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@Dammit
The detail on CCTV is dreadful.
I used to run a bar that had the highest incidence of bag/laptop theft in London, and would often show people the theft on the blurry black and white footage.
Whilst you could see what was happening the footage was too indistinct to actually ID the thief- the best you could do would be to give a description of what they were wearing, and that only in black and white.
CCTV can only very rarely "solve" a crime in terms of identifying who did it- normally only when you have managed to catch the suspect and can marry up their clothes/size etc with the footage, and even then it's open to interpretation.
As bifter points out it can be used to alert police to crimes that are occuring, but that requries a large budget as people watching camera's 24/7/365 requiring paying, somewhere to sit, someone to cover them when they need the lavatory etc.
However as Pip points out they are fantastic at spotting number plates- with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) you can largely automate the process of fining motorists for speeding/RLJing/box junction offences, hence the proliferation of such camera systems.