You have probably driven past one without noticing. A sleek black box mounted on a pole, solar panel on top, positioned at an intersection or on a quiet residential street. No flashing lights. No obvious signage. Just a camera photographing every license plate that passes by.
That is a Flock Safety camera — and depending on where you live, there may be dozens of them within a few miles of your house. For anyone who has been through a car accident in Colorado, understanding how this technology works — and how it connects to proving fault after a Colorado crash — has become genuinely important.
Denver installed 111 of them across roughly 70 intersections. Neighboring cities like Arvada, Castle Rock, and others across Colorado added their own networks. According to data from DeFlock, a crowdsourced camera mapping project, there are now over 1,000 ALPR cameras in the Denver metro area alone. Nationally, more than 5,000 law enforcement departments use interconnected Flock systems.
The cameras work by photographing every vehicle that passes — license plate, make, color, direction of travel, timestamp — and feeding that data into a searchable database. It is fast, automated, and relentless. During a single month, Denver’s network photographed over two million vehicles.
Most people think of these cameras as a crime-fighting tool, and that is mostly how they get sold to city councils. Denver’s pilot program led to 289 arrests and recovery of 170 stolen vehicles. That is a real result. But the technology records far more than stolen cars — and that data has uses that go well beyond criminal investigations.
The Part Nobody Talks About: Accident Reconstruction
Here is something most drivers do not realize: if you were involved in a crash near an ALPR-equipped intersection, there is a reasonable chance the camera captured your vehicle — and possibly the other driver’s — in the moments before, during, or after the collision.
That footage and data can become evidence.
In car accident cases, establishing exactly what happened — who ran the light, who was speeding, which direction a vehicle was traveling — often comes down to whoever can produce the most objective documentation. Witness accounts conflict. Dashcam footage is not always available. But an ALPR record showing a vehicle’s location, direction, and speed at a specific timestamp is a different category of evidence entirely. It is machine-generated, logged automatically, and harder to dispute.
Accident reconstruction specialists already rely on traffic camera footage as a standard tool. ALPR data adds another layer. It does not just capture intersections — it captures movement patterns. A vehicle photographed by multiple cameras in sequence can reveal travel speed between points, route taken, and whether a driver was where they claimed to be.
Working with an experienced Denver personal injury law firm that understands how to identify and request this data before it disappears can make a significant difference in the outcome of a case.
The Retention Problem: Time Is Not Your Friend
The catch is that this data does not last forever — and the windows vary significantly depending on who is running the cameras.
In Arvada, ALPR data is automatically deleted after 30 days unless flagged for an ongoing investigation. Colorado state law, under C.R.S. § 24-72-113, requires that passive surveillance footage collected by government entities be destroyed within three years. Denver’s system operated under its own data policies, and those policies changed multiple times amid public pressure over privacy concerns.
What this means practically: if you were in an accident near an ALPR camera, the data that could corroborate your account of events may already be gone by the time you realize it existed. Thirty days is not a long window if you are still dealing with insurance adjusters, still recovering, or still trying to understand what happened.
The moment after a crash is not when most people are thinking about camera systems. But that is exactly when the clock starts running.
Who Can Actually Request This Data?
Access to ALPR data is not straightforward. Under Colorado’s Criminal Justice Records Act, non-law enforcement requests are evaluated case by case. Police departments control the data, Flock Safety stores it, and the rules around civil litigation access are not cleanly defined.
That ambiguity matters. A personal injury attorney with the right knowledge of where to look — and who to ask — can sometimes obtain ALPR data through subpoena, public records requests, or by working with accident reconstruction experts who have established channels. But it requires moving quickly and knowing that the data exists in the first place.
The Privacy Fight Running in the Background
It would be incomplete to discuss Flock cameras without acknowledging the fight happening around them.
Denver’s political battle over Flock became national news largely because audit logs revealed the system had been accessed over 1,400 times for immigration enforcement searches — despite official denials that this was occurring. The city eventually ended its Flock contract and transitioned to a competitor. The core network, however, did not disappear. About 50 cameras remained operational under a new provider.
Privacy advocates argue that ALPR networks create a mass surveillance infrastructure that captures the movements of every person who drives — regardless of whether they have done anything wrong. They have a point. The data is not just about stolen cars or accident reconstruction. It is a location history of millions of people, retained by private companies, and accessible under conditions that are still being litigated and legislated.
Colorado’s existing surveillance data statutes provide some guardrails, but the law has consistently struggled to keep pace with how quickly the technology has deployed.
The Practical Takeaway
If you are in an accident near any major intersection in the Denver metro area, assume there may be cameras nearby that captured something relevant. That assumption is increasingly correct.
Act on that assumption quickly. The data retention windows are short. The access process is not obvious. And the difference between footage that exists and footage that has been deleted often comes down to how fast someone moved to preserve it.
The cameras are everywhere now. That is a fact worth understanding before you need it.
