Why does Hollywood pretend surveillance cameras don't exist?

This has bothered me for a really long time

So I was rewatching a great episode of Andor last night. In it, a small group of rebels infiltrates an Imperial garrison and steals a lot of money. Much of the rest of the 1st season deals with the fallout of this event and the Empire trying to figure out who did it.

Now, if I were running a garrison storing hundreds of millions of dollars in a vault, the very first thing I would invest in is a massive video surveillance system.

It has bothered me for probably two decades how Hollywood always pretends that security cameras don’t exist in both tv and movies. Even dating back to the original Star Wars movies, had the Empire installed a very basic (especially by the technological advancement of the universe) monitoring system, our band of heroes’ adventures into the Death Star would have been thwarted immediately.

It’s absolutely shocking to me how everything from Bond to Marvel movies and everything in between neither has a single person monitoring dozens to hundreds of cameras at sensitive sites like military bases, banks, government installations, and high end private residences nor seems to even have unmonitored cameras recording in the event they want to review what happened.

Technology is at a point these days where I can pick up a wall mounted, battery powered, WiFi connected 1080p camera with a three month battery life for around $150 on Amazon. Cameras these days even use AI to spot people in them so they don’t have to be actively monitored. I know a company that can take a single frame of a face and give you their name, address, phone number, and more within seconds. And you expect me to believe these things just don’t exist in fiction?

Obviously suspending disbelief is part of the entertainment process, but at this point it’s really starting to strain credibility to literally never have cameras everywhere (unless it’s part of the plot) not only alerting anyone monitoring them that our hero is sneaking in or otherwise doing nefarious things or recording an entire heist from a high security facility and then asking us to wonder how a galactic empire has no idea who did it.

I have felt the slide of TV and Movies into the abyss over the last decade to a point where seeing Dune 2 is the first time I’ve been to the theaters since before Covid and Andor was the only show I’ve watched since 2018. Maybe if their scripts actually didn’t insult our intelligence we’d be able to enjoy some actual entertainment.