A Modder Put 235 Flock Cameras in GTA V's Los Santos. Driving Through Them Feels a Lot Like Real Life

Every driver in America has started noticing them: small black cameras on poles at intersections and city limits, reading every plate that passes. Flock Safety's license plate readers have become one of the biggest flashpoints in the car world this year, and now they are in Grand Theft Auto V, where you can drive past them, get chased because of them, and blow them up with a rocket launcher.

The mod is called Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader, or GTALPR, and it comes from Morry Kolman, an artist who works under the handle WTTDOTM. Wired reported on it first, and Jalopnik's Justin Hughes wrote it up on Sept. 14. It is a free download from Kolman's GitHub page, which lays out exactly what it does.

How the mod works

GTALPR installs 235 functioning Flock-style cameras around Los Santos. Kolman says in the project description that the number is one tenth of the Flock readers currently tracked by DeFlock.org in Los Angeles County, which GTA V's map is heavily based on. Many of the cameras sit in the same spots as their real-world counterparts, according to Jalopnik, and the GitHub page points to Muscle Beach as an example where the game map and real camera placement line up almost one to one.

The cameras change how the game plays. Drive past one while you are wanted and the police home in on you. The bigger twist is the error rate. Every time you pass through a camera's field of view, the mod rolls a 1 in 20 chance that it misreads and triggers a police chase for no reason at all. Kolman built that in on purpose, describing it on GitHub as a nod to "Flock's own history of inaccurate reporting."

Jalopnik pointed out that this part is not much of a stretch. The site noted Los Angeles declined to renew its Flock contract in July after finding 161 false hits for stolen vehicles in just two months.

Then you get to fight back

This is still GTA, so the cameras are destructible. Smash one and it leaves behind loot worth $600, which Kolman says is the estimated market value of the parts in a real Flock camera, based on a hardware teardown by the group EyesOffCR. There are speedrun modes for wiping out 10, 50 or all 235 cameras, with a stats screen that tracks your times.

The mod also turns the surveillance into a camera of your own. Whenever one of the readers snaps you, the mod can save the picture with Flock-style overlays, in widescreen or vertical formats ready for social media. It takes pictures when you destroy cameras, too, so you can build an album of the carnage. According to the GitHub page, a control panel opens with F7 on a keyboard, or the right bumper plus up on the D-pad on a controller while stopped, and from there you can place and save cameras, render your photos and check your stats. Kolman also built a custom 3D camera model to mimic Flock's real hardware. And you can place your own cameras anywhere on the map to shoot your stunts, which explains the GitHub gallery full of flying sports cars, a fighter jet at sunset and a tank parked at an intersection.

Kolman explained the motivation in a TikTok video that Jalopnik quoted. "Flock is a scourge on America," he said, describing it as a private, eight-billion-dollar surveillance company running more than 100,000 cameras nationwide. "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," Kolman added.

Why car people should care about a game mod

Car games have always been where a lot of drivers work out how they feel about the real world. Street racing games sold a fantasy of outrunning the cops. GTALPR flips that. The fantasy is gone, because the cameras see everything, and some of the time they are wrong. That is a pretty sharp way to make the point that a lot of drivers have been making at city council meetings this year.

It also fits a long tradition of GTA modding as a form of commentary. Kolman is not new to this; Jalopnik noted he won a Webby Award in 2025 for Traffic Cam Tollbooth, a site that lets people take selfies through New York City's public traffic camera feeds. GTALPR takes the same idea and makes it interactive. You do not read about plate reader errors. You get pulled over by one in the middle of a mission.

Jalopnik was careful to say it does not encourage anyone to vandalize real cameras, and neither do we. The real fights over Flock are happening in contracts, council votes and courtrooms. But for a lot of drivers, especially younger ones who first learned to love cars in games, a mod that lets you feel the system misfire is going to land harder than another explainer.

If you want to try it

The mod is distributed through Kolman's GitHub releases page, with install instructions for players who already use GTA V mod tools and for those who have never modded the game before. And maybe do not try the speedrun on the way to work.