RE TFURROWS: PDSCANNER I haven't posted for quite a while. Not for lack of things to say, but I've accumulated lots of urgent jobs and they seem to be accumulating much faster than I can get through them. I'm falling apart actually - forgot my wallet last time I drove to town and only avoided a 1/2hr round trip to go home and get it (by which time there would have been at best 5min until the shops shut at 5PM) thanks to the emergency cash that I keep in the glovebox. Writing this when it's a clear failure of prioritisation is probably a sign that I've pretty much run out of steam at this point. I'm not really the sort of workaholic that I need to be for this self-employed lifestyle that I set myself up for, it's only now that I'm making some half-decent money, but I haven't got any better ideas so on I march, steadfast, into oblivion. Anyway, I'm putting all the long phlog rants that I've been coming up with, not writing, and forgetting for the past month aside for the sake of a quick response to Tfurrows who'se been listening into the police radio: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2021-07-16_PDscanner.txt I did this for quite a while years ago after I set up RTL-SDR with a USB TV tuner found at a garage sale (ahh, the days when garage sales were allowed - into another stay-at-home lockdown here again by the way, thanks to the spread from that limo driver quarantine leak in NSW which still doesn't make any sense to me) with a home-made VHF aerial. I just stumbled onto the channel while messing around in LinRad, and it was actually for a region North of me centred at a major rural city but also covering lots of rural areas in the old gold mining districts. I kept the frequency handy and left it on in the backgroud some days while doing physical tasks, until a few years ago it disappeared. I guess they might have gone digital on a different frequency, but I haven't checked because shortly afterwards I decided to do a fresh install after a HDD failure with the PC and then ran out of energy to finish setting up stuff like rtl-sdr and linrad (both would need to be compiled because there aren't packages for the weird distro that I chose to experiment with). Anyway, for the years that it was working I spent a few days listenting to it constantly and besides getting an idea for the procedures (even starting to figure out bits of their "code [x]" system) like tfurrows has been, it really affected my view of cops. The "traffic cops" certainly made up the bulk of the traffic as it sounds like they do for tfurrows in (I'm kind-of guessing) the US. Main differences are that here in Victoria, Australia (I'm sure different states all do things their own way) they didn't radio in the action taken and when they did the licence checks the dispatch also mentioned when the person also held a firearms licence, which I didn't really expect. Being a rural area, quite a lot of the people they were pulling over did have firearms licences so I doubt the officers placed that much significance on it, but it's interesting that the cops have it in mind that those people might come out all guns blazing or something. Also they seemed to have a pretty good hit rate of finding drivers with expired rego, licence, past offences, it would have been interesting to know why they pulled them over in the first place. Compared to tfurrows, there's definately a bit more mystery as to what happens in the end, it did feel like they could probably get away with quite a lot - in some areas there wasn't even reliable radio coverage. The incident responses were the really interesting part though, and gave me more of a feel for what they have to deal with as well as a slightly disconcerting picture of what goes on all the time out in the world - it's scary what _doesn't_ make the news (especially since journalism budgets in rural Aus are cut to next to nothing these days). Some stand-out incidents that had me listening cosely as details slowly trickled in: * The only city incident one that I remember clearly was some crazy bloke who apparantly started threatening staff in a store and I gather there was a bit of a stand-off as he refused to come out. I'm pretty fuzzy on the details, but they were taking it very seriously. * Out in the country, there was one case where there'd been some long-running dispute/fued between two neighbouring households (as reported back by the officer attending who obviously knew the history) and this time one bloke had apparantly said he was getting his gun. Probably nothing came of it, but I didn't really think of that sort of stuff going on locally. * The funniest one had to be the armed man who robbed a shed on a rural property, then obviously had some sort of run-in with the owner and tried to drive off down a rough track, ending up by getting his car bogged down to the axels. In the words of the cop who arrived there, "he's never getting out". After apparantly watching him struggle from back at the shed, and obviously talking a lot with the owner who was apparantly a friend of the cop, the cop eventually went to get the bloke in spite of the clear preference of the dispatch woman who wanted him to wait for backup, and who at least made extra-sure that he was wearing his bullet-proof vest. Maybe there's a deeper story behind that one. The cops were definately aware of what was being broadcast over the radio, and often swapped mobile phone numbers when they wanted to discuss soemthing more privately. That isn't bad I suppose (they were often discussing the personal histories of people) but it must have been more fun listening to them before mobile phones were around. Oh dear, as usual this isn't anywhere near as short as I thought it would be. Still the point I was building to was that if you listened to them at length, getting called into lots of very difficult and unclear situations, dealing with all these dodgy characters, being lied to from everyone, it's not that surprising that they end up treating some people unfairly or disproportionately. Granted they sign up for the job, and whether that's for the right reasons or because they just want some power in their community, I think in the real world you have to expect some sort of trade-off for finding people willing to walk into the sort of situations that everyone else does anything they can to avoid. Perhaps it's not obvious from what I've written here, but when you listen to it for a few hours, hear the reports, hear how the information changes and the situations develop, you naturally think "what would I do?", and personally the answers often weren't easily forthcoming. People are scary. I don't really get into debates over social issues in any case, but when I hear all this anti-police stuff that's what I think back to. Frankly I think that if you forced me to do that job every day, espcially in worse areas that the one I'm listening to (I can't imagine what they have to deal with in the aboriginal settlements) I'd probably end up being just as harsh. That's not to say you shouldn't expect better from people who choose to do the job, nor that some aren't just nasty/corrupt from the start, but it manages my expectations. - The Free Thinker. P.S. For a somewhat extreme, but very entertaining, example, watch the original Mad Max movie. Some of the filming was actually done in the same areas that radio channel covered (you could imagine it's the same channel that the characters use/ignore in the movie's dystopian future).