so this count comes from OpenStreetMap, where volunteers organized through a project called DeFlock have been photographing readers and tagging their locations for about two years. We pulled every reader tagged in a box drawn around the county, put each one inside a Census city boundary, and joined the result to Census population and land area.

That produced 3,127 mapped readers inside the county’s 88 incorporated cities, and 2,190 of them carry a manufacturer tag naming Flock Safety. Another 2,164 sit outside all 88 city limits, in unincorporated county or across a county line. Motorola Solutions is the second vendor with 406 readers, and 302 readers have no vendor tag at all. We left those out of the Flock count instead of guessing, so every Flock number here is a floor. Avalon, Bradbury, Maywood and Sierra Madre have no mapped reader of any kind.

Per square mile

West Hollywood has a mapped Flock reader for every 27 acres, and the City of Los Angeles has one for every square mile and a half, a ratio of about thirty-seven to one. Los Angeles ranks 67th of the county’s 88 cities on Flock readers per square mile and 71st on Flock readers per resident, which puts the city with 40 percent of the county’s people in the bottom quarter on both. Counting readers from every vendor, it falls to 80th per square mile.

Density and income

San Marino, where the median household earns $214,167 a year, has the sixth-densest Flock coverage in the county. Bell Gardens, where the median is $62,298, has the 13th. When the county’s 88 cities are ranked by median household income and split into quarters, every quarter has between four and six of the twenty densest. The nine cities with no mapped Flock reader are just as mixed, from Hidden Hills and Rolling Hills, the two highest-income cities in the county, to Maywood, which ranks 85th of 88. Income figures are the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates for 2020 through 2024.

Land area tracks the ranking more closely than income does. All 22 of the densest cities cover less than eleven square miles of land, and the densest city larger than that, Burbank, ranks 23rd. West Hollywood’s 45 cameras come to 23.8 per square mile because the city covers less than two, and matching that density across Los Angeles’s 470 square miles would take roughly eleven thousand readers.

Per resident

Divided by residents instead of land, the ranking reshuffles, and three industrial cities go to the top.

Industry has 199 residents, Vernon 207 and Irwindale 1,439. They’re manufacturing and warehouse districts that were incorporated to be workplaces, and their daytime populations run to tens of thousands of people who live somewhere else.

Per capita is the usual denominator for civic data, and here it produces a ranking whose top three entries are an artifact of incorporation law. Per square mile has a bias of its own, rewarding small cities and burying large ones. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.

The rest of the county

Los Angeles was already among the least covered cities in the county when its contract lapsed. The fight at City Hall is over 138 cameras on city property, in a county with several thousand mapped readers, most of them owned by someone else and outside the city’s jurisdiction. Flock runs a network its customer agencies can search across, and the map shows where readers stand and who made them, but not who can search them.

On July 20 the West Hollywood City Council voted 3-2 to keep its Flock cameras, with new limits on sharing their footage with federal agencies. Its 45 mapped Flock readers give it the densest coverage of any city in the county.

CORRECTION, 2026-10-04. An earlier version said the end of the LAPD’s Flock contract hadn’t turned any cameras off and that the cameras kept recording. The Beverly Press reported in July that the department had turned off Flock cameras in the Beverly Grove area, and the piece no longer says so. The earlier version also said Los Angeles was the only jurisdiction in the county to publicly reopen the question of whether it belonged in Flock’s network. West Hollywood’s council took up the same question and voted 3-2 on July 20 to keep its Flock cameras, with new limits on sharing their footage with federal agencies.