MH
Max Herrle
Creator, Safe Tallahassee
Why I built this
This started as a side effect of a local campaign. While I was out
talking to people around Tallahassee, I kept running into the same
automated license plate reader cameras — the Flock cameras — and
started digging into what they actually were, who was running
them, and what they could see. What surprised me wasn't the
technology itself. It was how little anyone I talked to actually
knew about it, and how scattered the real information was once I
went looking — a page here from the City, a dataset there from the
County, a policy document somewhere else, none of it in one place
a normal resident could actually find.
Once the campaign wrapped up, that itch didn't go away. Safe
Tallahassee is what happened next — part hobby project, part
advocacy, built to put the public safety and civic data that's
already technically public somewhere people can actually see it:
where the cameras are, what's actively being responded to, what's
been reported to the City, who owns what land, and — just as
important — the context and pushback around the surveillance side
of it, not just a neutral map of camera dots. I'm making the
project itself public now because I think the "how did nobody
know this existed" reaction I kept getting is worth fixing, not
just noting.
This is a one-person project, maintained on my own time, not a
City or County product. Follow along or reach out at
@maxherrle on Instagram.
What this is
Safe Tallahassee is an independent civic dashboard. It pulls real,
public data — police/fire calls, license plate reader (ALPR)
camera locations, traffic cameras, code enforcement complaints,
land ownership records, voting precincts, transit stops, and
local news — from the same public systems the City of
Tallahassee, Leon County, and their vendors already publish or
expose, and puts it on one map. It isn't affiliated with the City
of Tallahassee, Leon County, TPD, or LCSO.
Surveillance & privacy — read this too
This app shows where automated license plate reader (ALPR)
cameras are, in part because that information is genuinely
useful for transparency — most residents have no idea how
extensive this network is or where it's pointed. Showing it is
not an endorsement of it.
ALPR systems like Flock Safety's log the plate, location, time,
and often a photo of every vehicle that passes, whether or not
it's ever linked to a crime, and that data can be retained and
shared across agencies and jurisdictions in ways most drivers
never consented to or are aware of. Independent civil-liberties
groups have raised serious, well-documented concerns about
retention periods, data-sharing agreements, and the lack of
public oversight over how this data gets used:
The agencies' own portals above are the real, current source for
usage numbers — anything this page said instead would just go
stale. If you want to know what this app's own map can't tell
you (retention period specifics, data-sharing agreements with
other agencies, whether it's shared with ICE), that's a public
records request, not something either this app or Flock's own
dashboard fully answers.