How come the Police don't use hands-free kits?

[ciphergoth]

Why does the policeman currently blocking the way to Charlotte Road still have to hold his radio to his ear?

Comments

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

1.) They don't want to get caught up in the wires when they're trying to arrest people
2.) It wouldn't really fit the Met police image if their bobbies all looked like they were talking to themselves half the time ;-)

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

2.) It wouldn't really fit the Met police image if their bobbies all looked like they were talking to themselves half the time ;-)

Would this be their intended image or their actual image? ;-)

[babysimon]

They didn't have them in the 50s?

PS: Have you seen the sign pointing the way to Oxford Circus? Very funny. And how are they going to shoot Charlotte Road in such a way as to hide the graffiti?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Any idea what they're shooting?

[babysimon]

A drama. They told me the name and I immediately forgot.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Because introducing new technology across a large public sector organisation is pretty much guaranteed to come in spectacularly over budget, over schedule and under spec.

Airwave, the new system, is allegedly currently being "rolled out" at a cost of about 3 billion smackers IIRC. If you look at the Police part of your Council Tax bill you'll see a separate entry for it, it's so huge (and that's just a local top-up). Nobody will let them put up the masts, it's fundamentally crap, doesn't actually work, is hard to use, and the other emergency services (who were supposed to all switch to the new system) have decided they don't want to touch it with a bargepole.

[hughe.livejournal.com]

from my understanding its a digital encrypted system that also randomly changes frequencies during transmissions to try to avoid decoding. But i have heard that this means that another officer cannot join a conversation and if a receiving party suffers interference along the way they loose what frequency the transmission is on and get cut off completley. sounds like a load of pish to me.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

1.) They don't want to get caught up in the wires when they're trying to arrest people

This is exactly the problem that Bluetooth solves well. Cf, Sony-Ericsson phones.

I'd guess the Bobbies don't have them because your kooky, crazy, Socialist government is cheap!

Cops get all the toys here in the US! I mean, we're a police state, after all...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I should think the frequency hopping is to prevent jamming, not decryption...

new technology and government

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Wow, and here I thought that was an American problem.

In Seattle, the city owns the power company and runs the garbage pick up,with the individual households paying for these services. And yet, the city cannot figure out how to combine the two billing systems together, so every month I get TWO mailings from them instead of one. I can't imagine how much they're paying out in postage. Me, I mail off just one check. I wonder if it screws things up for them.

As for the cops - my guess is that they are intrinsically stupid like ours are here. I give you an example based on how American cops handled a running car abandoned (by crooks) on the railroad tracks near my old apartment. They were there for an hour inspecting the car for contraband, but oddly NONE of them thought to call the train company and tell them that the tracks were blocked. It all ended very spectacularly but left me without a lot of respect for the "men in blue," since they could also have easily just driven the car somewhere else.

[hughe.livejournal.com]

fair enough, sounds right. apparently what they did was add in a control channel that broadcasts what is on what channel at any time... whoch kind of defeats the object.

[biog.livejournal.com]

Maybe they should make a film about them called 'cop shoot cop...(in the foot)'.