Remember, it's also cops (not exactly the same cops, but cops nonetheless) who campaign for encryption backdoors so that civilians can't hide illegal activities from police surveillance.

I've been around a minute and the police radios have undergone steady technological shifts just like everything else. What started as straight analogue radio with some special channels started moving to digital by the mid-90s, by the mid '00s digital had frequency hopping and by the mid '10s the latest versions of police radios got encryption by default as it became so easy to do and the radio manufacturers added it to serve multiple markets.

Every step in the evolution broke the previous gen radio scanners but that wasn't the point, the point was to get better audio quality, more channels, reduce radio interference, add the bandwidth that the MDTs needed, and finally to secure the comms of the MDTs.

Without encryption anything going through the MDT can be "read" and you'd expose the full details of personal data to everyone in signal range for every single traffic stop. Name, Address, DL #...all of it. On top of that the way that many of these systems work is that the radio the officer is talking to when they get out and walk around is actually being relayed through their car so the same system that allows the MDT to work is also being used for voice.

DO the police try and hide their comms? Absolutely they do but that isn't why their radios have encryption. In fact the first sentence of the article contradicts the headline when it talks about both Aurora and Denver getting encryption before 2020, which is when the article claims this started.

Remember when it came out that cops were told to play copyrighted music when speaking with people who videoed their interactions? The idea was that Google would block those videos from YouTube. There’s nothing evil about that, for sure.

Yeah, no red flags there...