Donald always kept the volume up on his police scanner. Every where he
went he had the police scanner playing in the background and if you ran
into him in a parking lot, and stopped to chat, the scanner would be
squaking on and off. He mentioned once he even had one at home, which he
said kept on all the time.
Donald wasn't the brightest cookie in the box, as they say, and I heard
once he had an IQ of 80. But he was the most personable person you'd ever
meet. Everybody liked Donald and Donald liked everybody else, as he lit
up when he saw them through his thick coke bottle bottom glasses. In the
suburb community of Burien he was a common fixture. Always running
errands for people, looking up friends, and working as a janitor. He grew
up there and his mother ran a local beauty salon.
I ran into Donald and his brother once, and they talked police business
like other people talked baseball. They loved it. They would talk about
what they heard, read, saw, and even the close encounters they had when
they got in their cars and drove to the scene they'd heard about over the
scanner.
Donald was plugged into the community and if something ever happened he
would probably tell everyone he knew. That was back in the late eighties
and early nineties. Now, in this information age, so much of what goes
across the police scanner is encoded. The police offer a twitter service,
but there they have a chance to prepare their message before it goes out
to the public. I'm sure Donald has subscribed, but is he getting the same
information and more importantly, is the community?
We have lost a valuable layer of communication between the police and
the community. I would imagine the police disliked the scanner. It seems
like it just sets up a situation where a bunch of uninformed people are
watching your work. Now, via email, twitter, and web pages, all
information released to the public is prepared after the fact. On the
scanner it was real time and if there was a chase going on through your
community you could know about it if you had a scanner. What would you
get now?
Now the helicopter overhead and police cars driving up the neighbors
driveway are the first inkling we have of any police activity in the area.
Should we lock the doors, call our lawyer, get the mace ready? Should we
boil water in case we can be of service? We don't know. All that's on
the scanner is clicks and bleeps and twitter hasn't come through with
anything yet. Instead we have to wait for the 'Police Blotter' to come
out in the local newspaper and hope there's something about the event we
saw 'going down'.
We've lost an important bond with our enforcement agencies in this
information age. Does this put more power on enforcement's side? Is it
good or bad? Is it right or wrong? Are we safe?
