Almost immediately after the gunfire stopped on Bourbon Street early Sunday morning, the world could catch a glimpse of an unknown gunman pumping off several rounds into the scattering crowd, thanks to a camera perched on a nearby bar’s balcony.

As recently as a few years ago, police might have been lucky to get a detailed eyewitness account of a crime and its perpetrator. Now, thanks to networks of private security cameras around the city —particularly in the French Quarter— detectives are able to witness many crimes themselves and release the footage to the public an in effort to nail the perpetrators.

Police have not said how many cameras recorded the shooting that injured 10 people about 2:45 a.m. Sunday at the intersection of Bourbon Street and Orleans Avenue, but they have released video of the incident as seen from two vantage points in the 700 block of Bourbon and another balcony at the corner.

The city Monday afternoon released another video showing a “person of interest” in the incident. The city once made an effort to set up its own crime-camera network, but most of those electronic eyes never worked and the program in general was a boondoggle wrapped up in Nagin administration cronyism.

Since then, though, several networks of private cameras have sprung up, offering better results.

In recent weeks, the New Orleans, LA, Police Department began compiling a list of cameras at homes and businesses across the city available for police review as part of a program called SafeCamNOLA, a spinoff of SafeCam8, which began nearly two years ago in the French Quarter.