It's not about hobbyists vs. non-hobbyists for me. Has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's a simple matter of accountability to the public. There are absolutely communications that should be encrypted because they could adversely affect officer safety. I.e. Do I expect the SWAT teams raiding a meth lab to broadcast in the clear? Do I expect the Secret Service to broadcast in the clear? Of course not. However, outside of those types of ops, everything should be in the clear.
I'm not anti law enforcement by any stretch of the imagination. I have plenty of friends who are LEOs, I work with LEOs on an almost daily basis, I've never been in trouble with the law, etc., aside from a single speeding ticket. But even with that, I have personally experienced police corruption and abuse of power.
While I don't agree with how the 1st Amendment Auditors conduct themselves, you can very clearly see from what they do that police have a very real problem with public accountability. 99.9% of the time, a judge is going to side with the officer, even in instances of wrongdoing. But the video tape never lies, and that's exactly why they don't want the camera to be a witness. Same goes for the radio. Unencrypted traffic cannot be hidden or altered.
Sure, even encrypted traffic is subject to FOIA or Public Information Request (depending on the agency), but how many times have you seen official recordings magically disappear, or fail during the timeframe of the request? How many times have officers magically forgotten to turn their body cams on, or that footage was magically erased? Haven't seen it? I have personally, and on way more than one occassion. What would have happened with all this Floyd stuff had there been no video recording made by the public at large? My personal opinion is that the officers would have stated that nothing out of the ordinary took place and the medical examiner's autopsy findings would have held. The fact that an officer had his knee and all his body weight on the carotid artery of the suspect for almost 8 minutes after he was already in cuffs would have never come out. I can almost guarantee that.
So therein lies my problem with encryption. If a byproduct of forcing traffic in the clear is that hobbyists and scanner enthusiasts benefit, that's fine with me, but would in no way even factor in to my reasoning for getting rid of encryption.