ALPR cameras in British Columbia

190 licence plate readers and related surveillance cameras are mapped in British Columbia, 22 of them classified as police ALPR. Every location links back to the OpenStreetMap node it came from.

What is mapped in British Columbia

113 Border control

55 Private / institutional

22 Police ALPR

Toll gantries and border crossings are counted separately on purpose. They read plates too, but they are a different kind of system with a different legal basis — folding them into a "surveillance cameras" total is how a map ends up overstating policing. See the categories on the map →

Who operates them

Operator	Cameras	Detail
University of British Columbia	30	Locations and policy →
UBC Okanagan	25	Locations and policy →
Canada Border Services Agency	2	Locations and policy →
Delta Police	1	Locations and policy →

A further 132 mapped cameras carry no operator tag, so we cannot say who runs them. That is the single biggest gap in crowdsourced ALPR data, and it is why we file records requests instead of guessing. The paper trail →

Retention rules that apply here

Jurisdiction	Non-matching reads kept	Authority
BC, Canada (police)	End of shift / immediate	OIPC BC ruling F12-04 (2012)

How the rules compare across Canada, the US and the UK →

Read this as a floor, not a total. These are cameras somebody has mapped in OpenStreetMap, not an official inventory. Newly mapped is not newly installed, and none of this captures vehicle-mounted ALPR — the fleet scanners that do most of the plate reading in Canada and appear on no dot map anywhere. The fleet layer explains the gap → Data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), generated 2026-10-19.