You’re cruising through Los Santos, not wanted, not causing trouble, when a camera catches your plate and the cops materialize anyway. That’s not a bug. That’s the whole idea.
Artist and modder Morry Kolman (WTTDOTM) built Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader (GTALPR), a free, open-source mod, to put you inside a Flock camera network and let you feel what that actually means.
235 Cameras, Zero Privacy
The mod turns Los Santos into a working surveillance trap, with every drive carrying a real chance of unprovoked police attention.
The mod drops 235 Flock-style automated license plate reader cameras across Los Santos, each one photographing your vehicle as you pass. Every drive-by carries a 1-in-20 chance of triggering an unprovoked police chase, which Kolman frames as a direct reference to Flock’s documented false-alert problem.
If you’re already running from the cops, passing a camera extends the cooldown. The city becomes a trap.
Kolman doesn’t soften the intent: “Flock is a scourge on America. It’s a private, eight-billion-dollar surveillance company that operates over 100,000 [cameras] across the country. If you think the 235 in this mod are bad, just understand that that is one-tenth of the cameras currently installed in LA County, which Los Santos is based on.”
The Destruction Economy
Kolman made sure the surveillance state comes with a demolition mode, complete with speedrun timers.
The cameras blow up. Destroy one with a rocket launcher and collect the wreckage for $600 in-game, a figure pulled from a real hardware teardown by civil-liberties group Eyes Off Cedar Rapids.
Speedrun mode pushes the satire further, letting players race to destroy 10, 50, or all 235 cameras and fully “De-Flock” the map. Kolman put it plainly: “Far be it from me to implement a surveillance state in game art and not gamify destroying it, so there is speedrunning functionality built into video games.”
A few mechanics worth knowing before you install:
- Cameras use a custom 3D model built to mimic Flock’s actual hardware design
- Each capture saves a Flock-style watermarked photo of your vehicle
- Players can place their own cameras for custom surveillance setups or stunt footage
The Numbers Behind the Joke
The real-world figures Kolman is satirizing are considerably less funny than the mod.
Flock Safety operates roughly 100,000 to 120,000 cameras across around 7,000 U.S. communities, serving about one-third of American law-enforcement agencies, according to BBC reporting. A customized Flock system in Roseville, CA produced 1,427 alerts, with more than 70 percent erroneous, according to investigative reporting. An analysis of 24 traffic stops linked to reader errors found police drew guns on innocent people in two-thirds of cases.
LAPD temporarily suspended use of Flock cameras over privacy concerns, per the Los Angeles Times, even as hundreds of other ALPR units remain active. Open-source project DeFlock tracks over 16,000 Flock cameras in California alone. Kolman’s “one-tenth of LA County” framing is more poetic than precise, but the underlying point holds.
The mod is free on GTA5-mods and GitHub, requires ScriptHook and OpenIV, and launches with F7. Understanding why someone felt compelled to build it might matter more than the download.
