The cameras caught the gunman standing alone for five minutes on West 54th Street, ignoring the early-morning rush of people streaming by.
They caught him again as he stood in the dark at 6:44 a.m. and locked into his target, Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, who was walking on the other side of the street.
And they captured video of the gunman, who was dressed in black and wearing a gray backpack, crossing the street and walking up to Mr. Thompson. He appeared calm as he raised a gun, fired several times and then walked away.
The seconds before Wednesday morning’s shooting of Mr. Thompson, the fatal moments and the immediate aftermath were all captured on surveillance cameras, leaving investigators with a trail of digital evidence to help search for a man who was “proficient” with firearms, according to Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Police Department, with help from the federal government, poured resources into expanding its surveillance capabilities. New York City now has a vast system of cameras, both public and private, that the police can scour to locate people.
The city has “investigatory capabilities that are above and beyond most municipalities,” said Brittney Blair, a senior director in the investigations and disputes practice at K2 Integrity, which advises companies on risk management and security.
On Wednesday, cameras inside a Starbucks two blocks from the crime scene that the gunman visited minutes before the shooting captured his partially hidden face.
Others showed the gunman waiting for Mr. Thompson, and then recorded him fleeing on a bicycle into Central Park, where he disappeared.
By late Wednesday, the police had released at least five images of the suspect, but had not announced arrests. They had not identified the shooter or a motive.
Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said the police would use its aviation unit, dogs and drones to find the killer.
Investigators would work backward to create a timeline, talking to Mr. Thompson’s friends, colleagues and family, scrutinizing his social media accounts and analyzing surveillance footage around Midtown, the police said.
“An incident like this happens, we don’t spare any expense,” Chief Maddrey said.
The footage revealed a chilling encounter between the seemingly calm gunman and an unsuspecting executive from Minnesota.
The gunman raised the weapon, heedless of a woman standing nearby on the sidewalk. He fired several times, hitting Mr. Thompson in the calf and back, as the woman ran away, according to the footage.
Mr. Thompson barely had time to whirl and face his attacker before crumpling to the ground. The gunman fiddled with his weapon, which had appeared to jam, and shot again as he walked toward Mr. Thompson.
As Mr. Thompson lay bleeding, the gunman jogged across 54th Street and fled through a pedestrian passageway near the Ziegfeld Ballroom before appearing again on West 55th Street. The police would later find a cellphone in that passage.
Then, he got on a bike that he rode north, Chief Kenny said. At 6:48 a.m., at the same time that the police found Mr. Thompson dying on the sidewalk, the shooter was riding into Central Park on Center Drive. That was the last time he was seen, the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said.
Later Wednesday, police officers gathered at a Citi Bike kiosk at Madison Avenue and 82nd Street on the Upper East Side. They were asking doormen and building superintendents nearby for video footage that might have captured activity around the dock.
Despite the ubiquity of cameras across the five boroughs, seemingly tracking New Yorkers’ every move, the police have not always been able to harness their collective power to find suspects quickly.
In April 2022, after Frank James opened fire on a packed Brooklyn subway train during midweek rush hour, it took more than 31 hours for officers to track him down even though he had been captured on surveillance video.
Members of the public eventually tipped the police off to his whereabouts: A 17-year-old boy on a school field trip in Chinatown spotted Mr. James in a park, and then a different caller told investigators that he was at a McDonald’s in the East Village. Mr. James was eventually arrested near Sixth Street and First Avenue.
“It’s never as speedy as you would want it to be or like they show on TV,” said Ms. Blair of K2 Integrity.
“Those investigations are extremely tedious,” said Ms. Blair, who is a former director of intelligence operations at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Chicago. “It takes analysis of tens of thousands of hours of footage from all different camera sources.”
Even with New York’s level of technology and surveillance, the police must rely on investigators who are keen observers and can identify someone by looking at their shape and movements, Ms. Blair said. And the public remains a critical ally of the police, who distribute images and descriptions of suspects in the hope that someone will help identify them, she said.
“There is no magic button you can press to immediately identify someone like this,” Ms. Blair said.
“But,” she added, “of all the places in this country to commit a crime like this, Manhattan would be the dead last location on my list.”
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