It's not that the cops don't know how to search a video, they simply don't want to, because theft of property from you, a working-class nobody, is nothing to them.
Neither am I but ours are so paranoid they will still wear stab vests under their hoodies when doing plain clothes patrols even if the majority don't carry a gun.
And also that - depending on the format of the video and software involved - doing a "binary search" might not be that simple
With my own NVR system, it takes great quality video and I can pull files of it, but the actual interface is pretty janky to say the least, and accessing stuff like the fisheye cameras only really works well within the vendor's app.