An estimated $12,000 worth of surveillance camera equipment was stolen last weekend from 11 MTA subway cars in Queens, the Daily News has learned.
Sources say one or more suspects got away with the cameras and memory systems retrofitted to the cars of an R train after an apparently botched attempt to take the train for a joyride.
Sources say the incident was discovered Sunday when crews discovered that two separate R trains parked along a section of lay-up track between the Briarwood and Sutphin Blvd. stations on the F line were touching and had sustained some damage to their couplers.
Data recorders on one of the trains — a 10-car set of R160 subway cars — indicate it had been started and moved without authorization on Saturday, apparently before colliding into the second train at low speed.
When transit workers boarded the train to try to pull surveillance footage, they discovered that all 22 of the train’s surveillance cameras — which had been retrofitted to older model cars like the R160 over the past few years — were missing, along with their memory cards.
Cameras had also been stolen from the car on the second train that had been bumped into, sources said.
Transit sources told The News that footage on the cards is stored in a proprietary format, and should be unreadable without the MTA’s own software.
Tim Minton, a spokesman for the transit agency, told The News that the incident was “under active investigation.”
Cops estimated the missing surveillance equipment cost $12,000. The extent of the damage to the trains’ couplers was not immediately clear, but sources said the speed of the collision was low.
All New York City subway cars have been equipped with security cameras since December, the result of a 2022 directive from Gov. Hochul to retrofit surveillance technology to every subway car in the fleet.
“They’re gold — they pay dividends every day,” MTA’s head of security, Michael Kemper, said of the surveillance systems Thursday at a subway safety press conference.
This weekend’s incident is the latest in a spate of subway car break-ins.
In January, a group of teens broke into a pair of R trains parked along lay-up tracks in Brooklyn and took them for a joyride.
In that instance, the teens either spray-painted or otherwise covered the trains’ surveillance cameras.
