Three camera systems watch Chicagoland’s streets: the city’s speed cameras, its red-light cameras, and the license-plate readers that suburban police departments buy from Flock Safety. We have counted what each one records, from the source files, and read the laws that govern them and the audits that tested them. This page is the front door to all of it.
Three analyses, every figure computed from their source files · updated July 29, 2026What photographs your car on a Chicago-area street?
Three different machines under different rules — the first two run by the City of Chicago, the third by individual suburban police departments. The city’s speed cameras sit near schools and parks and record vehicles exceeding the limit. Its red-light cameras sit at about 150 intersections and record vehicles entering on red. And across the suburbs, police departments operate automated license plate readers — cameras that photograph passing vehicles’ plates and check them against the wanted-vehicle lists and databases the operating agency has connected, most of them sold and networked by one company, Flock Safety. The city programs record violations; the plate readers record passing traffic, wanted or not.
How much do the city’s cameras record?
The speed cameras have recorded 20.6 million violations since their public file begins in July 2014 — 2.6 million in the latest 364 days on file (July 1, 2025 through June 29, 2026), and the single busiest camera, beside McKinley Park, averaged 415 a day. The count nearly quadrupled in 2021, when the city began ticketing at 6 mph over the limit instead of 10. The speed cameras, counted. The red-light cameras are the older, steadier program: 7.1 million violations in the same span from a fleet that has held at roughly 300 cameras for a decade, 537,706 in its own latest year (July 16, 2025 through July 15, 2026) and easing since a 2023 peak. The red-light cameras, counted.
Who can search the suburban plate readers?
At least 116 police agencies across Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties — 222 statewide — have documented use of Flock plate readers. The sharing is the story: McHenry’s own disclosure page, as displayed July 29, 2026, listed 463 organizations able to search its cameras, from the Chicago Police Department to Wisconsin’s Department of Justice to a freight railroad’s police force, and reported 275,720 vehicle detections over the prior thirty days. A 2024 Illinois law forbids sharing plate-reader data to investigate or enforce laws that interfere with reproductive or other lawful health care, or that permit detaining someone over immigration status — and in two 2025 audit findings, the Illinois Secretary of State found U.S. Customs and Border Protection with access to Illinois plate-camera data, and directed the camera vendors to shut that access off. The plate readers, counted, with the law and the audits.
What the rules are
The city’s camera programs run under city and state rules described on the city’s own program pages: speed cameras only within an eighth of a mile of schools and parks, during set hours, with $35 and $100 fines; red-light cameras at intersections the city says it chose for crash history. The plate readers are bounded by a 2024 state law, Illinois Vehicle Code Section 2-130, which bars sharing plate-reader data for the purpose of investigating or enforcing laws that permit detention based on immigration status or that interfere with lawful health care, and requires written declarations from out-of-state agencies. Each analysis carries its sources in full — the city’s program pages, the statute, and the Secretary of State’s 2025 audit announcements, all read before anything here was written.
How this hub works
Every figure on this page is computed from the same source files the three analyses use, committed alongside them — the city’s two camera-violation datasets, which are public records, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance, a research database built from news coverage, agency documents and public-records requests — plus, for the sharing-list figures, the Flock transparency portals our plate-reader analysis read and dated — and each analysis linked above documents its own methods, windows and caveats. Two that matter everywhere: a camera “violation” is a recording reviewed by city contractors, not a ticket, and the Flock counts document use at some point, not a live inventory. When the underlying files update, we rerun the analyses by hand and rebuild this page from the same committed files; the update date above records when that last happened. If you spot an error, corrections come first.
Related Keep Chicagoland Moving coverage
- Chicago’s Speed Cameras Recorded 2.6 Million Violations in the Year Through June. One Camera Averaged 415 a Day.
- Chicago’s Red-Light Cameras Are the Quieter Program: 537,706 Violations in the Latest Year, Led by Lake Shore and Belmont
- At Least 116 Chicagoland Police Agencies Have Used Flock Plate Readers. One Suburb’s Cameras Can Be Searched by 463 Organizations.