Four numbers

The map at a glance

Who made the cameras, according to the tags

Twenty of the 293 nodes name an operator, and every one of those is private: The Home Depot (8), WestWind Management (5), Lowe's (4), and Walmart (3). The other 273, including 250 of the Flock-tagged cameras, name no operator at all. No node is tagged to the City of Aurora or the Aurora Police Department. That is not evidence either way; it means the volunteers who mapped them did not record one.

Where they cluster

The readers follow the arterials of the older, western half of the city. Counting every reported camera within 250 meters of a corridor's road geometry, regardless of vendor, the densest are:

Three groupings stand out on the map itself. The tightest is on Havana Street just south of Mississippi Avenue, where 21 Flock-tagged cameras sit within 400 meters of one point; 15 of the 21 were mapped in August 2025 and the other six in November 2025. A second group of eight runs in a north–south line east of E-470, between 6th and Alameda Avenues, roughly 600 meters from the nearest arterial. In the southeast, the Southlands area around South Aurora Parkway, Smoky Hill Road, and E-470 holds a dozen more. East of E-470 and north of Colfax, where most of the city's land area lies, the data shows no cameras at all.

Against the contract

The purchasing records on this site name 22 Flock cameras by number (two Falcon Flex and 20 Falcons for the School Resource Officer unit) plus Flock software on 20 cameras the City already owned; the two largest camera awards state no count. In October 2025 the police chief put the figure at “about 100 Flock systems” (Context). The map shows 267 Flock-tagged readers.

The gap does not establish anything on its own. At least three things widen it honestly:

• The program has grown. The chief's figure is a year old, and the March 2026 renewal added $348,700 of camera subscription; a camera a volunteer mapped in July 2026 may not have existed in October 2025.
• Private Flock cameras are on the map too. Flock sells to businesses, and 17 of the red dots are tagged to Home Depot, Lowe's, or a property manager. More may be private without a tag; the data cannot separate the City's cameras from anyone else's.
• The data overcounts and undercounts at once. A decommissioned camera stays on the map until someone removes it, so the 12 school-lot cameras switched off in October 2026 may still appear; a camera nobody has walked past does not appear at all.

What the map does establish is narrower and still useful: where volunteers have seen Flock hardware in Aurora, and how thickly. The City's own location list, if one exists, has not been released.

What a dot is, and is not

• A volunteer's report. Each dot is an OpenStreetMap node someone added by hand, tagged man_made=surveillance and surveillance:type=ALPR. A red dot adds manufacturer=Flock Safety, a mapper's identification of the hardware.
• Not an inventory. It undercounts (unmapped cameras are absent) and can overcount (removed cameras may remain). 270 of the 293 nodes have never been edited since they were created.
• Not a date of installation. A node's timestamp records when it was mapped or last edited. The earliest ALPR node inside the boundary dates from November 2024; the first tagged Flock Safety, from May 2025. Those are ceilings on the program's visibility, not beginnings.
• Not an operator. The map does not say whose camera any dot is. Where a node carries an operator tag, the hover text shows it; where it does not, nothing is inferred.
• Not the whole program. Deployable Falcon Flex units, the drone fleet, and any mobile readers cannot be drawn as fixed points.

Method and exact query

The camera data comes from a single Overpass API query against OpenStreetMap, run October 13, 2026 (OSM data as of 20:03 UTC that day). The query asks for every ALPR-tagged surveillance node in a bounding box around the city, and the result is then filtered to the nodes that fall inside the City of Aurora's administrative boundary, OSM relation 112875, using the boundary polygon itself. A boundary-area query gives the same set:

[out:json][timeout:180];
area(3600112875)->.a;
node["man_made"="surveillance"]["surveillance:type"="ALPR"](area.a);
out tags center meta;

Paste that into overpass-turbo.eu to reproduce the count; it will have moved on from 293 as volunteers add and remove reports. The road layer is a second query for motorway, trunk, primary, and secondary ways in the same box, and the boundary is the relation's geometry from Nominatim.

Everything needed to rebuild the map is in this site's repository: the filtered camera data (aurora-alpr-cameras.json, with the OSM contributor fields removed so no mapper is identified), the boundary (aurora-boundary.json), and the script that draws the SVG and computes the corridor counts, .github/scripts/build-alpr-map.py. Each dot links to DeFlock's map at that camera's coordinates. Corridor counts treat a camera as “on” a corridor if it lies within 250 meters of any point on that road's geometry.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Camera reports are the work of DeFlock volunteers. This page is not affiliated with DeFlock or OpenStreetMap.