One possible compromise that leaps to mind is to have the radios be encrypted, but they all feed into a several-hours-long buffer and get automatically decrypted and published after that delay. You wouldn’t be able to stalk police or whatever, but they wouldn’t be able to hide malfeasance or incompetence from the public.
It’s not perfect, there are still good transparency reasons for knowing what the police are doing right now, but it might be a good enough balance.
Criminals. Back in the long long time ago I was a minor drug dealer (just weed) but when I would deliver to some of the bigger dealers, like the kind who had whole operations, they would have police scanners going pretty much all the time. It would give them time to dip out before getting pinched.
That issue came about because of poor procedure and poor enforcement. Instead of being “you are fired immediately if camera is screwed with” it was “yeah you’re chillin”
There was another comment in this thread about exactly that situation, a female police officer that noticed a creepy guy following her around during her patrol. But there’s lots of other potential negatives to having open immediate police comms, like criminals monitoring to see whether there are police around before doing whatever criminality they were planning on doing.
Same goal of body cameras, but we all see how that turned out.
Sounds like “we tried it once and it didn’t work, therefore we should never try again.” Instead, we should take into account how the body camera situation has failed and modify the approach to account for it.
Mandate that the buffer be operated by an independent body the police have no control over, for example.
One possible compromise that leaps to mind is to have the radios be encrypted, but they all feed into a several-hours-long buffer and get automatically decrypted and published after that delay. You wouldn’t be able to stalk police or whatever, but they wouldn’t be able to hide malfeasance or incompetence from the public.
It’s not perfect, there are still good transparency reasons for knowing what the police are doing right now, but it might be a good enough balance.
Same goal of body cameras, but we all see how that turned out.
The blue wall of silence is real, If there is a way to hide misconduct from anyone along the chain, they absolutely will do so.
Also who is out stalking cops? They notoriously have guns and very little self control over pulling the trigger
Criminals. Back in the long long time ago I was a minor drug dealer (just weed) but when I would deliver to some of the bigger dealers, like the kind who had whole operations, they would have police scanners going pretty much all the time. It would give them time to dip out before getting pinched.
That issue came about because of poor procedure and poor enforcement. Instead of being “you are fired immediately if camera is screwed with” it was “yeah you’re chillin”
There was another comment in this thread about exactly that situation, a female police officer that noticed a creepy guy following her around during her patrol. But there’s lots of other potential negatives to having open immediate police comms, like criminals monitoring to see whether there are police around before doing whatever criminality they were planning on doing.
Sounds like “we tried it once and it didn’t work, therefore we should never try again.” Instead, we should take into account how the body camera situation has failed and modify the approach to account for it.
Mandate that the buffer be operated by an independent body the police have no control over, for example.