If you’ve ever wanted to take a baseball bat to a Flock camera, you can now do it without getting arrested. The only catch is that you’ll have to do it inside Grand Theft Auto V.
Artist Morry Kolman created a new mod called Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader, or GTALPR. It puts 235 Flock-style cameras around Los Santos and actually pays players to destroy them.
While playing, you can smash or shoot one and pick up what’s left for $600 in game money. The cameras also photograph cars passing by, which can make dealing with the police a lot more annoying.
Kolman notes on the project’s website that destroying real Flock cameras is illegal and, they won’t drop $600 if you do it.
Why Are There 235 Cameras?
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According to the official project page, 235 wasn’t random. When Kolman made the mod, it was about one-tenth of the number of Flock cameras being tracked in Los Angeles County.
That makes sense for GTA V, since Los Santos is heavily based on Los Angeles. Kolman even found a few places where the real and fictional maps line up closely enough to put cameras in roughly the same spots.
Players get $600 for each destroyed camera because that is the estimated value of the parts inside a Flock camera. Kolman got the number from a hardware teardown of a Flock Falcon Flex by the group Eyes Off Cedar Rapids.
You can also turn destroying them into a competition with yourself. The mod keeps track of your fastest time for taking out 10 cameras, 50 cameras or all 235.
Sometimes They Call the Cops for No Reason
Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a Flock camera mod if the cameras didn’t occasionally cause problems.
If you’re already running from the cops and drive past one, it extends how long it takes to lose them. Kolman says some parts of the map have so many cameras that escaping police can become nearly impossible.
Even driving around minding your own business isn’t necessarily safe. Each time your vehicle enters a camera’s field of view, there is a one-in-20, or 5%, chance that it will trigger a police chase for no reason.
Kolman told WIRED that feature was inspired by real reports of innocent people being stopped because of errors involving automatic license plate readers. The virtual cameras will also photograph you as you pass. You can save those pictures later, complete with overlays made to look similar to the ones used on real Flock images.
You Can Download the Mod Now
GTALPR is a single-player mod made for the PC version of GTA V Legacy. It should not be used with GTA Online, and it does not support GTA V Enhanced.
You can download it through the GTALPR GitHub page, but it requires several installation steps and additional modding programs before you can start hunting down cameras. The mod is not affiliated with Rockstar Games or Flock Safety.