Frederick County
County record. Includes every city and agency within Frederick County.
Technology presence
What these categories mean
- ALPR
- Automated license plate readers (ALPR): camera systems that automatically capture, read, and log vehicle license plates with location and time, producing a searchable record of vehicle movements.
- Fixed cameras & RTCC
- Agency-operated fixed video cameras and the real-time crime centers (RTCC) that aggregate live and recorded feeds for monitoring. Extends the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Atlas, which enumerates real-time crime centers and camera registries but not standalone fixed-camera estates.
- Face recognition
- Software that matches faces in images or video against a reference database to identify or verify individuals.
- Drones / UAS
- Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), commonly called drones, operated by an agency for overhead observation, imaging, or sensing.
- Gunshot detection
- Networks of acoustic sensors that detect and locate suspected gunfire and alert an agency.
- Body-worn & dashcam
- Officer body-worn and in-vehicle dashboard cameras that record encounters; public access to the footage is frequently restricted.
- Doorbell & camera registry
- Programs that give an agency access to privately owned camera footage: doorbell-camera partnerships, citizen camera registries, and private-camera integration platforms.
- Cell-site simulators
- Devices that mimic cell towers to locate or identify nearby mobile phones. They are often called Stingrays, or IMSI catchers after the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number that identifies each phone on a network. Adjacent: communications surveillance outside the visual/sensor core.
- Predictive policing
- Software that forecasts where crime may occur or who may be involved, to direct policing. Adjacent: analytics rather than a sensing deployment.
- Social-media monitoring
- Tools that collect and analyze public social-media activity for an agency. Adjacent: open-source/communications monitoring outside the visual/sensor core.
The record, by agency
Frederick City Police Department
The Frederick City Police Department uses Axon body-worn cameras.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Frederick City Police DepartmentFrederick City Police Department WebsiteFrederick City Police Department Facebook
Thurmont Police Department
The Thurmont Police Department uses Axon body-worn cameras.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Thurmont Police DepartmentThurmont Police Department FacebookCity of Thurmont
Frederick County Sheriff's Office
The Frederick County Sheriff's Office received $380,547 from the Bureau of Justice Assistance to purchase 246 body-worn cameras through the 2022 Small, Rural, Tribal BWC Microgrant program.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Small, Rural, and Tribal Body-Worn Camera microgrant grantee list
Frederick Police Department
According to reporting from The Markup, the Frederick Police Department used PredPol (now Geolitica) between 2/16/18 and 7/14/20.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): The Markup
The Fredrick Police Department maintains a voluntary registry of private and personal surveillance cameras.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): City of Frederick
Source: EFF Atlas of Surveillance (Electronic Frontier Foundation & University of Nevada, Reno — Reynolds School of Journalism) · CC BY 4.0 · retrieved July 2026