[Scan-DC] NPR: Police Radio Chatter Is Open To All Ears. But Should It Be?

[Alan Henney]

NPR All Things Considered

March 28, 2016 Monday

SHOW: All Things Considered 08:00 PM EST

Police Radio Chatter Is Open To All Ears. But Should It Be?

ANCHORS: Martin Kaste

GUESTS: Mike Madden, Lindsay Blanton, Jim Bueermann

LENGTH: 703 words

KELLY MCEVERS: When police talk about how prepared they are for complicated attacks, one question that always comes up is radio communications. Unlike in Europe, most police radio chatter is public in this country. NPR's Martin Kaste reports some officers think that's a problem. 

MARTIN KASTE: In Europe, police communications go out over restricted frequencies, or they're encrypted. But here in the U.S., things are generally more open. 

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: One suspect so far - male in black clothing. He's still firing rounds.

MARTIN KASTE: This is from the terror attack in San Bernardino last December. The two suspects had shot up a holiday party, and as the manhunt developed, you could follow the drama playing out over police radio.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) 

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: One suspect fled in a black SUV westbound from the location. We do not...

MIKE MADDEN: And our radio traffic was playing out real time across the nation. 

MARTIN KASTE: That's San Bernardino Police Lieutenant Mike Madden, one of the first officers on the scene. At a recent hearing about lessons learned from the attack, he singled out what he sees as the strategic risk of open-radio communications. 

MIKE MADDEN: It was being broadcast live on YouTube for all to hear, including potential suspects who are now being made aware of what law enforcement actions are. That's an extremely precarious position for first responders of an incident of this magnitude to be put in. 

MARTIN KASTE: It's the Internet that's changed things. It used to be you needed a police scanner to hear this stuff, and it was mainly reporters and hobbyists who bothered to get the right equipment. But now hundreds of hobbyists are putting local police chatter online, and those streams are consolidated on a website called Broadcastify. Lindsay Blanton is the CEO. 

LINDSAY BLANTON: We have about 5,700 public safety streams online at any given time. 

MARTIN KASTE: People can even listen in via a smartphone app. Blanton says more than 200,000 people listened in during San Bernardino, a record for his company. And he says he rarely hears from police departments because they know that this kind of streaming is perfectly legal. 

LINDSAY BLANTON: There's not much pushback. You know, certainly we've heard through the grapevine that there are some agencies, especially agencies that tend to operate a little more secretly than others, that they don't like what we do. The flipside of that is, there are a lot of agencies that see value in what we do, and they actually actively participate on our platform. 

MARTIN KASTE: Blanton guesses that 10 to 15 percent of American police radio traffic is now encrypted or otherwise unavailable. There's usually a spike in interest in encryption following high-profile incidents such as the Boston bombing, but that interest fades when departments look at the cost of switching to a new system. Jim Bueermann is a retired police chief and head of the Police Foundation. 

JIM BUEERMANN: Police radio systems that are available are ruggedized, and they are very expensive. They're very sophisticated, but they are really expensive. The portable radios that officers wear on their belts are now approaching about $4,000 apiece. 

MARTIN KASTE: And there are technical challenges, too. One you encrypt, you have to think through compatibility with neighboring agencies and jurisdictions. Who gets to talk to whom, and when? Beermann says departments often end up just getting encryption for the more sensitive units, such as narcotics teams, and leaving the more general conversations out in the open, and he thinks that's a good thing. 

JIM BUEERMANN: I think there's tremendous transparency and confidence-building attributes to having an open radio system where people who are generally supportive of the police want to listen to what's going on. And it gives them a sense of what officers are involved in. 

MARTIN KASTE: But he admits it's a real decision that society has to make, whether this kind of transparency is worth it compared to the possibility that a terrorist attack may someday take advantage of the openness of American police radios. Martin Kaste, NPR News.