Got a buddy who is a McKinney cop, about the equivalent of a DPD Covert cop. He supports the encryption (As many of McKinney's officers do) Sure it does put they're business in secret and we all have agree'd that channels used by Narcotics and SWAT teams don't need to be available to the public (We might not like these encrypted but most of us agree those channels should be free from ears)
They have been recovering a bunch of scanners from all sorts of crimes and criminal operations especially on the West side of McKinney. They have been seizing illegally cloned radios and have really made an impact on scanner wielding criminals because of the encryption.
Of course their is the other side "Police accountability" and these guys must be accountable to the citizens that hire them or McKinney becomes a "Police State" slowly moving to a "Communist state"
Was his removal due to the encryption? we don't know and may never know. Will this event and others like it open the door to scanning McKinney PD? Time will tell, but I really believe certain channels should remain encrypted - There are Police Operations that go on the Public don't need to be clued in on.
That's my thought - I'll go back to shutting up for 6 more months.
McKinney PD has recovered cloned radios being used by criminals? I would love to see proof of that. That would be extremely rare...much less more than one instance of it. Generally these rare instances make the news media.
BTW, most of the McKinney talk groups are recorded in dispatch and anyone can simply mail an open records request and receive radio traffic for whatever time period they want. Same goes for CAD notes, 911 calls, even the messages officers send to each other in their in car computers.
If McKinney did indeed have criminals using cloned radios I would love to see the police reports as proof, I may send an open records request for this to confirm that this actually happened.
I do support encryption on sensitive talk groups like SWAT, CID, narcotics, etc...but generally support patrol talk groups being open unless there has been some verifiable reason not to.
A great solution would be to keep everything encrypted and the agency itself provide a time delayed online feed to its patrol talk group, say 15 minutes, to remove any tactical advantage to a criminal listener. Some PD's...like Arlington, provide a live feed of all their calls in CAD online for anyone to see, this could be another solution.
As far as the chief being removed. He does serve at the pleasure of the city manager or in some cases the city council. It would be nice to know the reason here...but I doubt it has anything to do with the radios.