The city will invest $5 million into at least 140 new closed circuit television security cameras in areas of the city experiencing high crime rates, the mayor announced at a press conference on Monday.

The new cameras will be about a 70 percent increase in the CCTV camera program, which currently has 205 cameras in the network: 185 at fixed locations, and 21 mobile cameras, per Metropolitan Police Chief Peter Newsham.

“We regard this as one tool, another tool in our toolbox for fighting crime and making neighborhoods safer across the District of Columbia,” Mayor Muriel Bowser told reporters Monday afternoon.

The CCTV camera program has been running in the District since 2001, when the police department began installing cameras downtown to monitor large-scale events and contend with potential terrorism threats, according to Newsham. In 2006, D.C. began installing them in neighborhoods experiencing high rates of violent crime.

At Monday’s press conference, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Peter Newsham said that security camera footage is instrumental in solving crimes—often, officers’ first step in an investigation is determining what security cameras nearby might have captured the incident or a suspect.

“The use of camera technology plays a vital role in deterring and solving crimes, including some of our most significant violent offenses,” Newsham said at the conference. “I personally believe it’s one of the advances in technology that has been most significant in helping law enforcement.”

Per Newsham, MPD detectives were able to obtain video footage in 83 percent of last year’s homicide investigations, or 132 out of the 160 total cases. In 70 percent of those cases, the footage contributed to “advancing the investigation,” Newsham said, and it contributed to closing 40 percent of the cases.

But MPD’s CCTV cameras are actually a tiny fraction of the security footage available to the police in the city. The city’s private security camera rebate program, through which private businesses can install security cameras on their property and make the footage available to MPD, has funded nearly 17,000 cameras across D.C., according to the mayor’s office. The program has given out $2.25 million in rebates.

MPD is going to begin installing the first 15 of the new cameras in the next few weeks, per a city press release. They’ll be installed first in the city’s fall crime initiative areas, which are in Southwest, Columbia Heights, the U Street Corridor, Shaw, Saratoga, Greenway, Washington Highlands, and Congress Heights.

The city will do community outreach and take recommendations from the D.C. Council to decide where the rest of the new cameras will go, Bowser said on Monday.

The new cameras will also come with technological advances: They’ll have more memory space, higher resolution images, and (when there is shotspotter detection nearby) the lens of the camera will be able to automatically swivel toward the sound of the gunshots, Newsham said.

The cameras “will provide us with the technology and the resources we need to keep residents safe and, more importantly, bring those who violently offend to justice,” Newsham said.

The announcement comes in the midst of a crime spike in the District. Last year, there were a total of 160 homicides in D.C., a 38 percent increase over 2017. This year, the city is at 152 homicides already and on track to beat last year’s number.