Atlanta's massive surveillance expansion fails to boost crime clearance rates

Atlanta has aggressively expanded its surveillance infrastructure over the last five years, yet the investment has failed to move the needle on solving major crimes. An investigation by the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) reveals that a surge in camera deployments has not translated into higher clearance rates for the city's most serious offenses.

According to FBI Crime Data Explorer figures, Atlanta's integrated camera network grew eightfold, expanding from 3,300 cameras in 2021 to 28,626 by 2026. This expansion includes more than 5,000 Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) provided by Flock Safety. Despite this growth, homicide clearance rates dropped from 53.4% in 2021 to 48% in 2025. Motor vehicle theft—the primary target of ALPR technology—showed negligible long-term improvement, with clearance rates moving from 9.9% in 2021 to 3.9% in 2024, before returning to 10.2% in 2025.

The Surveillance Gap

Flock Safety, founded in 2017, has marketed its ALPR technology as a "magic bullet" for law enforcement. The company claims that maintaining one LPR per sworn officer correlates with a 9.1% increase in clearance rates. This narrative has fueled rapid adoption across the U.S., with an estimated 100,000 cameras now installed by police departments and homeowners' associations.

In Atlanta, this push has resulted in a city described as the most surveilled in the country, boasting over twice as many cameras per capita as Washington, D.C. However, the real-world data contradicts the marketing. A significant discrepancy has also emerged regarding official reporting: Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum claimed a 77.55% homicide clearance rate for 2025, a figure that sharply contradicts the 48% reported by the FBI.

Privacy vs. Public Safety

The failure of these tools to demonstrably solve more crimes raises urgent questions about the trade-off between mass surveillance and actual safety. Because ALPRs log the routine movements of all citizens, critics argue the loss of privacy is unjustified if the technology does not produce results. Len Phillips, head of DeFlock Atlanta, noted that the public was asked to accept expanded surveillance based on promises of dramatic safety improvements, stating that the "tradeoff between safety and civil liberties was just a one-way transaction."

The Data Conflict

As the city continues to operate one of the densest surveillance grids in the nation, the gap between police claims and federal data remains a point of contention. The stark contrast between Chief Schierbaum's internal figures and the FBI's findings suggests a systemic issue in how success is measured or reported. This discrepancy undermines the justification for the city's surveillance density, as the promised correlation between increased monitoring and increased safety remains unsupported by federal statistics. Until the Atlanta Police Department reconciles these figures, the efficacy of the 28,000-camera network remains an open question for a public that has traded its privacy for a promise of security that has yet to materialize.