Let me give you the standard without thought answers that you’ll get. Officer safety. They heard something from some guy about some agency that had a dude using a scanner to listen to something and that got them all scared and the situation was dangerous and now they all need encryption because THP, TEMA, and FEMA run 90% of real traffic in the clear, but you don’t need to know about the tree across the power lines, okay.
We need to migrate away from big E. It is really unfortunate and does so much to help with that interoperability thing everyone shouts about. If I had the problem of responding to a neighboring department’s jurisdiction I’d like to know what is happening over there as it happens instead of their people calling my people and trickling it down the radio 4 minutes later.
At a minimum they need a very frequently updated media page where you can learn about the wreck blocking 3 lanes of traffic. That’s probably asking too much….. safety ya know?
