City of Cameras
Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the United States. With 124.14 surveillance cameras per 1,000 people, we not only lead the country, we have more than twice as many cameras per capita as 2nd ranked Washington, DC and more than four times as many as 3rd ranked Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But no matter how surveilled we are here in Atlanta, it never seems to be enough for our city’s leaders.
A few years ago, the city council considered requiring all new commercial and residential buildings within the city limits to install surveillance cameras. Another proposal was targeted at ensuring a working surveillance camera was mounted on every single 24-hour gas pump in the city. Wealthy white neighborhoods in the city have taken to raising money themselves to install more of these devices. We’ve even got privately-run apartment complexes employing robotic AI surveillance dogs monitored by low-wage laborers in Colombia. Despite all the ways that surveillance has shifted to focusing on the digital traces produced by our phones and social media activity, video monitoring of our collective existence in, and movements through, public space remain central to the modern carceral state. And the City of Atlanta has latched onto basically every surveillance technology that exists for precisely this purpose.
But for all the ink spilled about Atlanta’s expansive and ever-growing surveillance network, journalists, academics and activists haven’t previously been able to identify where these cameras actually are. That’s because the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has, to my knowledge, rejected every single open records request for this information (including my own!) on the specious grounds that releasing it would lead to terrorism. Given that the purported promise of these surveillance cameras is creating a comprehensive, real-time view of the city, it’s deeply ironic that the city obstructs the public’s view of the system itself. As long as I’ve wanted to follow the geographer Brian Jordan Jefferson’s suggestion to use “the digital infrastructure of the racial state against itself, turning its tendency to document everything into a vulnerability, scrutinizing its datasets, producing data on the practices it seeks to hide,” because of the city’s intransigence about sharing this data, we’ve had no way to turn the proverbial camera around and get the same kind of comprehensive picture… until now.
About a year-and-a-half ago, the good folks at the Atlanta Community Press Collective reached out because they’d seen me griping online about my aforementioned open records request being denied. Turns out that, in the course of fulfilling a separate, unrelated open records request, the APD had shared with them an Excel spreadsheet with a list of 1,755 video surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers (LPRs) and their approximate locations. Combining that dataset with another 152 proposed locations for cameras and LPRs that I was able to get my hands on via an open records request, we were able to deduce locations for 1,878 of these devices. All in all, we had the location for 1,158 video cameras and 568 LPRs, along with 68 proposed video cameras and 84 proposed LPRs.
Of course, this number pales in comparison to the total of over 60,000 cameras attributed to the city in their #1 ranking, or even the nearly 45,000 cameras listed as “connected” or “integrated” on Connect Atlanta’s website as of writing. That’s because the vast majority of the cameras in the city that are connected to the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF)-funded Loudermilk Video Integration Center (VIC) are not owned and operated by the city itself. Instead, these larger numbers include cameras that are privately-owned and/or operated, whether by individual homeowners and businesses, or by larger institutions, like the 140 cameras owned and operated by the Midtown Alliance, 1,100 operated by Georgia State University (not to mention countless others on Atlanta college and university campuses), or even the 20,000+ cameras owned and operated by MARTA. These cameras are then either fully integrated into the VIC for real-time monitoring or are registered with the APD such that footage can be accessed on demand.
This means that what we’ve been able to map here represents no more than 4.2% of the City of Atlanta’s total surveillance capacity, and probably even less. But given that our total number of locatable cameras is only off by two from this August 2023 snapshot of the system, we think it represents a reasonably good proxy for the cameras owned and operated by the city itself (at least as of a couple years ago), and the geographies that APD has prioritized for continued surveillance. Any better picture of the geography of surveillance in Atlanta would require a successful lawsuit challenging the APD’s claim that such records are exempt from the Georgia Open Records Act, or an insanely herculean effort to crowdsource the locations of an additional 58,000 cameras (which probably isn’t the best use of anybody’s time).
So where are all of these cameras located? As the table below shows, Downtown Atlanta is the most surveilled neighborhood in the city, with most of the rest of the top 10 neighborhoods being located on the city’s predominantly Black west and south sides. Of the 411 cameras Downtown, 93 are located at APD’s headquarters and another 68 are in City Hall, potentially making these two buildings the most surveilled places in the entire city. And yet, that doesn’t seem to stop some of the people who work there from doing all kinds of nonsense that is substantially more criminal and damaging in both its intent and its effect than whatever the surveillance cameras they’ve got embedded throughout the rest of the city are picking up.
Given how much these interior cameras can distort our geographic picture, we’ve filtered them out and broken down the following maps by type of surveillance device. The map on the left in green represents the concentrations of just those exterior-facing conventional video surveillance cameras, while the one on the right shows the locations of LPRs on their own. Even still, Downtown and the neighborhoods surrounding it continue to show up as the primary hotspots, with some barely perceptible differences between their respective geographies otherwise.
By putting the two data sources into conversation with one another via calculating an odds ratio as we do in the map below, we can suss out some of the finer distinctions between the geographies of video cameras and LPRs. This also allows us to compare the relative balance of the two types even though there are roughly twice as many video cameras as LPRs across the full dataset. So here, any of the areas marked in green have a higher-than-expected concentration of video cameras, while those in shades of purple have more LPRs than one would expect based on the overall balance of the two device types. Though the pattern isn’t dramatic, the biggest clustering of LPR-dominant areas is located throughout Buckhead, while most of those more generally surveilled areas in and around Downtown have either a balance of cameras and LPRs or more cameras than expected. While nothing more than speculation, it seems this could reflect a strategy of APD seeking to surveil the city’s most populated neighborhoods, along with those that are otherwise predominantly Black, with video cameras pointed at street level, while the LPRs concentrated in wealthy and whiter neighborhoods reflect a means of drawing a boundary around these spaces, assuming that any crime will be captured by cars entering or exiting the neighborhood.
But do these cameras actually do anything to help prevent or solve crime? Or do they just record it? Several years ago, APF claimed that these cameras reduce crime 20-50% in their vicinity, but more recently they’ve revised that figure down to just 5%. The only evidence that’s been shared publicly to support these claims is entirely anecdotal. Given that the APD won’t release the full data necessary to fully evaluate these relationships – not to mention the fact that data on crime is extremely unreliable, if not functionally useless, in the first place – there’s no reason for us to take these claims seriously. The people responsible for managing these cameras don’t even know how many of them there are. APD has even admitted to something like 10-20% of their cameras not working at any one time, either because of problems with the technology or their own administrative incompetence. So if these cameras don’t actually stop crime or help to solve it, what are they for?
The City of Atlanta’s massive investment in surveillance technology represents both a strategy of counterinsurgency and a kind of “extractive abandonment”. That is, it is a means of criminalizing and repressing social movements, political protest and dissent, as well as a way to commodify the general neglect of certain people and places into a publicly-funded revenue stream for private corporations when those dollars could be better spent actually providing the kind of meaningful services to Atlantans that prevents “crime” from happening in the first place.
Even if these maps represent just a fraction of the full surveillance infrastructure blanketed across the city, they represent the first time that we’ve been able to visualize the geography of Atlanta’s surveillance cameras in this way. And if the APD believes this data is an insufficient or inappropriate sample, they’re more than free to release the full dataset on surveillance camera locations to the public for everyone’s benefit.
▻https://mappingatlanta.org/2025/06/09/city-of-cameras
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