The other night we watched “King of Thieves,” an instructive and entertaining movie about a notable 2015 heist in London. It starred some of the senior royalty of male British actors as aged career criminals, of whom Michael Caine is by far the best known in this country. Critics roundly panned it. A waste of two hours. Etc.

It was based on a 2016 Vanity Fair magazine piece by Mark Seal titled “How a Ragtag Gang of Retirees Pulled Off the Biggest Jewel Heist in British History.” Look it up. A beautiful writing and reporting job, probably even more enjoyable if one has seen the movie first.

What struck me as a 9/11 truth obsessive was the clusters of close-up shots of surveillance cameras recording the old robbers in any number of locations as they go about preparing for the multimillion-pound holiday weekend theft at Hutton Garden Safe Deposit and incriminating themselves in the days afterwards.

Surveillance cameras weren’t the only tools the police had going for them, but they provided the first clues.

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Fourteen years before, surveillance cameras captured what was (or wasn’t) happening on Sept. 11, 2001, before, during and after the 9/11 attacks, but some of the recordings are among the considerable evidence the FBI and the Justice Department has withheld from the public.

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Days ago, onlookers wielding cellphone cameras captured George Floyd’s asphyxiation death at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, and authorities could not round up and withhold all the video and audio evidence of the killing.

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