[Scan-DC] 'Upgrades' of local police radio systems fueled by desire for secrecy

[Alan Henney]

The News Journal (Corbin, Kentucky)

March 18, 2015

'Upgrades' of local police radio systems fueled by desire for secrecy

BYLINE: TRENT KNUCKLES

SECTION: OPINIONS; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 713 words

It wasn't so long ago that with an inexpensive radio scanner, a handful of frequencies and a little time, citizens in this area used to easily be able to monitor the goings on of all our local first-responders (police, fire, EMS, etc.)

Spend a little more for a "digital trunking" scanner and you could hear Kentucky State Police too. 

It was a very nice way of doing things. People got to know, in real time, what was going on in their communities.

Around about 2010, we started to enter what I like to call "The Dark Age."

Flush with money from the federal government to upgrade to digital communication systems, police departments, mainly, began the process in earnest.

But they did a funny thing.

They made DARN sure that the radio systems they adopted could not be easily monitored. There were all kinds of reasons why they picked the systems they picked, but the main reason is to make certain that the general public was kept in the dark. Period. The less you heard, and knew, the better.

What's worse, is that while police department brass, naturally, are the ones that wanted these radio systems, our elected town commissions and councils didn't look out for our best interest. They weren't the buffers they should have been. They didn't put on the brakes and ask any questions. There was no due diligence. They just dove in headfirst and went right along with it. They were complicit in doing something that was not in our best interest. That is a shame.

Since, that push toward secrecy has taken strange and illogical turns.

The radio systems our local police agencies use are not compatible with Kentucky State Police. KSP made the leap from analog radio to digital years before smaller city and county police forces. So why not just adopt their system and be consistent? Why not get the same thing so that everyone can easily communicate with everyone else?

Makes sense, right? The decision to go to a different, proprietary system has had stupid results.

Like, for instance, a case in Laurel County recently where officers from the Sheriff's Department there and KSP had to swap increasingly agitated messages to each other through dispatchers to coordinate the capture of a suspect during a chase on I-75. I've got the audio of it here at the office. It is sort of ridiculous, really. Common sense tells you technology allowing officers to talk directly to one another is much better than a Trooper telling a dispatcher at KSP Post 11 to tell as dispatcher at the county 911 center to tell the Sheriff's Deputy on the road to back off a little bit so they can deploy spike strips. It's just crazy.

We should have seen it coming! Some basic questions and even the slightest bit of research would have revealed this problem in advance. But none of that was done because, I believe, there is some built in aversion to question police agencies about things like this. They are given too much deference. Or, people just didn't care. It was too technical and confusing soehwhatever.

Unfortunately, it's led to a lot of silliness. I've talked to many rank-and-file officers who have admitted to what I'm telling you. As long as they are dealing with officers in their own agency, things are fine. But when fighting crime becomes a multi-agency affairthe new radio systems can be a hindrance. Our money has been wasted on a half-baked patchwork of radio systems when we should have gotten a larger, more connected network.

What the federal government wanted was police departments that could work more cohesively together on similar digital radio systems to better fight crime and serve the public.

What's happened instead is the creation of little police fiefdoms walled off, digitally, from one another for the most cynical of reasons. Internally, they do have better communications. But across the line, departments have not been brought together in the way envisioned. Instead, they are more fractured and less cohesive than ever. All so you would know less about the activities of your local law enforcement agencies.

How is this good for the citizens? How does this lead to better policing? It doesn't. It just leads to less accountability. Taxpayers footed the bill for something that hasn't been good for them.

We got swindled. We'd have been better off staying analog.