[kawfey]

I think this would actually be very hard, especially with the gear used by most agencies. Motorola, for example keeps everything locked down and buried behind exorbitant costs. Just a single handheld radio can cost upwards of $6,000, and re-keying the encryption among other re-programming needs can only be performed by Motorola techs.

It's much easier to just offer the media a radio that has already been programmed. This is commonplace at news agencies since they can afford it, but street journalists are frequently left in the dark, and I don't think many police agencies are too upset about that.