That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.

People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.

But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw

And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.

The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat.

You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .

Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.

In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.

...because the point of surveillance was never to solve crime.

The rampant crime is largely made up.