My City Encrypts 100% communications including EMS, Fire, Police and Emergency repose, it is a stupid policy but...
https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Encrypted_Agencies
You'd need to upgrade at the base station upfront to have both the old and new systems, and add a repeater, but you could then take your time replacing the radios in the field instead of having to replace them all at once.
The radios were encrypted to stop him from doing so within the next calendar quarter. He was plotting dispatch calls versus FOIA reports of burglaries to find the variances.
I’d expect this to be a growing trend. Local political corruption is ubiquitous in USA, that’s why they accuse every other country of it.
I'm thinking a traffic analysis app https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis might be useful for when encryption becomes more widespread.
Few things there, first "victim of a crime", most area's criminal reports are public records as they should be. Allowing the police to operate in secret is a very bad thing
Further outside of location information is a rare that other personal info is transmitted over the air anyway, general descriptions etc sure but...
Finally I think the public value, and transparency we get from having open air dispatch far far far far outweighs the limited privacy concerns. People say the same things when police are mandated to wear body cams, just like in those situations the public right to know what the police are actually doing far outweighs some minor privacy concerns.
We need FULL transparency in policing right now.
Would that be something related with the way that voting areas (whatever they are called in the USA)/Gerrymandering is causing?
Area-X on the map (that doesn't have any straight/simple lines in its perimeter!!!) has data hidden, while Area-Z seems to have "all the problems"?
Apart from real-estate fraud, I am trying to imagine what other areas of life may this impact.
(again I am NOT using -alphabetically- Dem-Rem notation)
1) In the USA there is very little concern for local elections compared to say, the presidency. Most people don't even know who their local elected officials are, and most don't show up to vote in elections that only concern local issues. The only people who participate in local politics are those who have a business interest in influencing local political offices.
2) Yes, a lot of this can be studied with geo data, from both sides of the coin! From the standpoint of the police, maintaining a presence in multiple areas of a city is a matter of time and distance. How long does it take a police car to go from the dispatch location to the scene of a reported crime? From the standpoint of a criminal who is robbing houses, there's a consideration of "how long is it going to take police to get here" if they see that police have no presence in an area outside of the times when a crime is reported. You can also see disproportionate enforcement of criminal laws based on property location. A lot of people don't want to see house prices negatively affected by crime statistics in wealthy areas. When a kid from an affluent part of a city gets caught with illegal drugs, for example, you won't see a large police presence in the neighborhood showing up to investigate. More police means more reports, and reports become statistics, which then in turn negatively affect property values. On the other hand if a poor kid from an apartment in a poor neighborhood gets caught with illegal drugs, the police will happily go there and harass adjacent residences, cars, neighbors, and for lack of a better word turn it into a fishing trip to try and find more petty crimes to charge more people with.
3) Local tax revenue in the USA is mostly from two sources: retail sales taxes collected at the point of sale in stores, and yearly taxes on real estate. A lot of retail sales tax was lost when people began shopping online more than shopping in stores in the past ten years. Most larger online stores now collect and pay local sales taxes (like Amazon) but they did not do so initially, it has only recently been required of them to do so. Prior to changes in local sales tax laws, the responsibility to pay sales tax ultimately fell on the customer rather than the store. Due to that, the reliance on property taxes was even more prevalent than it is now. (1)
4) There is no profit in jailing criminals. There is profit in releasing criminals after charging them fines instead of sending them to jail. Again, for the purpose of maximizing government revenue, there have been efforts to jail fewer non-violent criminals and instead charge them fines and let them go. This is especially the case when there are quite literally financial services built upon paying bail and fines in the USA. Lets say a burglar is arrested robbing a house. It might take 6 months to a year to give him a trial, so unless he has some sort of demonstrable violent criminal history a local judge will simply charge him a bail fee and let him go. Presumably he can't pay the fee, so there are local bail loan services in the USA that, for typically 10% of the amount of the bail, will assume the risk of the burglar not showing up for his trial for him. So the burglar won't have to pay the 5,000 dollars bail he was assessed, he will only have to pay the bail bond company 500 dollars. (2)
(1) Property taxes are not entirely objective. In most places in the USA, people pay property taxes based on appraised value, not on actual realized gains or losses. For instance, if you buy a house, in the first year after the sale you will be charged property tax based on the price you paid for the house, but in subsequent years the local government will compare your houses to sales of similar houses in your neighborhood. If prices rise, they will charge you more based on the assumption that your house has increased in value.
(2) For the most part local judges are elected, not appointed, so they can be bribed with campaign contributions from bail bond companies who don't want those judges to compel them to pay for accused criminals who don't show up for trials.
And even when its public record, there is a large consensus that some of it should not be published to a larger audience. There was a now old incident where pirate bay had a torrent of a public record covering the investigation of death of several children. It was one of the few torrents that if I recall right, the pirate bay voluntarily took down. A lot of people commented that police should have used more discretion in what they put in the public record.
Body cams has the same issue. It is good that they exist. There is however cases when the record should be kept secret. The default should always be transparency, with exceptions when there is good reason to keep it away from the public. As a obvious example, the body cam recording from a police arriving to a rape scene with the undressed victim should not be public record.
Interestingly, tapping in on mobile phone conversations, and de-scrambling them, is legal in Norway, at least for the state. AFAIK they still don't need a court ruling to do so, like they do when they want to wiretap someone. This is because the radio waves aren't regulated the same way as wired connections in Norway. I suspect this might be similar in the rest of the EU as well (of which Norway is merely a de-facto member). It might also be something to look into if you're an American, to check whether this is also reflected in either federal or state laws.
In the single city case he had volunteers check the text-to-speech outputs and manually fill in addresses that were missed. His accuracy rate was quite low with 2014 tools so it was a lot of manual work to transcribe the addresses from the recordings. I suppose text-to-speech tools are better since then, but these recordings are still quite dirty. You're talking analog radio recordings of poorly trained personnel who have regional accents, mumbles, inconsistent phrasing, etc.
Try to find tooling to get good text-to-speech accuracy from some sample source like the recordings on liveatc.net (air traffic controllers) and see how accurate your results are, noting the difference between controllers (who are trained in proper phraseology and speaking techniques) and pilots (who are not).