Every red dot is one automated license plate reader whose physical location someone has documented in the field and filed to OpenStreetMap. Shading shows how many sit inside each city or town. Click any municipality to see what's on record there — including whether its contract is running, contested, or already cancelled.
| Municipality | Status | Cameras | Per 10k |
|---|
There is no Massachusetts statute governing automated license plate readers. What a department may collect, how long it keeps it, and who it hands it to are set by that department's own policy — and can be changed without a vote.
A note on how to read this. Departments that adopted this technology did so lawfully, using tools the Legislature has never gotten around to regulating. The gap described below is a gap in state law, not evidence that anyone locally acted in bad faith. The point of laying it out is so residents and officials can have the same facts in front of them during a conversation that is worth having either way.
These are absences in the statute books, not findings about any particular department. Many agencies adopt some of these safeguards voluntarily in their own written policies — which is itself a good question to ask.
The one statute that touches this is the 2024 Shield Law, which bars Massachusetts police from assisting out-of-state investigations into reproductive or gender-affirming care. Whether nationwide Flock sharing is compatible with it has never been tested.
| State | ALPR statute | Retention cap | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts | None | — | Set by each department. Bills pending since 2023. |
| New Hampshire | RSA 236:130 | ~3 minutes | Broadly bans highway surveillance, public and private, with narrow exceptions. Strictest in the country. |
| Vermont | 23 V.S.A. §§1607–8 | Strict | Tight limits on use and access; effectively forecloses Flock-style retroactive searching. |
| Maine | 29-A §2117-A | 21 days | Only DOT, Public Safety, and law enforcement may operate a system. Private use barred. |
| Connecticut | Rules, not statute | 30 days | POST Council guidelines cap retention and bar immigration and reproductive-care use. A bill adding a warrant requirement after 7 days cleared the Judiciary Committee. |
| Rhode Island | None | — | Roughly 300 cameras statewide. H 8077 heard in House Judiciary in March 2026. |
Mostly no — and least of all on the warrant question.
There is no comprehensive federal statute covering how plate data is collected, kept, or shared. A 2025 Congressional Research Service brief found that Congress has left the field to Fourth Amendment litigation and to state and local law. The Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994 doesn't reach it either; that law governs DMV records, not roadside cameras.
That leaves the Fourth Amendment as the only federal constraint, and so far courts have mostly declined to require a warrant. Flock's own position is that more than 40 courts have considered license plate readers under the Fourth Amendment and ruled that use in public spaces does not require one. As of July 2026 no federal appeals court has ruled on a citywide network either way.
One federal bill is moving. The PRIVACY Act, filed by Rep. Keith Self of Texas, would require federal law enforcement to get a warrant before querying surveillance data held by state and local systems, including ALPRs. Worth reading closely: it would restrict federal access to a town's data. It would not change how the town's own officers search it. Separately, Sen. Ron Wyden's office found that Flock had run a since-discontinued pilot sharing data with DHS and ICE without properly telling its client agencies.
Massachusetts protects drivers more than federal law does. Commonwealth v. Augustine required a warrant for cell phone location data under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights in 2014 — four years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached a comparable result in Carpenter. McCarthy's "enough cameras in enough locations" rule comes from Article 14 of that same document and has no federal equivalent.
The honest way to put it: the protection exists in principle more than in practice. There is no notice that you were scanned, no public audit trail, no way to have a scan deleted, and no private right to sue. A rule with no mechanism behind it gets tested only afterward, in court, by someone who happened to have a lawyer who knew to ask. That is an argument for the Legislature to set the terms, not for anyone to assume the worst about a local department.
Filed by Rep. Steven Owens of Watertown. Caps retention at 14 days absent a specific criminal investigation, bars using ALPR to track First Amendment–protected activity, prohibits selling plate data, requires a warrant to pull data from other agencies, and makes unlawfully collected data inadmissible. Endorsed by the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Goes further: erase data within 48 hours, limit state-level retention to 120 days, restrict operation to law enforcement and MassDOT, and create civil damages plus Attorney General enforcement.
Passed the House 146–0 on June 4, 2026; the Senate passed its own version 40–0 in September 2025, and a conference committee was appointed June 11 to reconcile them. It bans the sale of precise geolocation data. It does not reach police ALPR networks — it governs commercial data brokers. Passing it would not close the gap above.
The SJC held that "with enough cameras in enough locations," ALPR data would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and constitute a search under Article 14. But it found that the four cameras then in place at the Bourne and Sagamore bridges did not cross that line. The threshold exists and has never been defined — which is why camera counts like the ones on this page matter.
Police need a warrant for cell site location information under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. The reasoning ALPR challenges build on.
Long-term location tracking is a search. Every ALPR case since argues over how far this reaches.
The case to watch. Two Norfolk residents, backed by the Institute for Justice, sued over a 176-camera Flock network after learning it had captured their cars 475 and 325 times in four months. In January 2026 the district court granted the city summary judgment, reasoning the system was not "near continuous" and so did not reveal the whole of their movements. On appeal the ACLU, EFF, Cato, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance all filed briefs urging reversal. There is still no federal appellate ruling on ALPR dragnets.
