201–202 of 202 posts
Do police really still use unencrypted radios?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
Police are increasingly militarised, pretty much any military uses encrypted radios. It's a cheap technology now.
https://www.harris.com/solution-grouping/tactical-multiband-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine in Little Rock connected the dots on how police were ignoring burglary reports en masse to rig the stats in favor of businesses and realtors with a vested interest in lower perception of crime than there really was. 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 th…
This is fascinating, and seems like the kind of thing a national-level investigative reporter would love to cover. Has it been covered anywhere or pitched to anyone?
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).