Insights · Time

Why most camera clocks are wrong

June 2024 · 3 minute read

It is one of the least appreciated facts in evidence law: the clock on the camera is very often wrong.

According to a widely cited FBI training finding reported across the security industry, more than half of all security-camera systems display the wrong time on their footage. The usual culprits are mundane: a daylight-saving change the system never accounted for, or a clock nobody set correctly when the camera was installed.

A small error, a large problem

An hour does not sound like much until a timeline is in dispute. If footage is stamped an hour off, it may appear to show an event before or after it actually happened, contradicting witness accounts, alibis, or other records. At that point the same video that should have settled the question becomes the thing the other side attacks.

The fix is not to trust the clock on the screen but to anchor the time to something verifiable. The most reliable record of when a file was captured is the metadata the camera wrote at the moment of recording, not the overlay a misconfigured device happened to print.