Encryption may fix a portion of it, but it definitely won't fix all of it. And correct, the public doesn't necessarily have a right to know or listen in real time either. But the public does have a reasonable expectation (or a right) to know what is happening in their community in a timely manner so they can hold their leaders accountable if they are not doing their jobs and are just in office collecting a paycheck. Just imagine if there was complete encryption and very limited public access to information about crime incidents during the majority of the Lori Lightfoot administration in Chicago these past few years...or in NYC...no one would have heard anything about how bad the crime ACTUALLY is, because no one in government wants to jeopardize their job by making the leaders look bad. The public would likely only have a very filtered perception that the administration wants the public to see. Kinda like how many encrypted agencies do now, posting many pictures of their officers having positive interactions with the public (as they should, the community needs to see that side of policing as well), but nowhere near as many posts about crimes that are happening (not just incidents that might make an agency look bad to the public).
Several agencies in the DFW area have fully encrypted all fire/EMS and LE comms, and some of those agencies still deal with these same issues of incorrect information spreading regularly. Mostly due to the Facebook and Twitter people who see a 3 cop cars with flashing lights while their out driving around and either tweet a photo about it or go live and make something up and say "i think someone got shot by the cops etc." and it's actually just a traffic stop or some petty crime and no shooting.
As someone who works in the journalism industry professionally, and has for several years, the whole "file a FOIA" is a bit hard to do when we have no way of knowing something happened that we might want to FOIA for, and what to actually file a FOIA for (i.e. basic incident details so they can fulfill the request in a timely manner). Several agencies who have implemented full encryption don't tweet serious incidents, send out daily blotters anymore or send press releases out unless someone from the press inquires, if their lucky enough to be tipped off about something happening.
Some of the larger agencies are much better at working with us and have active calls platforms available for the media and/or will occasionally tweet out serious incidents during business hours (if we're lucky and its an agency with a good PIO, they may tweet some things after business hours that they are notified of). Many don't tweet anything at all and will send a press release out next business day. Some larger agencies don't even do any of those.
Some of the serious crimes we used to cover, we sometimes never find anything out from officials on anymore until months after when they have no leads, the case is about to go cold and they are ready to finally send out a 480×360 black and white, out of focus surveillance camera shot from 100 yards away, taken off the CCTV monitor on an Android from 2012, begging for someone to call in with a lead on a half a year old case and asking us to do a story about it so they can finally close the case and then tweet out how they finally made an arrest. Sometimes we get tips to our newsroom from family members or the victims themselves of a crime or accident, after they made a report to police, and they will ask if we have any information on it before the police ever say anything about it, and then once they know we're interested because we reach out to confirm the details we're told, they'll finally say something about it. You'd be surprised how many cases no one told police details about because they didn't know they had witnessed a crime or a portion of a crime until they saw something about it on the news...
My point, there needs to be a standard that if an agency opts for complete encryption of their communications systems, there are more avenues of transparency of information made available to the general public, or at least the press. Yes, FOIA requests are a way of transparency, but far from ideal, when the response time often depends on when the PIO gets around to responding, an agency's policy and/or state/federal statutes (this can vary between anywhere from minutes to hours, days, weeks, months or possibly even years...).
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