Police plan to have as many as 12,000 cameras giving crime analysts a window to the city.

With the aid of the Atlanta Police Foundation, a nonprofit fundraising organization that supports the Atlanta Police Department, new technology is being developed to help police track perpetrators in cars, identify suspects in a crowd and tell police where crimes might happen.

College students work in a lab in the foundation’s downtown office testing a license plate recognition camera, analyzing crime data from an algorithm designed to predict crime and perusing an online pin-map that links to an expanding network of surveillance cameras.

And on Wednesday, officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security lauded the technology being developed for the city.