Police on Monday said footage from a surveillance camera in a subway car helped lead to the arrests of three people in connection with the fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man last week.
Justin Herde, 24, Alfredo Trinidad, 42, and Betty Cotto, 38, were in custody in connection with the killing of William Alvarez, 45, of the Bronx, according to the New York Police Department.
Mr. Alvarez was riding a southbound D train around 5 a.m. on Friday morning when the three suspects boarded at the Fordham Road station and got into an argument with him, the police said. Mr. Alvarez was shot in the chest, Michael M. Kemper, the Police Department’s chief of transit, said at a Monday news conference. Chief Kemper added that Mr. Alvarez’s attackers fled the train at the 182nd-183rd Streets station.
About 1,000 of the system’s roughly 6,500 cars are equipped with cameras, part of a broader effort begun in 2022 by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans to install cameras in the rest of the cars by the end of this year.
Killings on the subway are rare, but attract intense public attention. This year there have been two other fatal incidents in the system. Earlier this month, a 35-year-old man was killed and five other people were wounded in a shooting at the Mount Eden Avenue station in the Bronx during the evening rush hour. And in January, a 45-year-old father of three was shot on a No. 3 train in Brooklyn after intervening in an argument.
Transit leaders are under intense pressure to bring ridership back to prepandemic levels, and making the system feel safe is critical to that mission. Ridership rose by about 3 percent in January, hovering on average at about 3 million daily passengers. In 2019, daily ridership was about 5 million.
Chief Kemper on Monday described the homicides as “isolated incidents,” but lesser crime had begun to creep up on the subway in recent months. Overall crime in January was up more than 45 percent compared with the same period last year. Most of the increase was because of theft, the police said.
In response, Mayor Eric Adams ordered an increase in police presence this month: An additional 1,000 uniformed officers have been deployed in the transit system, a show of force that echoes a similar surge at the end of 2022.
In the past two years, state and city leaders have launched several anti-crime initiatives in the subway, including extra overtime for police officers and the involuntary removal of severely mentally ill homeless people. Officials also installed the cameras in hopes of bringing more scrutiny to places where riders were worried about random attacks, muggings and rising numbers of homeless people. At the time, privacy watchdogs criticized the camera plan as politically motivated and expensive. The mayor and Gov. Kathy Hochul have said that along with improving public safety, the moves were meant to combat a public perception — fed by several high-profile crimes — that the system had become much more dangerous.
A New York Times analysis of M.T.A. and police statistics published in November 2022 showed that the chance of being a victim of violent crime in the subway was remote, even as the rate of offenses like murder, rape, felony assault and robbery had more than doubled since 2019. The analysis found that the rate — 1.2 violent crimes for every million subway rides — was roughly equal to the chance of being injured in a car crash during a two-mile drive.
So far this year, crime is up 13 percent compared with the same period last year. But after the early-year jump, crime in the subway is down so far in the month of February by about 17 percent compared with last February.
The new cameras have also led to arrests in other crimes, including the January Mt. Eden attack, police said. “You’re not going to get away with it,” Andrew Albert, an M.T.A. board member, said at the authority’s monthly board meeting on Monday. “And your picture is going to be everywhere.”
