Police Grant Abuse

DHS funding wastes. I am just off-duty from patrol and have commentary on one of the largests wastes of resources. My Police Radio. Yep…my radio. That wonderful high tech communication device that I use to call in my traffic stops and use for 911 calls, it’s useless other than as a single band radio. I’ll explain in a moment, but first, a mid-diatribe preface. Hark back to the days of 9-11. Recall that there was a communications problem. Dispatch and call centers were overwhelmed with radio and phone traffic. Agencies could not easily talk with one another , officers and dept’s that work side by side could see each other but not readily communicate. The Department of Homeland Security decides that if we throw money at this problem it will go away. We now all have new radios per DHS, mobile units, stationary model and portables. All new, high tech, multi channel and band. Programmed with all the agencies they can fit on it. The Problems: -No standardization between States, Agencies, Departments. My channel 1 is your channel 500 -No training or documentation of what the channels/frequencies are or whom they belong too. Not even a handout…nothing. -Insane amounts of work to listen and/or block out freq’s that overpower and “walk on” local freq’s. An ambulance service MANY miles from here uses a parallel frequencies and during a call out will overpower all local police, fire and ambulance channels. Most officer lock them out on the radio. We keep our local channels open and block/lock out all the others. Training Update: NIMS (National Incident Management System) which replaced ???? is a system designed for multi agency incidents ( from 9-11 to smaller issues) They specify that agencies need to keep contact within their own perview and that the commanders of the agencies will discuss in a command post. This brings us back to the old radios and using 1 or 2 channels to communicate with each other and our own command staff. Our multi thousand dollar radios are being used for a 2-3 channel system. (usually a car-to-car/officer to officer, a repeater channel and a tactical channel). I hesitate to bring up the Agencies that scramble their frequencies for “security” that we cannot talk with or listen to. The solution? Well…none. We spent the taxpayers money on a radio system that we cannot use effectively nor are allowed to use at incidents other than to be nosey.