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The company that provides Fort Worth police and other law enforcement agencies with technology for real-time camera feeds of crime scenes and automatic license plates readers is giving 50 businesses the opportunity to connect their video systems with police.

Flock Safety, the company, is providing up to 50 Fort Worth businesses with a way to connect their cameras with the Fort Worth Police Real Time Crime Center for a year for free, company founder Garrett Langley said Tuesday. After that year, the businesses will have to pay around $300 annually to Flock Safety to stay connected.

Those businesses will be able to connect up to eight cameras to a device that streams the feeds to police.

Langley said the introduction of these businesses into the Fort Worth Real Time Crime Center’s feeds will allow police and medics to have more information when responding to crimes and other calls for help.

The Real Time Crime Center, based out of the old TV station for the local NBC affiliate in east Fort Worth that still has the peacock logo of the news station in some places, takes feeds from cameras all over the city and uses them to detect and respond to crimes, as well as to locate suspects. During a tour of the facility Tuesday, Lt. Ward Robinson told the Star-Telegram that police working in the real time center can pull up feeds in a matter of seconds.

In a demonstration, one officer working in the center pulled up live camera feeds from the West 7th entertainment district less than five seconds after Robinson asked him to. One camera feed, shown during the tour, showed how the cameras have the ability to zoom in across long distances and still get a clear image.

The officer, one of three working from the dark space that was once the control room for KXAS news broadcasts, zoomed the camera in to show the EECU Credit Union on West 7th Street, about two miles away. The image was so clear that some faces could be made out.

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Integrating new feeds from local businesses will give police a chance to get more information, Robinson said. While there are too many cameras for police to monitor at all times, the business feeds will allow the Real Time Crime Center to access those cameras if there is a call for service and relay information to responding officers, providing vital details about what the scene looks like, if a suspect is still there, if they can see anybody who was injured or if there are any visible weapons.

Robinson said he has heard concerns about privacy and wanted to assure people that the cameras are only being used in public access areas. About 90% of them are overt, with clear labels identifying them as police cameras. Unless videos are needed as evidence in an investigation, they’re deleted five days after they’re made.

Pairing camera feeds with things like gunshot recognition software and the ability to automatically scan and run license plates gives police opportunities to more quickly identify shootings, respond faster to crimes, be more informed when responding, and identify and locate suspects accused of violent crimes more quickly, officials said.

Information for responding officers and medics is especially important because it allows them to adapt their tactics when responding, Robinson said. If there is a suspect with a gun at a location, police will respond differently than if a shooting suspect had already left the area.

“We used to do surgery with a machete. Now we can do surgery with a scalpel,” he said. “We want to be able to control how we move on the scene tactically.”

As the technology continues to evolve, police hope to soon have the ability to use drones to get to the scene of a crime before officers arrive, especially if there aren’t any cameras there feeding back to the Real Time Crime Center, Robinson said. That would allow allow police not only the ability to have more coverage of the city, but also to track suspects if they leave the scene of a crime after a police drone arrives.

Adding cameras to businesses will help increase that coverage.

“The crime in our community can be defeated if we work together,” Robinson said.

Businesses interested in integrating their cameras with the Fort Worth Police Department can learn more by visiting the Community Camera Program website and choose the “integrate your camera” option.