Every figure on this page recomputes from the live record set on each visit.
The tracker holds 1,044 records. 417 carry a dollar figure and 633 carry a camera count, but only 318 carry both. Those 318 are the only records where a cost per camera can be computed at all, and the spread between them is wider than any single headline number would suggest.
The distribution
Across those 318, the median works out at $4,813 per camera, with the lowest at $650 and the highest at $97,000. That number does more harm than good on its own, because the range runs from $944 to $58,468. 54 of them sit above $10,000 per camera and 5 sit below $1,000.
At the low end: Riverside County at about $944 across 1,769 cameras, Prosper at $967 for 212, Providence at $1,188 for 60, and Cleveland at $1,250 for 100.
At the high end: Commerce City at about $58,468 for 78 cameras, Johnson City at $55,607 for 145, Alameda County at $25,806 for 93, and Houston at $20,126 for 318.
Four things drive the spread
Term length. A figure covering 10 years and a figure covering 1 year are not comparable, and the tracker lists both. Johnson City signed for 120 months. Little Rock structured its renewal as two 1-year terms. Divide a decade of payments by a camera count and the result looks enormous next to a single year of the same service.
What the contract buys besides cameras. Johnson City is the clearest case. Its $8,063,000 covers 145 plate readers plus 145 pan-tilt-zoom cameras, 2 trailers, gunshot detection, and a real-time crime center. Dividing the whole package by the plate reader count charges the room and the trailers to the cameras. Commerce City is similar: its ordinance carried a first-year buildout of roughly $912,095 inside a 60-month total.
Whether the figure is annual or total. Fort Worth works out near $1,910 per camera per year on 278 cameras, and El Paso near $4,683 per camera per year on 150. Both are annual. Most of those 318 are contract totals. Mixing the two in one list is the most common way this number gets misused.
Who is paying. El Paso runs on a $702,500 Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority grant. Fort Worth pays from a general fund, a crime control and prevention district, public improvement districts, and neighborhood improvement money. Grant money tends to buy a smaller, denser deployment on a shorter clock.
The count-conflict problem, in one record
Riverside County sits at the bottom of the range at $944 per camera, and that figure deserves a caution. The record lists 1,769 cameras, a figure from a portal aggregate. The documented purchase behind the $1,670,000 covered 210 new cameras added to 328 already in service, or 538. Divide by 538 and the rate becomes about $3,104, more than 3 times the number the listed count produces.
The record says which figure it uses and why. This is the count-conflict rule working in public: a documented purchase beats a portal aggregate unless the portal figure is newer and the gap is modest, and here the gap is not modest. Any per-camera figure built on a portal count carries the same caveat.
What a single year buys, where the record says so
Four records state an annual rate directly rather than leaving it to division. Fort Worth runs about $1,910 per camera per year. El Paso runs about $4,683. Whiteland was quoted $3,000 per camera per year and its council voted the purchase down 3 to 2. Iowa State University works out near $1,208 across 36 cameras.
That range, roughly $1,200 to $4,700 a year for a plate reader, is the most defensible number this dataset supports. It rests on 4 records out of 1,044, which is the honest size of the claim.
Why 414 records cannot be compared this way
414 records carry exactly one half of the arithmetic. 417 records carry an amount at all, which means most contracts on this site have no public dollar figure. Some have a camera count and no price. Some have a price and no count. Aurora runs 117 cameras with no amount recorded. Dane County cut $80,000 a year with no camera count recorded.
A blank here means no public document has stated the figure, not that the figure is zero. The records request guide names the office that holds the missing page.
What to do with the number
Compare a contract to its own state file first, then to contracts of the same term length. The costs page recomputes the full distribution from the same rows on every visit, and the data page publishes the underlying CSV and JSON so the arithmetic can be checked rather than trusted.
The one figure that travels well is the annual per-camera rate on a contract that buys only cameras. Everything else needs its footnotes carried with it.
Find your city. The tracker lists every documented Flock contract, the vote that approved it, and the renewal date. Alerts email you before the next decision.