As National Night out began yesterday Minneapolis Police slammed the
receiver down on citizens. The traditional UHF communications system
that has served this city so well for decades was replaced monday night
by an unproven and overpriced new digital trunked communications
system. And so we citizens who paid for this subsidy to the
communications industry were further cut out of the information loop by
the Minneapolis Police.
These new digital trunked radios cost thousands of dollars apiece and
we taxpayers are paying for new ones for every squad and officer in the
city. And while their new and shiny, they don't have the range of the
units we're dumping, are way more complex to repair, and can't be
readily replaced if needed like our old radios. And the money that went
to pay for those fancy new radios could have gone to fully staff a
department that barely avoided layoffs instead.
Worse yet, we pretty much can't hear them. With the old units any
citizen with an under hundred dollar scanner could keep up on local
police activity. This allowed good citizens to keep an eye out for and
alert police to where the miscreant the were looking for was hiding. It
also allowed us to size up the situation when we saw the neighborhood
was swarming with squads- it's helpful to know and respond accordingly
if the police are looking for a missing child or an armed assailant.
But it appears that Minneapolis Police may not want us to know what
there up to. Certainly, the only advantage, and a questionable one at
that, of the new system is that you need a new $500 scanner to hear our
police. This assures that low budget operations like KFAI, the
Spokesman-Recorder, peace activists, and the average citizen won't know
what possible mixups or mischief MPD is up too.
Worse yet, with the new radios Minneapolis Police often won't be able
to talk to other cops either. After years of having a common frequency,
Minneapolis and St.Paul police can no longer directly communicate.
Neither can Minneapolis police communicate with local departments when
a chase ends up in Buffalo, etc.. In fact, the cost of converting the
rest of Minnesota's Police and Fire departments to the new digital
trunked radios is estimated at over $200,000,000... I don't think
that's gonna happen real soon. And with the reduced range on the new
frequencies, they probably won't be able to reach the repeater and talk
to each other either.
Sorry to not bring any better news as National Night out draws to a
close.
from Hawthorne, new home to Jordan's displaced criminals.
Dyna Sluyter
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