**Wait*** For those that didnt know, within 45 seconds of the suspect giving himself up, the Boston PD tweeted it, and CNN was broadcasting it live...
Within 4 minutes the photo of the suspect giving himself up was posted by Police Crews..
Thats faster than the delay that exists in Live feeds..
Its bad for public safety how?? Ive worked in Emergency Services for the past 27yrs in NYC, and nobody has ever been hurt injured or any suspect ever escape because of scanners..
Yeah, this terrorist suspect who was hiding inside a boat while bleeding, weak, starving and cold and in shock, was looking for a scanner or his phone to get updated tweets..
We really need to keep this into perspective.. and stop fanning this fire..
Calgary, California, nobody even knows where that is... so for some cop from nowhere USA to start inciting this paranoia is ridiculous.. I cannot help but laugh at all this nonsense.
Scanners will be around for ever, and by the way the XTS-5000 with encryption kills their batteries faster than the nonencrypted models. The non-encrypted models batteries last about 10hrs under "NYC USE" the encrypted versions last about 4hrs. which is why nobody uses it. When the police dont want something overheard they wont say it on the radio..That policy is cheaper and safer than trying to get out on an encrypted radio or worse yet, finding your battery dying.
George
(1) The title of the thread may be a little misleading. The CA is surely meant to be Canada. Calgary, Alberta, Canada is one of the largest cities in the country, even if it is "small potatoes" for a NYC public safety officer.
(2) I do agree with you that scanners, live streams, etc., don't cause as much harm to public safety operations as people think - in most cases. At the same time, irresponsible use of such resources (such as broadcasting the addresses of houses under search, or putting in the mainstream media what was essentially the dying words of a police officer) has indeed caused problems in the past.
(3) Delaying a stream is impractical for some uses. For example, I run an official feed which broadcasts a fire department. Besides members of the public in our area, some of our members who live outside the range of our radio system use the feed to determine if they should respond to the station for coverage. To put a 15-plus-minute delay on my feed would negate its purpose (and besides, the instances of firefighter safety being affected by live streams is nil compared to the miniscule amount that are legitimate police concerns).
The real solution, in my opinion, is to embrace the public nature of today's world. Communications of general patrol nature, fire and EMS response, and etc., should not be subject to censure or encryption. There should also be acceptance of the fact that there are millions of people out there who are going to see what's going on and text, tweet, post, and otherwise tell one another about the situation. This has been going on since time immemorial, but in this modern age, it's blindingly easy to do, that's all. Things which are truly of a sensitive nature and shouldn't be broadcast to the whole world should be handled on either encrypted channels or off the radio altogether (either on telephone or face-to-face). This includes medical and personal and other such information, movement of police and other law enforcement agents responding to a specific situation (i.e. drug interdiction unit, auto theft task force, or even just surveillance), and similar activities.
There's also been a recent article linked to here on RR illustrating just how poorly some agencies and entities work their secure communications. Some of it is poor systemic design, and some of it is, essentially, habitual behavior and laziness. That culture needs to change and people need to consider proper security of comms before saying something. I train my fire/rescue/EMS crews to not say something on a public channel that they wouldn't shout from the top of the truck with a megaphone, and if they have something truly private, take it off the radio. That kind of thinking is needed across the board.
