LANSING, Mich. This map plots 88 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and 104 general CCTV cameras across the greater Lansing area, using volunteer-contributed data from OpenStreetMap. Every pin on the map corresponds to an OSM node and links back to the underlying record. The map is a compilation of existing public data, not a release of new information. A companion map maintained by volunteers at deflock.me covers the same territory with a broader national footprint.
The chip row below the masthead filters the ALPR layer by operator.
Click a chip to toggle it on or off. Alt-click, shift-click, or
cmd-click to isolate a single operator. The “Show Flock
only” pill further restricts the visible ALPR cameras to those
whose OSM record carries a
manufacturer=Flock Safety tag. The overlay panel in the
lower-left toggles the CCTV layer, an approximate 50-foot capture
radius around each visible ALPR pin, and an ALPR density heatmap.
The ALPR operator counts shown on this page (22 Lansing PD, 30 MSU
Police, 16 MSU Parking, 11 Meijer, 7 Lowe’s, 2 without operator
tags) are direct counts of OpenStreetMap nodes within a greater-Lansing
bounding box (42.60–42.82°N, −84.70 to
−84.40°W). Thirty-one of the 88 ALPR nodes carry a
manufacturer=Flock Safety tag. The remainder have either
an unspecified manufacturer or a non-Flock vendor (Motorola/Vigilant,
Genetec).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s
Atlas of Surveillance
reports 21 Flock cameras operated by the Lansing Police Department, a
figure also cited by
City Pulse.
This map shows 22. All 22 are tagged manufacturer=Flock Safety;
no additional non-Flock LPD camera is present in the data. The
single-camera discrepancy is consistent with an OpenStreetMap
convention under which a physical pole hosting two cameras pointing in
different directions is sometimes mapped as two nodes rather than one.
Nodes 13202851002 and 13228780162, located about 19 meters apart near
the intersection of West Kalamazoo Street and Jenison Avenue, are the
most likely candidates for such a dual-node pole. The per-node count
is the one this map displays because each node is an independently
tagged and independently correctable OSM record. The per-pole count is
the one law-enforcement-facing documents tend to use.
The 50-foot (15.24-meter) coverage circle drawn around each visible
ALPR pin, when the “coverage zones” overlay is active, is
derived from the published effective-capture distance for the Flock
Falcon fixed-pole camera. Actual capture depends on mounting height,
camera angle, and traffic speed; the circle is labeled
“approximate.” A camera’s recorded
direction tag, when present, gives the compass bearing
the camera faces, which a circle does not represent. Displaying a full
circle rather than a directional cone is a conservative choice.
The map shows the physical locations of cameras that are tagged by OpenStreetMap volunteers as ALPR or CCTV, along with each camera’s publicly contributed operator, manufacturer, and direction tags. It does not show license plate imagery, the contents of any plate-reader database, police patrol routes, staffing or dispatch information, unmarked vehicles, search audit logs, or any other operational information about how the cameras are used. No private-party data has been ingested.
operator, manufacturer, and direction fields are frequently blank. Two ALPR pins in this dataset have no operator tag at all and appear under the “Unknown” chip.