What do you mean? Pulling a few camera feeds to track down or identify a theft occurring at a known location at a roughly known time is a few minute's work. It's worth the value of the bike let alone the value of prosecuting a criminal.

In my experience they will pull the video of the bike literally being stolen, but it simply shows someone in a hoodie and mask at night cutting the lock and walking off. There's nothing further you can do with this video.

What you need is something like being able to search all of the cameras from a wide area which contain a bike and x color hoodie so you can follow the person back to some other location that identifies them further. This is the part that's missing in most cities. It could be done manually, and it would be if it was a very serious crime like terrorism, but for normal theft it isn't worth the time. The tech does exist now though.

This is very naive.

1. The odds of the actual bike itself being covered by CCTV during the theft is pretty slim. Nearby? Sure, but probably not recording the offence. Then unless you're got a precise time window/know where the thief went, you're stuck watching hours of footage hoping to spot the right bike.

2. Even if you do get a clear, high quality facial picture of the thief, you have no magic way of figuring out who that is. You essentially email it to all the local cops and hope someone's recognises them.

The result is your bike theft turns into quite a big investigate, with a sub 5% likelihood of a position outcome.

> There isn’t the resources to watch all of this cctv. Sure someone could spend weeks watching all the feeds in the city to track the thief down. But the cost quickly exceeds the value of the bike.

Precisely. So why exactly did they deploy so much of it when they had no way of using it? This isn't new, it's been the case since like 2005 that people walking around London generate more CCTV footage time than real time.

There was another farce when they had that second round of attempted bombings on the Underground and despite having very clear video of it happening they absolutely struggled to deal with it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_attempted_... "described by the Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair as "the greatest operational challenge ever faced" by the Met"), leading to the whole shooting of the Brazilian at Stockwell incident.

All this surveillance demonstrably isn't a deterrent to actual criminals or would be terrorists in the slightest.