Previously you could hear what was going on in town - a degree of transparency around police.
Now you can’t. For better or worse, eh?
Now you can’t. For better or worse, eh?
The City of Chicago makes decrypted audio available, just on a 30 minute delay. That's a sane compromise, I think.
A 30-minute delay crushes that.
I don't care one way or another, but it's silly to say there's no actual concern there, I think.
I'm not saying there's no concern. I'm just not sure if this 30 min delay is as effective as it sounds at first glance. My gut reaction has been wrong enough times in my life that I have gotten in the habit of challenging my own assumptions.
They're not all morons hopped on something. Some are cleverer than you would ever want to know about.
Notably, when I did a ride along once, the burglary call we responded too, the officer got a call from his Sergeant and they didn’t put anything over the radio until they already cleared the place.
As to if the perps had cleared out already due to some SDR MAC address magic (good call!) I guess we’ll never know. Everyone just assumed it was a false alarm. /s
That's ridiculous. I've seen one police chief give this testimony but I've seen no evidence anywhere or charges levied anywhere showing it has actually occurred and I can't actually parse out the criminal model.
You have to assume that they _absolutely will always_ broadcast the location of burglaries on the radio. They could just not do that. Perhaps they coordinate the arrest using cellphones which is something that happens all the time already. Then your listening in has cost you a person who could otherwise be stealing things and may end up being a highly unreliable indicator of imminent capture. Then you have to be sure you leave early enough and carefully enough that no one, not even a neighbors ring camera, sees you leave the scene or tracks your travel after the crime.
That's not to say I haven't seen "criminals" use them. Street takeovers will monitor traffic to frustrate responding officers. Cannonball run players will monitor traffic to avoid speed traps. I've also used them for skip tracing when trying to find an officer who is also a debtor, ironically, they often think themselves above civil law enforcement and are notoriously hard to collect on.
Anyways, it really seems like a weak dodge from police departments that would rather not be accountable to the public. Chicago is no exception. Delays of communications put control solely in their hands. I can't imagine a worse outcome. It should be a third party non-aligned agency that performs that task and it should take a call from the governor to prevent them from doing it.
Some criminals will (and have, and do), use whatever technology they can to stay ahead of the police. It seems that every time a chop shop is uncovered, regardless of the laundered items, the press feigns amazement at how sophisticated it was.
Sure, plenty of street crime is committed by desperate addicts, but they are often only one link away from a dealer who has access to all the necessary tools to get all the advantage possible.
But...
Is that even really the question?
At some point, the deeper topic for deliberation needs to be:
* Is any society likely to significant stem property (and other!) crime when it has deputized a tiny sliver of itself as being the portion responsible for public safety and law enforcement?
Given the ubiquity of cameras, comms devices, and (at least in the USA), firearms, it seems more practical to conceive a future where we all share this responsibility instead of delegating to a SPOF, and then acting surprised when the Chicago cops are running liquor or the LAPD are dealing crack, and are not at all focused on actual crimes occurring in the community.
Anti-police activists rightly recognize that property is typically insured and easily replaceable, whereas people's lives are not. There is a deluge of evidence to support the notion that random encounters with police can be fatal for black men with no provocation. There is also overwhelming evidence to support the assertion that a disproportionate percentage of cops have abusive and / or racist tendencies.
I'll leave with a poignant quote from the author Jermaine Lamarr Cole - "I came fast like 9-1-1 in White neighborhoods".
I'm not sure there are aggregated data available on this very specific piece of the puzzle, but my anecdata are different than yours (and FWIW, I'm a resident of a historically and currently Black neighborhood).
https://naacp.org/issues/race-justice
Remember that Dunning-Kruger cuts both ways.
It sounds sane! Though I wonder if like body cams the decrypted channel will have mysterious malfunctions every so often when anything interesting happens?