KRS 61.871
Policy of KRS 61.870 to 61.884--Strict construction of exceptions of KRS 61.878.
The General Assembly finds and declares that the basic policy of KRS 61.870 to 61.884
is that free and open examination of public records is in the public interest and the exceptions provided for by KRS 61.878 or otherwise provided by law shall be strictly construed, even though such examination may cause inconvenience or embarrassment to public officials or others.
1. Today, people have a reasonable expectation of privacy on land-line or cellular telephone; a very expensive radio system should offer the same if not more security for its users.
There is a difference between a cell or land-line fone and a two-way radio system, wiretap laws and the like... A tape recording of police radio transmissions on a given frequency is a public record. OAG 89-11
2. The same reasonable expectation of privacy should be given to "'customers" of police agencies. Everyone in the county doesn't need to know if my neighbor and I have a dispute at midnight, nor do they need to be informed of every time someone's home security system sends in "the third false alarm this week".
Sorry, my safety and the safety of my family trumps my neighbor's right to have a private feud with his neighbor....
"Police blotter" and "incident reports" are open to public inspection. OAG 77-102
Although a city may not adopt a policy of withholding names and addresses of all crime victims, along with the location of the crimes perpetrated against them, the city may withhold names and addresses of victims of sexual offenses as privacy interests of victims of these singularly traumatic crimes outweigh public interest in disclosure of identifying information. OAG 02-ORD-36 (2-22-02)
Likewise, my safety trumps someone's third false alarm this week... if an Officer is responding to yet another false alarm when I need his services, then there is a problem.
To most public safety radio users, the idea of "in the clear" radio is as archaic as the party line telephone. I expect to see a lot more use of encryption in the future, as unfortunate as that sounds.
A government I can't monitor is one I don't trust. I have listened (legally) to a few conversations that were hidden from public scrutiny in some manner by encryption.... very few of them had anything to do with officer safety... one of them, in fact, was poking fun at me because my car looked like a "wannabe's" car (specific remarks about the number of antennas, etc). That conversation ceased abruptly when someone informed the two having their fun that the Scene Commander was 10-12 (present) with the "wannabe"....
