Should police communications be allowed to become encrypted and no longer immediately available to the press and the public? The New York Times reports that the NYPD is currently spending half a billion dollars to upgrade its comms systems, with one side effect being that the public (amateur sleuths, photojournalists, insomniacs, and criminals) can no longer tune in to the latest happenings in their city — the reason Ford Explorers accelerate through Manhattan.
While I understand the desire for transparency, this developing technological obfuscation seems like a correction for the amount of surveillance that police have experienced in the past ten years. Required bodycams and a constantly recording public do more for accountability than some nightcrawlers and dispatch aggregators used to. Allowing police a couple of minutes of room to assess and operate seems like a fair trade for what we subject modern cops to.
Chelsia Rose Marcius reports for the Times:
The debate over whether to encode the transmissions is playing out across the country. Most law enforcement agencies in California have hidden their real-time communications to comply with a 2020 state mandate meant to protect the names of victims and witnesses that are spoken over the airwaves. The Chicago Police Department was expected to fully encrypt its system by this year, making transmissions public only after a 30-minute delay.
Those who oppose the shift — including elected officials, news outlets and advocates for demanding more accountability from law enforcement — argue that encryption inhibits such transparency, erodes trust in the police and prevents crucial information from being reported quickly.
. . .
In July, the New York City Council called the encryption move “troubling” and said there “should have been a comprehensive plan to maintain access and transparency rather than it being an afterthought.” The body’s public safety committee plans to discuss the new system this week.
Chief Ruben Beltran, who leads the Police Department’s Information Technology Bureau, said the department needed a system that was faster, more reliable and more secure.
You can read the rest here.
The public’s need for transparency into the application of law must be balanced with ensuring the law officer can perform his duties more efficiently and without unnecessary stressors and entities wandering into frame. If there weren’t the apprehension documentation requirements of the past few years, I’d be opposed to keeping these comms from the public’s ear.
However, with crime up — organized crime especially — and the compounding strictures of regulations and mob criticism turning many away from actual public service, there are also instrumental reasons for even the civil-liberties crowd to let this one go. We ask more of cops every day with no give . . . the consequences of that ingratitude are observable from coast to coast.
We can throw our local lawmen a bone and grant them a few minutes to do their jobs without a Nikon 200–500mm lens poking them in the badges as they step from the squad car.