How does one perform oversight of a police department if the comms are encrypted? Do I FOIA all the communications? How specific does that request have to be? Are the comms even recorded? How long are they retained? What happens when the recordings are "lost"?
Geez, this is a crazy take... as much as I hate corrupt police, monitoring their communication means disabling their ability to communicate with each other in secret.
During the Munich 1972 olympics(1), terrorists took some Israeli athletes hostage, and then this happened:
> Meanwhile, the terrorists learned from radio and television broadcasts that the police were approaching and had planned a rescue operation. The authorities had failed to cut off the terrorists' electricity and remove the press from the Olympic Village.
If they did all that and the terrorists were able to listen to their radio, what's next? Is encryption allowed then? If they could enable it then, why not enable it all the time, "just in case"?
If your city is a major US urban area, it seems very unlikely to me that "the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people". They may very well be abusive; they may very well terrorize people. Those are real problems. But people are more terrorized by crime, and, if you pay attention to what people in lower-income neighborhoods --- especially Black neighborhoods --- are actually saying in neighborhood meetings, it's that the police don't respond enough, not that there's too much of them.
There's a really pernicious tendency among well-off white collar activists to instrumentalize residents of lower-income neighborhoods, activists who themselves rarely experience crime (because they tend not to live in places where it's a major problem), and project onto those residents a preference for property crime over police intervention. In the main, working class people hate crime.
