It sounds like the encryption was limited intentionally, so government organizations could easily decrypt it.
The dark unspoken part? They don't need to worry about you distributing it domestically, because anyone using it domestically is subject to extralegal rendition and rubber-hose cryptography without a warrant.
That's been formally legal since the passage of the PATRIOT Act (and from the infinite renewal of the NDAA), but even Lincoln ended Habeas Corpus on a whim when he found it convenient.
We don't live in a constitutional democratic republic, we live in a totalitarian surveillance state LARPing as a constitutional democratic republic.
This is like when people tell you Flint doesn't have clean water (it's been fixed for four years.) Sometimes, time passes.
"Successfully" is the real loaded term here. Those that claim to see the cabal behind the curtain unfortunately have woefully underdeveloped facts to support it.
A subverted liberal democracy secretly run by a cabal of oligarchs but on the surface still playing hands-off with everyday people's lives is not totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not some generic insult to describe any oligarchy or authoritarian government. Totalitarianism is the extreme absence of individual liberty.
For instance, the US has been doing down on the Economist Democracy Index in recent years. "Flawed democracy" is not totalitarian, but it's trending away from "full democracy" and cries of totalitarianism may well be responding to real concerns.
In the abstract, I wonder if it's better to raise such issues with incremental language and small arguments, or to raise them with hyperbolic claims, or to tailor to your audience, or some other combination.
You don't have to tell me that I'm weird, I already know.. Most people seem to think dictionaries are obsolete because spellcheck exists, not caring that the primary purpose of dictionaries is to look up the established meanings of words. I know I'm weird for thinking these established meanings should at least be acknowledged when deciding to stray from them. If people want to use hyperbole to make a point I think that's fine, and know that even if I didn't think it was fine it wouldn't matter because I couldn't stop them. But my personality is such that when I see somebody doing it without acknowledging the established meaning of the word, I feel compelled to remark on it. Particularly when people are doing it with serious words with heavy connotations, like totalitarianism or genocide.
As for the deteriorating state of American democracy, I share most of your concerns, but I don't see a trend to totalitarianism specifically. For instance the government now exercises less control over who people marry today than it did a generation ago, much less three or four generations ago. I do perceive disturbing trends in corruption, wealth distribution, and administrative competence. But a corrupt incompetent oligarchy is not synonymous with totalitarianism.
These are police radios. All of the transmissions are recorded at the dispatch center and routinely get audited and used in various ways.
The bigger security threat is that police will often have actual sensitive conversations on personal cellular devices and SMS.
This is just another example of the good old boys network of public safety gear selling bullshit products.