RW>                                                      But most major
 RW> police departments don't want to allow people to hear what they
 RW> are doing.
There are very many excellent reasons for this: 1) There are a lot of
criminals who use police scanners to avoid capture and commit their crimes;
2) many of the news media use police scanners to get stories, and they even
beat police to the call in some cases. This sometimes complicates the call
greatly and creates another entity for the officer to deal with at arrival.
3) some received transmissions, even on supposedly secure frequencies, can
endanger the lives of the officers responding. I'm told that Radio Shack can
sell you a scanner that will receive nearly all of these supposedly secure
channels. All you have to do is play with it long enough to identify the
secure channels in your area. In some cases, Radio Shack will even give you
the frequencies of the secure channels. For obvious reasons, this could cause
great danger for officers about to conduct a raid, etc.
There is a move to scramble police channels for all of the above reasons and
more. Criminals already have too much of an advantage over law enforcement,
and there is already too much danger associated with police work. If a
criminal can buy a $100 scanner at Radio Shack and know everything we are
doing, something is wrong with this picture. Using a scanner to commit a
crime is a separate violation, but this is always after the fact and means
very little. It is obvious that law enforcement will be using scramblers in
the future to avoid some of these problems.
Tom Rightmer - A Victims' Rights Advocate
... The light seen at an end of a tunnel is at the wrong end.
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30
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