Deploying Flock Safety License Plate Readers

Overview

You're a city police department ready to purchase your Flock Safety subscription, but you need help planning your deployment.

There are many considerations, and decisions that need to be made. The cost of a Flock Safety deployment is per device per year, and since we're deploying license plate readers, we need to be able to cover as much of our city as possible.

Tips:

• Cameras should be placed to monitor traffic entering a geographic area, it's redundant to also monitor traffic leaving the area

• Cameras are best suited for covering only 1-1/2 lanes of traffic, so placing cameras on the shoulder and in the median can help cover wide roadways

• Cameras should not be placed on county, state, or federal right-of-ways without cooperation from the managing entity

• Cameras should not be placed on roadways that only define city limits

• Signs can be added for a deterrence effect, but subtle, or even hidden placements can be leveraged for stealth

Locations

Now, let's work out an example using the City of Corcoran, MN. This city is typical of the state, following the US township grid, 6 miles square, with a few major roads at 1 mile intervals. But, there are many more roads that both compose, and cross the city boundary, some weaving in and out.

To work out where to place cameras ideally, we could place a camera at every road that crosses the city limit, but a reasonable approach might be to cover each road that crosses the city limit and allows a vehicle to reach the city center.

Using this strategy, we'd place 29 cameras.

Zooming in, it's clear why the coverage problem can become difficult as new residential developments connect interior roadways in the city.

Unfortunately, 29 cameras blows up our budget for license plate scanning.

To work within the budget, we need to drastically reduce the camera count. We can use past traffic volume surveys to determine which roadways are most commonly used, or infer from the roadway size to optimize coverage. Putting cameras on the County Roads that cross the city may take some negotiation, but really reduces the amount of cameras needed.

As an example, let's look at how the City of Corcoran actually deployed its cameras, paring down the deployment to only nine cameras.

Unfortunately, the more dense a city becomes, the harder it is to cover well with license plate cameras. It's just too expensive to cover what could be hundreds of city limit crossings.

Cities bounded by interstates have very limited crossings, which can be advantageous. If an interstate bounds or crosses through your city, here's an example of how to deploy cameras to cover that ingress point.

Mounting

There are several mounting options for these license plate cameras. Cameras can be powered by utility power, but are most commonly powered using Flock Safety's iconic black-trim solar panel. This gives customers some flexibility, but by far the most popular mounting option is Flock Safety's subtle black standalone pole. Customers can also choose to mount cameras to existing infrastructure like light poles, signal poles, or - stealthfully - behind signage.

Which you choose depends on existing infrastructure, and the visible deterrent effect intended.

Here are two illustrations to help you visualize how camera coverage looks in the real world.

Finally

You can coordinate with local private businesses that are also Flock customers in a one-way or two-way data-sharing agreement. You should reach out to prominent big box stores and shopping centers which may be more likely to already be Flock customers. This way, you will improve your coverage without additional cost.

That's basically it! You're ready to plan a deployment of Flock Safety Falcon cameras in your community.