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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the lockdown was voluntary, though with strong community pressure to comply.

But yes, multiple subsystems failed in the police response. If you listened to police scanners, you also heard that they had some trouble identifying streets correctly, or keeping their mics off when not talking. But police response protocols are one human system that definitely needs to be able to work in the face of multiple subsystem failure. I say judge the police on how the response worked as a whole.

I have to say though, thank god that Dunkin' Doughnuts' Tactical Ration Deployment Vehicle ran smoothly.

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Talking about the scanners and technology (and failures) didn't "homeland security" give millions to metro police departments around the country to get their communication encrypted? I vaguely remember reading about that a couple years ago. I wonder where that money went if that is accurate.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22federal+grant%22+%22encry...

I've wanted to ask about this since seeing the Boston police channel available on the internet. In the UK all the channels are encrypted making it virtually impossible for a civilian to listen in. Is it simply financial reasons that the USA doesn't do this?

Is it simply financial reasons that the USA doesn't do this?

Surely not only financial reasons. In the United States, consumer purchase of inexpensive radios that pick up police communication frequencies has been commonplace since the early 1970s (when I first owned one). I remember a Hacker News thread a year or two ago in which a European was surprised that a news report including the name of a person arrested (not tried and convicted, but just arrested) was permitted in the United States. Our historical sense in the United States is that police operations and arrests should be largely in public view, reportable by the news media and observable by the public. Different societies come up with different trade-offs on this issue, in law and in custom, but in the United States arrest records are public (and routinely reported, although often with some time lag, in local weekly newspapers) and police radio activity can be monitored by many private citizens. It was noteworthy this last week that the Boston police make more use of Twitter than many urban police departments, but the general degree of openness observed in the police response to the marathon bombings is fairly typical of the United States.

Speculating from the perspective of a Brit in Boston, it may be to do with the fact that police organization in the US is much more fragmented and federated - rolling out compatible radio encryption equipment, handling key management etc. across multiple police forces would be much more complicated, financially, logistically and politically. On the operation in Boston on Friday, you will doubtless have heard of the involvement of the FBI, ATF, Massachusetts state police, city of Boston police department, Watertown police, MIT campus police, transit police... cops from all the surrounding towns were also involved in the lockdown. In the UK this would all have been handled by one constabulary, possibly with support from specialists from the Metropolitan police, and with fundamentally common funding and control structures from the UK Home Office, whereas all those different police organizations in the US are responsible to different funding and governing authorities.

Apparently the police prefer interoperability over secrecy - if all the departments had encrypted comms during this manhunt, nobody would have been able to talk to each other because there were so many different police forces out there.

Interoperability is very highly valued. I just went through some government training courses on incident response, and interoperability was stressed many times.

Yep and no one could use the new radios.

to be fair if you live in Massachusetts you would know, all of the streets are not marked as you would expect in other areas. If there are street signs at intersection often times only one of the streets is marked.

There's no way to ask this without sounding snarky, but: why?

Towns in Massachusetts were laid out before the invention of the automobile.

Why don't they go now and label all the intersections properly?

GPS?

The order to close businesses was pretty broadly heeded, and with no workplaces, shops, daycares or school programs to go to the voluntary 'shelter in place' situation became pretty mandatory, even for people outside the lockdown but working in the Boston area.

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