New York City will not publish a map of the cameras watching its streets. This one is assembled from four kinds of evidence — the city's own live feeds, the tickets its enforcement cameras wrote, a volunteer census of street corners and an open map anyone can edit. It is not complete, and no complete map exists. The layers count in different ways and see some of the same hardware, so .
The map shows six kinds of device from four kinds of evidence and keeps them apart because they are not equally reliable.
Department of Transportation traffic cameras. The agency runs a public network of street cameras and publishes their coordinates and live images through its Traffic Management Center. Click one on the map and you see what it sees. These are the only cameras in this project whose locations the city itself confirms. DOT says the images are not recorded.
The city does not release the locations of its automated enforcement cameras. A DOT spokesman told West Side Rag in August 2026 that keeping the sites secret makes the program work better.
But every ticket a camera writes records the corner it was written at, and those tickets are public. Grouping the Department of Finance's fiscal 2026 violations file by location turns roughly 5.5 million camera tickets into a list of the corners that were issuing them, which is a list of the cameras.
Three violation codes are written by fixed cameras rather than by a person: 36 school zone speed, 7 red light, 5 bus lane. Finance splits each location across two 20-character columns, so the string has to be reassembled, then split into a travel direction and two street names, then matched against a gazetteer of intersections built by snapping the endpoints of all 122,244 segments in the city's street centerline file onto an 11-metre grid.
Locations that could not be matched are almost all highway ramps and service roads whose names in the ticket system have no counterpart in the centerline file. They are counted in the table but not drawn on the map. A camera flagged approximate in the detail panel was matched by nearest spelling rather than exactly, so its corner is likely but not certain.
Two cautions. A camera that wrote no tickets in the period leaves no trace here, and the fiscal 2026 file carries issue dates from July 2024 through June 2026, so a corner in this layer is one that was ticketing at some point in that window — not necessarily one that is ticketing today. The last ticket date in the detail panel is the best available check.
Amnesty International's Decode Surveillance NYC. More than 7,000 volunteers examined 45,000 intersections in Google Street View three times each and counted the cameras visible from each one, noting whether each was bolted to a pole or to a building. The result is the only systematic count of private cameras that exists for this city: 28,950 cameras at 14,097 corners, of which about 22,000 were mounted on buildings rather than street furniture.
This layer is a count per corner, not a set of camera positions, so it is drawn as graduated circles rather than as points. It is also five years old and reflects whatever Street View imagery volunteers were shown, some of it older still.
Plate readers, other cameras and gunshot detectors from OpenStreetMap, which is where the DeFlock project's contributions live. Anyone can add a camera; nobody is required to. Coverage is therefore extremely uneven — a block someone walked with their phone looks saturated, and the block beside it looks empty. An empty area on this layer means nobody has surveyed it, not that nothing is there. That misreading is what the August 2026 story about the Upper West Side was about.
Despite the name, there are no Flock Safety cameras in New York City; the New York Police Department (NYPD), DOT and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) have all said they do not contract with the company. The plate readers here are run mostly by the NYPD, DOT, the MTA and the Port Authority, plus a handful of big-box retailers.
The four kinds of evidence look at the same streets from different angles, so they see some of the same hardware. Nothing on this map should be added up into a single grand total.
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