Atlanta has more surveillance cameras per capita than any city in America. That’s a corporate artifact, like saying the city with coke headquarters has been known for more America First tokens per capita.

Flock Safety’s headquarters means DeFlock’s crowdsourced map shows over 5,000 Flock cameras in the metro area. The police department has about 1,800 sworn officers. The city’s integrated camera network grew eightfold since 2021, from 3,300 cameras to 28,626.

Flock claims one license plate reader per sworn officer correlates with a 9.1 percent increase in clearance rates. That means Atlanta has nearly three per officer.

The Atlanta Community Press Collective pulled APD’s submissions to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. Homicide clearance was 53.4 percent in 2021 and 48.0 percent in 2025, showing a worse rate. Rape stayed at 37.7 percent. Robbery stayed at 25 percent. Burglary moved from 10.7 to 11.6 percent. Flat across eight major crime categories, despite cameras.

The cameras waste a lot of time and money, add invasive risks that reduce safety, yet solve nothing extra.

They cost tens of millions of dollars a year. Every car, every plate, every trip is logged into a database searched by nearly 2,000 agencies, including for immigration raids.

What is this, Igloo White again? Or more to the point, do we learn nothing from history?

$180K Grant in 1966: Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) for New York Surveillance

Atlanta lost its privacy for a crime-solving machine that solves no additional crime.