Aerial surveillance violated the Fourth Amendment because it enabled deductions about the whole of a person's movements, even where interpretation took extra steps. The precedent the Norfolk appellants say the district court ignored.
Start with your own municipality. Most departments running Flock publish a transparency portal at transparency.flocksafety.com listing camera counts, search volume, and sharing settings, and your police department, select board, or city council can answer the rest. Useful things to ask, without assuming an answer:
The ACLU of Massachusetts publishes a sample public records request if you'd rather put it in writing. Departments generally answer these questions readily, and many have posted the information already.
Damaging, covering, or disabling an ALPR camera is a crime. The equipment belongs to the municipality or the vendor, and interfering with it can bring property-destruction charges regardless of how strongly you disagree with the program. Every change described on this page — in Cambridge, Watertown, Natick, Greenfield, Framingham, Salem — came from residents showing up to meetings, asking questions, and voting. That route works.
A necessary disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. Everything here is assembled from public information available at the time of publication — news reporting, court filings, published bills, agency transparency portals, and crowdsourced mapping. Laws change, bills move, contracts are renewed or cancelled, and cameras are added and removed continuously. Verify anything you plan to rely on against malegislature.gov, the court docket, or your municipality directly, and treat every figure on this page as a snapshot rather than a current count.
The dataset lumps together very different things. A toll gantry, a hardware store's parking lot, a campus entrance, and a police reader on a public road all get the same tag — but they answer to different rules and different people.
Two things to take from this. First, most mapped units carry Flock hardware but no recorded operator — field mappers photograph the camera, not the contract, so the count of confirmed police cameras is far lower than the count of police cameras. Second, the tolling gantries are a separate category entirely: Raytheon, TransCore, Neology, and E-ZPass equipment belongs to MassDOT's electronic tolling, and H.3755 would restrict toll technology to tolling purposes and require a warrant before police could reach that data.
The traffic, parking, entrance, and area labels describe what a camera is pointed at, as judged by whoever mapped it. They are not measurements of range or resolution — that depends on lens and hardware, which the dataset doesn't record. The useful distinction they draw is jurisdictional: a reader on a public road raises the constitutional question, a reader at a store entrance is a private operator whose data may still flow into the same network. Brookline's pending decision is exactly that second case.
Massachusetts agencies using Flock generally run a public portal at transparency.flocksafety.com. These are the departments' own numbers and their own policy language, and they are worth reading before assuming anything. Portals confirmed live for Massachusetts include:
Every portal reviewed carried the same policy language, and it cuts in the departments' favor: data is used for law enforcement purposes only and is never sold to third parties, hotlist hits must be verified by a person before an officer acts, retention defaults to 30 days, and every search requires a stated reason or case number that is logged and kept indefinitely.
Each portal also publishes a list of things the department says it will not use the system for. Those are immigration enforcement, harassment or intimidation, personal use, decisions based solely on a protected class such as race, sex, or religion — and, perhaps surprisingly, routine traffic enforcement. That last one is worth explaining rather than glossing over: it means the department is committing not to mine plate data to issue ordinary traffic citations. The system is meant for investigating specific crimes, not for ticketing.
These portals block automated collection, so the table below was assembled from publicly indexed portal content rather than scraped in bulk. Figures are point-in-time and unverified against the departments directly — treat them as a starting question, not a finding.
The sharing lists are the most revealing part of any portal, because they show reach rather than intent. Four out-of-state portals list Massachusetts agencies among their connected organizations:
| Portal | Cameras | Retention | Searches | Orgs shared with | MA agencies listed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cranston RI PD | 27 | 30d | 605 | 38 | 17 |
| East Providence RI PD | 14 | 30d | 137 | 39 | 5 |
| Warwick RI PD | 10 | 30d | 362 | 16 | 5 |
| Flock Safety — sales/demo org | 197 | 30d | 871 | 51 | 5 |
The last row is the one worth a phone call. Flock's own sales and demonstration organization lists five Massachusetts police departments among its 51 connected organizations: Easton, Fall River, Freetown, Topsfield, and Wareham. The same portal records 871 searches run against its network.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not show. It does not establish that anyone at Flock searched a Massachusetts department's data, and a connection listed on a portal is not the same as an access event. It is a snapshot of a field whose exact semantics the company has not published. But a vendor sales account appearing in a sharing relationship with municipal police data is a reasonable thing for a resident of those five towns to ask their department about — and the department may well have a straightforward answer.
Beyond the demo account, 26 Massachusetts agencies appear in out-of-state portal connection lists: Attleboro, Bellingham, Canton, Dartmouth, Easton, Fall River, Franklin, Freetown, Holyoke, Lawrence, Malden, Marlborough, Medway, Middleboro, Milford, Quincy, Randolph, Revere, Seekonk, Somerset, Taunton, Topsfield, Wareham, Wayland, Wellesley, and the SEMRECC regional dispatch center. Massachusetts State Police and Abington, Acushnet, and Attleboro also appear on Woonsocket RI PD's list, alongside agencies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, New York, and the federal US Postal Inspection Service.
This is the mechanism the ACLU of Massachusetts is pointing at when it raises the Shield Law: not that any particular department misused anything, but that the sharing architecture reaches well past the Commonwealth by default, and the settings that control it are configured locally with no state law governing the choice.