Again its very different here in Sydney Australia. Sure you won't hear the fire brigade ( as wel call them here ) go on much about a guy with a gun or the condition of a patient. Because thats not their job. We have a seperate ambulance service here, who, most of the time, are the first service to show up. They are first to show up because our police are so backlogged they take ages to get anywhere, even if its some guy with a gun. But in the example you stated, if the ambulance turn up, they will hold off if an offender has a gun. They will then put it over the radio to inform the dispatch to alert the police, who will then priobably make more of an effort to attend quicker. They will hold off, but this info has already gone over the air, where the media catch it without the need to listen to the police. Probably at this stage the police don;t even know its a car jacker who is armed. Like I said, its very different over here. We don't have combined services like in the US. Each service is seperate. Here in NSW we have police, fire, RFS (bush fire) SES (state emergency service) Ambulance, VRA ( volunteer Rescue Service ) just to name a few. All seperate with seperate radios they talk on.
Again, different services, run differently in different countries. I have seen probably the one and only documentary on US stringers, and compared to Australia, its very different in a lot of ways. The newsrooms in Sydney don't have the same huge budgets as you guys in the US. Remember we have only 3 major commercial stations in the whole of Australia. There are a couple of small ones, and of course the government one, andf thats about it. You very very rarely see them chase a police pursuit with a helicopter like what just about happens every week in the US, in fact, I have only ever seen in once in well over 20 years. Helicopters are very expensive to run over here. The news rooms over here rely on stringers for a lot of their footage and news. In fact, the stations even send their journalists out with stringers who are contracted for jobs. I know I have tagged along a number of times in the past. Their own TV crews are reserved for duties that they can plan ahead on and send them out to. The stringers get all the othe stuff over here. The good ones work well with the news rooms, and its hard for new comers to get into the ball game.
Again, very different from the US the way it is. Like I said, I know a couple of stringers here in Sydney, and neither of them are at all bothered much by the police going encrypted. Sure it is a minor bother, but to them, getting work from the police services was not their bread winner anyway, so they are not worried one bit. There are many other ways to get the details and sure, some stuff you won't get because it is only crime related. But thats tough. It doesn't go to news because the media don't find out in time. Our news seems to be more worried about the antics of members of parliment lately.
Personally, I think it's wrong, and that the public has a right to know about things to a degree, and that the police, in general, should be accountable to some degree. For this reason I beleive they should not be allowed to encrypt full time. But this is Australia. No 15 in the western world for government secrecy and of freedom of information. Even the US beats us at this, i mean, its not hard to find out someone drivers details in the US, but try that over here if your not a member of law enforcement, or a P.I. Its almost impossible under the strict privacey laws we have. Even I had little trouble years ago tracking down an old friend who was in the US for my father that he had not talked to for a good 40 years. Try that over here online. Good luck!
Thats why the police and in other states and territories other services have gone encrypted. Because our laws state that information that is out in the public domain should be made private, and its the responcibility of the persons who hold this information to do so. This means they can't ban our scanners, but they have to encrypt if they want to meet Australian privacey laws. In fact, the Australian Capital Territoy, where our nations capital is, Canberra, encrypted their system all because of an online scanner stream. And this was after their laywers tried to shut it down, but could not. And these were federal laywers, not state, and it ended up costing them a packet of tax payer dollars to do so.
The news and scanning scene is very different from what I can tell to the US. Much more of a market there, which means stiffer competition for of course, much more news. You have 260million people, we have 22 million. We only get the scanners you get in the US, and then not all of them because there simply is not the market here for them.
