The CCTV meme is completely disconnected from reality. There are plenty of CCTV cameras around, but they aren't connected in any way, most of them are private, and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings. American obsession with Ring-like cloud connected cameras and their dealings with police forces are way more dystopian than the reality of CCTV as practiced in Britain.

A good example is my partner getting pickpocketed on an empty tube train, which surely should make finding the person easy, right? Nope, the Met told me they'd need to go and pay the train maintenance company to retrieve the recordings from each carriage on the train, and they're not going to do that over a wallet.

In practice it works pretty well, because it implicitly sets a very high bar on the severity of the crime that would warrant retrieving dozens of recordings and tracing people through them. Skripal poisoning or murders get that treatment and are solved pretty quickly. Small scale crime (or whatever dystopian thought crime scenarios people imagine) doesn't.