People in this day and age never want to hear it, but first responders in the United States are heroes of the highest order. They provide services that probably 99 percent of the population is too mentally weak and incapable of providing. They are on the scene of brutal accidents, welfare checks, and get put into a variety of tough situations daily.
The death of George Floyd and the resulting 2020 riots brought about the ridiculous 'defund the police' movement, which plenty of cities like Austin acted upon. Since then, police, EMS, and even fire fighters have been targets. Firefighters have been attacked in places, and police have been lured into fatal traps. Cities decided to pull money from them, and now are paying the price with higher crime rates than before the defunding.
This has led to Austin's first responders to now switch their dispatch traffic to only encrypted channels, thus stopping the public from listening on scanner feeds. Ray Hunt of the Houston Police Officer's Union says this move is surprising in a liberal city that defunded their department.
"I am shocked they would do that because it is an effort toward officer safety...and Austin, Texas does not give a crap about their officers," he says.
The cities that were gullible and spineless enough to defund their police departments are now reversing course mostly and trying desperately to corral crime. But with a now lack of officers, their cities are running amok.
Even with the amount of Democrat leadership in Houston, the city managed to luckily stay on the right side of things, and not pull funding from the department. But do we do the same to protect officers here?
"We do have some encrypted channels, where people cannot hear, you know if you are doing a big bust, or something like that," he says. "But I am totally in support of having no scanners out there, but also in support of transmissions being released afterward."
Getting away with criminal activity is somewhat easier in today's day and age. Many people like cartels or others can just listen into a scanner, pinpoint where police are, and either evade them or use tactics to avoid them.
It is about the element of surprise for the officers, but more importantly too, it is about officer and public safety.
"By having that, it makes both sides safer...no one is trying to hide anything...if you have a priority one call, and someone is listening nearby, they can get away and you have no chance at arresting them, or maybe even help victims," he says.
Anytime the police do anything to protect themselves, other people who are generally too stupid to critically think for themselves will accuse them of hiding something. This is why we have bodycam footage released all the time now.
But again, hiding scanner traffic is not some grand conspiracy to attack innocent civilians, or raid innocent people's homes. It is literally one of their last methods of protecting themselves, after Democrats stripped away the others.
"We are not scared of media or general public...but unfortunately, you have the element out there that are not good, and are using it for nefarious reasons," he says. "All the encryptions is not trying to hide what officers are doing...it is about officer safety."
Alas though, nothing in this wide world of advanced technology is safe, and that includes encrypted channels.
"I do not doubt with the technology that is out there now that someone could probably break into those...but you at least make it a more limited number than just having scanners out there for anyone to listen," he says.