DeFlock Los Santos With This GTA V Mod - Jalopnik

As a reputable news organization, we encourage you to fight the spread of private surveillance networks like Flock, Axon, and others by legal means, like writing letters to your local government and speaking out at town meetings. We would certainly never encourage you to vandalize or destroy cameras — at least, not in real life. But when it comes to GTA V, a game that's all about casual crimes, you can smash all the cameras you want in a mod that adds 235 functioning replicas of Flock cameras to Los Santos, reports Wired.

Creator Morry Kolman is no stranger to presenting the growing surveillance state in interesting ways. In 2025 he won a Webby Award for Traffic Cam Tollbooth, a website that accesses New York City's publicly accessible traffic camera image feeds to let you take selfies on whichever camera you happen to be near.

This time, he's created the Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader, or GTALPR for short. It alters the GTA V ecosystem to demonstrate how adding such cameras to the mix changes the game. If you pass by a camera while you're wanted, police spot you and descend on your location, just like in real life, making the game more difficult, or even unplayable at times. Many of these cameras show up in identical locations in the game as the actual Los Angeles locations they're based on.

Every time you pass a camera, there's also a 5% chance it will misread your plate, and police will come after you even if you're doing nothing wrong. This happens in real life, sometimes with far more than a 5% error rate. Los Angeles declined to renew its contract with Flock in July after discovering 161 false hits for stolen vehicles in just two months. This aspect of the game is startlingly realistic.

Chaos and mayhem caught on virtual camera

But this is more than an art piece making commentary on a political situation. This is a game, and it makes these cameras fun as well. You can destroy them all you want, run them over with a tank, or shoot them with a rocket launcher. There are speedrun challenges to destroy 10, 50, or all 235 cameras as quickly as possible. Every time you destroy a camera, it leaves a box you can loot worth $600, which is Kolman's estimate of the value of the components inside each camera.

You can also use these cameras for your own purposes. Every time one takes a picture, you can save it in a variety of formats to document your rampage, including shots of you destroying the cameras. You can even set up your own cameras anywhere you want to take pictures of your crazy stunts.

Kolman explains why he created this mod in a TikTok video:

Flock is a scourge on America. It's a private, eight-billion-dollar surveillance company that operates over 100,000 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 mod is an interesting statement about both how powerful these cameras are at fighting crime, and the consequences of the system's mistakes. It's also fun doing what GTA does best, encouraging you to terrorize Los Santos in new and interesting ways. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go to Ammu-Nation and buy a rocket launcher.