[Scan-DC] News organizations push back on D.C. police radio encryption

[Matt Stevens]

News organizations push back on D.C. police radio encryption
By Mike DeBonis<http://www.washingtonpost.com/mike-debonis/2011/02/24/ABbxUYN_page.html>

*Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier really doesn’t want anyone listening to her
department’s radio channels.*


*Lanier said allowing media to monitor police communications would harm
public safety.* (Jacquelyn Martin - AP) Police Chief *Cathy L.
Lanier*really doesn’t want anyone listening to her department’s radio
channels.

Lanier made that perfectly clear today in a D.C. Council hearing on her
department’s newly encrypted radio
communications<http://wamu.org/news/11/08/26/dc_police_to_encrypt_radio_communications.php>,
which have rendered useless the police scanners employed for decades by
news organizations and hobbyists.

Lanier, with the backing of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Paul Quander,
maintains that police need to keep their general radio channels secret in
the interest of public safety. But they have declined to offer anything
besides hypotheticals in meetings with media organizations that have asked
for the reasoning behind the communications lockdown, which began in
September.

Representatives from several news organizations, including a Washington
Post attorney, testified at the hearing, uniformly telling Phil Mendelson
(D-At Large) that the encryption has made it more
difficult<http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=12188>for
reporters to broadcast timely, accurate information about breaking
news. The department’s current approach to handling breaking news — through
public information officers, listserv posts, Twitter, and the D.C. Alert
system — is inadequate, many testified.

The radio shutdown, said a WUSA-TV representative, “is taking the public
out of public safety.”

*The news organizations have suggested that a limited number of scanners be
made available for their own use, purchased or leased from the city. But
Lanier was clearly uncomfortable with any arrangement that would allow
unfettered access to police radio frequencies for the media or anyone else.
She suggested that media monitoring would only be permissible if delayed
and scrubbed of certain information.*

”The compromise should be improving what we do, not reducing public safety
by allowing the press to have direct access to radio transmissions,” she
said.

The prospect of allowing select media access to the radio channels does
raise nettlesome questions: Who qualifies as media? How should the radios
be secured? How many radios do news organizations need? Lanier asked
Mendelson for time to improve the department’s self-reporting of breaking
events as a “happy medium” that would not “waste the investment we made in
encryption.”

But the news representatives questioned any solution that gave police the
ability to filter the news.

Lanier argued that the media does plenty of filtering itself. “What’s the
difference?” she asked.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mike-debonis/post/news-organizations-push-back-on-dc-police-radio-encryption/2011/11/04/gIQAv4lCnM_blog.html?wprss=mike-debonis

-- 
Matt Stevens
Photographer
www.FiveAlarmPhotography.com <http://www.fivealarmphotography.com/>