[dragnet2]

As a supervisor in my PD there were times I requested tapes from 911 of an incident. The incident may have happened over a period of an hour or two. I got all of it including all the dead air when nothing was said.

I don't understand. Are you saying your department records dead air, 24/7 when transmissions are not taking place? If so, why would they do that when it's easy to set up voice activated recordings?

[animal172]

I can't speak for any agency but mine. The tapes run 24-7. Not just when there is voice/radio transmission. The tapes are all time stamp dated. Is it a waste of tape? Probably. Does it allow us to say nothing was erased? Oh yeah. Remember that most system are multi track. There may not be any police traffic, but the EMS, fire or anyone else on the system may be using airtime.