Huh...
I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even...
I don't like that one bit.
> Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that your town is way richer than these nearby cities and has a way higher ratio of police to the kind of crime police want to solve hence the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" behavior.
So much of the policing problem is a result of towns with no real problems hiring a bunch of cops to go after little problems and then these bored cops who have nothing to do wind up doing revenue policing or pervasive fishing, acting as an enforcement arm for the petty civil portions of local government, etc, etc.
Like sure, Detroit or some other city with "real crime" might have a big enough department to harbor a rogue drug unit or whatever but at least your average beat cop is well fed enough on "real crime" they don't need to engage in bad behavior to meet quotas.
I get the temptation to attribute the popularity of these systems to lazy police with nothing better to do, but from personal experience there’s more to it.
I live in a medium sized residential development about 15 minutes outside Austin. A few years ago we started getting multiple incidents per month of attempted car theft where the thieves would go driveway to driveway checking for unlocked doors. Sometimes the resident footage revealed the thieves were armed while doing so. In a couple of cases they did actually steal a car.
The sheriffs couldn’t really do much about it because a) it was happening to most of the neighborhoods around us, b) the timing was unpredictable, and c) the manpower required to camp out to attempt to catch these in progress would be pretty high.
Our neighborhood installed Flock cameras at the sole entrance in response to growing resident concerns. We also put in a strict policy around access control by non law enforcement. In the ~two years since they were installed, we’ve had two or three incidents total whereas immediately prior it was at least as many each month. And in those cases the sheriffs could easily figure out which vehicles had entered or left during that time. I continue to see stories of attempted car thefts from adjacent neighborhoods several times per month.
I totally get the privacy concerns around this and am inherently suspicious of any new surveillance. I also get the reflexive dismissal of their value. In this case it has been a clear win for our community through the obvious deterrent factor and the much higher likelihood of having evidence if anything does happen.
Our Flock cameras do not show on the map here, btw.
Denser and more heavily taxed per-person, yes. Richer? I doubt it.
Could likely be traffic detection cameras mistaken for ALPR.
Possible, but there are plenty of instances of that sort of layout.
One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/