[Scan-DC] Little Rock to stream police dispatches on Web after 30-minute delay

[Bruce Harper]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Alan posted:

> Police Chief Kenton Buckner has cited officer safety as the primary reason for making real-time radio communication unavailable to the public.

One would think that the media, interested in maintaining real-time
access, would be digging into issues of "officer safety" to report or
refute this claim with actual incidents (or lack of incidents).

> While the price was the least expensive of other options considered by police and the city, the system provides no vendor support should it crash. Technical problems will have to be addressed by the city, Foshee said.
>
> "If it fails, people are just going to have to wait for us to fix it," he said.

Why do I have the feeling that when something critical happens, the
system will just happen to "fail" and the city will pull out the
"there is no vendor support, we'll get it fixed when we are able to"
card to explain the problem.

> Buckner said the system is "a step in the right direction." "The No. 1 fear that we had was that folks who were committing crimes, if they had these pocket scanners or these apps on their phone, that they could prepare for us in our response," he said.

Note the "_if_ they had these pocket scanners…" and not "we have had
several incidents where officers were in danger." Sounds like the
Little Rock media need to put the chief on the hot seat and have him
put up (with specific incidents) or shut up about "bad guys with
scanners."

Bruce in Blacksburg