Security cameras that would, if functioning, have captured images of the perpetrators, were actually non-functional. An issue encountered frequently by detectives solving crimes in modern-day settings, such as in Police Procedural shows. Typical reasons include:
- The camera was pointed in the wrong direction, whether by accident or by someone tampering with it.
- The recording device the cameras are attached to stopped recording (back in the days of VCRs they commonly "ran out of tape").
- The camera wasn't plugged in.
- The camera had been otherwise turned off by someone.
- The perpetrators covered the camera's lens.
- Just happened to be broken, especially if the writers aren't feeling creative.
- Statistics show that having a camera deters some crime, and a broken camera that looks functional is cheaper than buying a working one or getting it fixed. Because of this commonly-known fact many businesses install empty casings that look like security cameras.
open/close all folders
- Joe Darley, Nick Hume's son's murderer in Death Sentence would probably have gotten a much larger sentence, thus preventing the plot of the movie, if the gas station's camera at the scene of the crime was working.
- In Rivers of London, the first murder is caught on CCTV, but a key event in the lead-up to it, vital to figuring out who did it and why, occurred just outside the camera's field of view.
Live Action TV
- In one episode of Breaking Bad, DEA Agent Hank Schrader is trying to interrogate a gas station clerk to find out who sold her some meth. When he finally realizes she knows nothing, he looks up and asks if the security camera is regularly on. It isn't.
- Often happens in CSI. Usually whenever crimes take place in corner shops the owner will imply that it's not a real camera (or that it doesn't work) without even having to say it.
- Contrast with the absurd physics-breaking things they are when they do work.
- At least one case involved the camera being tampered with by someone on the inside.
- In another case from this franchise, an armed robber wore a special raincoat designed to reflect light into and dazzle the security cameras, which showed the suspect's movements only as a vague, glaring-bright blob.
- Subverted in Grimm: they couldn't find the perp with the security cams, but they were able to identify the murder victim and the people standing closest to her so they could question them about the crime. They were also able to nudge an uncooperative witness by reminding him he'd been caught on camera.
- Also happens in Law & Order and its subseries.
- Double Subverted in one Law & Order episode, in which a store camera is both active and shows the killer dragging his victims to where he kills them. The only reason it doesn't get used is because the killer had the video and the trick police used to stall him so he couldn't destroy the evidence before a search warrant arrived was more than the judge was willing to let slide.
- In an episode of A Touch of Frost, Frost asks Toolan if he managed to get the evidence from the camera for a murder that had happened in an alley, only to be told that it was facing the wrong way.
- BBC TV drama Hot Money was about a group of cleaners who plotted to rob an outstation of the Royal Mint where they worked. The scam involved disabling security cameras whilst notes destined for destruction were stolen from the vault where they awaited incineration. See Real life, below.
- Subverted on American Gods. In a flashback, Shadow tries to cheat in a casino but is warned by Laura to walk away before the casino has him arrested. He though that he positioned himself in a spot where the security cameras could not see him but those were the cameras he was meant to spot. He missed a number of other hidden cameras who were recording everything he did and various casino patrons around him were actually casino staff observing him.
- In Bus Stop, Jason tries to find someone that he knew rode on a specific bus on a specific date, so he gets in touch with the bus company to try to look at their security camera footage. Turns out the bus camera only turns on if the driver activates the emergency switch. No emergencies happened in that particular bus on that particular date, so there was no footage to see.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney's built for DS case, Rise from the Ashes, features a murder that supposedly occurred in a room with a security camera. That's a conveniently easy stroke of luck... apart from the fact that said camera constantly pans back and forth and therefore misses all the important points. Plus, the camera doesn't show the floor either, which fills the entire room with blind spots. This is actually pointed out in the game's dialogue and is how the supposed "victim" managed to get out of the room without being picked up on camera. It also doesn't help that a big wooden, maniacal mascot that someone just had to go and place in said room constantly keeps covering up the faces of the people on the video in an almost parodic fashion.
- PAYDAY: The Heist: The security cameras draw cops to the heisters that they watch as long as they are active, but are effectively useless at spotting heisters in stealth. PAYDAY 2 subverts it: security cameras take time to spot heisters and break stealth, during which the targeted heister can just move out of the way. The basic security cameras are easy to destroy, which will be picked up on by guards but also make great guard lures. However, the Titan Camera on Death Wish is invulnerable to damage.
- Averted in Blood and Smoke. During the first chapter Carson asks Hardigan to check footage from working security cameras.
- Common in Real Life. Many retail stores use dummy cameras to discourage criminals, but these are usually in tandem with a few working ones. In fact, the reason why most in-store CCTV footage is crap and blurry grainy is that the store owners are cheapskates who are recycling the same batch of video cassettes over and over again until they're over-recorded so often they are literally worn out.
- The strategy is to put at least one fake camera (sometimes nothing more than a plastic shell) in plain sight where everybody and their grandma has no choice but to see it at least once while they're in the store. Then, with that as a distraction and/or deterrent, a number of cleverly hidden cameras watch you completely out of sight and mind. It's expensive, but annual losses from stolen merchandise and/or vandalism can potentially be cut by thousands.
- Truth In Television in Britain (especially London) where there's the highest concentration of security cameras in the world, but most of them are of incredibly low quality and pointed where they're only of what little use they are for protecting their owners' property (rather than there in case some poor Victim Of The Week flees that way).
- The UK also experimented with Automatic Numberplate Recognition cameras on city streets, but initial hopes of using them to crack down on uninsured drivers and other low-grade motoring offences were thwarted when the police discovered that nearly one car in ten was being flagged up. Even if the OCR technology or the Police National Computer's records were 100% reliable and accurate, and even the finest systems that money can buy throw up false positives every so often, actually reacting to the information received would have been like trying to bail out the sea. The ANPR cameras are now only used to look for vehicles that have been reported stolen or in connection to another offence.
- The poster image for Insecurity Camera
- One African expedition claimed to have found and filmed a mokele-mbembe (a sauropod-like cryptid)... too bad they forgot to take the cap off the lens while filming.
- The background to the TV drama Hot Money was a real-life case at a backwater, relatively low-security, outstation of the Bank of England where old time-served banknotes were stored prior to destruction. The cleaning staff discovered a security gap they could exploit - as even bank vaults need to be hoovered and duste, and who really watches lowly menials like cleaners? In the storage areas, one of the two cleaners innocently chose to give the security camera a quick dust and a polish of the camera lens. That's their job, right? While Cleaner A was polishing the lens of the camera with a cloth, and blocking its view of what else was going on whilst merely doing her job, cleaner B was stuffing thousands of pounds worth of five and ten pound notes into the black bin-bag attached to her trolley. (As the notes were recalls which were intended for destruction in an incinerator, no accurate count or check was made of them: this became pretty much the perfect crime in Real Life, and was only discovered because one of the perpetrators was busted for an entirely different offence).