And then sometimes, a big call like a bank robbery or a shooting would send a reporter and photographer scrambling out the door.
These police radios — also popular with a public that liked to know what was going on in their community — are getting a little bit quieter this week as Dauphin County has joined a growing number of jurisdictions that are taking police dispatches off the public airwaves.
It’s called encrypted dispatch, and it’s taken root over in the last generation in the law enforcement world - much to the consternation of some journalists. To critics looking for greater police accountability, it’s not something to be applauded either.
The change explained
Up to this point, police radio listeners could hear a county dispatcher - after having received information from a 911 call - summon a police officer by car or badge number, and then relay pertinent information about the call.
Generally, that would be an address and a description of the incident and whether there were weapons involved; or, if it wasn’t an active crime, the name of the person that needed to speak to police.
As a call developed, responding officers would generally take conversations to an “operations channel,” which have already been encrypted. Even so, the listening public would at least have been alerted to the knowledge that there was, say, a fight reported here, or a drug deal observed there.
Other dispatches that routinely went out over the air to all county police - and the public - at once were called “bolos,” or be on the lookout announcements containing descriptions of people or vehicles that might have just been involved in a crime.
Now, all of that communication is going away.
Scanners, however, are not completely becoming paperweights.
Most counties are continuing to publicly broadcast fire and ambulance calls.
Officials say real-time logs of fire and ambulance calls and other incidents affecting traffic are now also available throughnew online displays that went online this fall in Cumberlandand Dauphin counties - giving listeners notice about what that batch of sirens is all about.
But the new online lists will not share police dispatches.
Case integrity or information control?
Police argue that in the long run, the switch to encrypted dispatch is good for public safety.
Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo said two real benefits are:
- Suspects who police are actively seeking will lose an ability to get tipped off, thereby staying one step ahead of a police response. Chardo was unable to point to any specific examples where public dispatches had foiled an arrest in an interview this week.
- Investigators have the ability to keep more initial case information off the air, which means that as they interview potential witnesses, it’s easier to find the people who have useful information or, potentially, tell who’s lying.
Hess also said encryption will prevent witness identifications and telephone numbers - which ordinarily aren’t even available through right-to-know requests but sometimes do get relayed in county dispatches - from being beamed to the general public.
“This is way to provide a better level of service by securing scenes, preventing evidence destruction and getting witnesses that have not heard information elsewhere that they’ve used to form an opinion,” Hess said.
Chardo said Dauphin’s decision, implemented this week after a review with leaders of the county’s municipal police forces, brings Dauphin County law enforcement into line with an increasingly-accepted national standard.
But some say the trend can feel like a step backward for police accountability.
When New York City encrypted the NYPD’s dispatches last year, for example, advocates for greater police accountability there argued it would impede the ability of journalists and news crews to get to incident scenes quickly, thereby reducing the chance of reporters finding witnesses or other independent sources.
And that, in turn, tends to give police and prosecutors more unilateral control of information regarding what the critics note is - security concerns aside - one of the most important of all public services.
It’s a real concern, some leaders in the fight for police accountability have said, especially in the post- George Floyd era. In one notorious case, The New York Daily News said that it obtained crucial video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner thanks to a call that came over police radio in Staten Island.
Kimeka Campbell, a community activist in Harrisburg who has baseline concerns about police not being forthcoming with historical information on arrests and other data requests, said this dispatching change adds another in-real-time layer to her frustrations.
Campbell said she can’t help feeling the change isn’t in part a reaction to the new age of community journalists posting real-time videos to social media, sometimes including scenes that police don’t want shared.
One of those community journalists, Matt Moyer of the Harrisburg -based Channel Five Ratchet News , agreed, contending that he believes some area police are resentful of the ability of outlets like his to get news out to the community before they have “cleared it.”
Moyer, however, said he’s confident his site will continue to thrive because, he said, it’s more dependent on eyes and ears in the community than scanner traffic.
“It’s the community that literally helped me build this channel up,” Moyer told PennLive Thursday night, adding in a nod to the cell phone-armed correspondents that populate his site, “they’re not stopping making cell phones in 2024.”
There may be some potential work-arounds to a total black-out, like making a public feed of police dispatches available on a 30-minute delay, or providing scanners with the encrypted channels to credentialed news media.
But given that Dauphin’s rollout of the new system was an administrative action that just happened Wednesday, those discussions haven’t taken place to date.
In the interim, Chardo and Hess acknowledged Thursday they are asking for, as Hess put it, the public’s “faith and trust” that encrypted dispatching isn’t intended as a secrecy measure, and that the onus will be on their agencies to make useful information available in a timely fashion.
An encrypted tide
In a way, it’s a surprising Harrisburg and other Dauphin County police dispatches were on the air for as long as they were.
The Pennsylvania State Police - the state’s second-largest force with a presence in every county - went to encrypted dispatch in 2006.
Of Dauphin’s neighbors, Cumberland County has encrypted police dispatch since 2006; Lancaster County since 2017; York County does not at present, but a county spokesman said Thursday it will be making the same move to encrypted dispatch within the next few weeks.
Jeff Enders , director of public safety for Dauphin County , said the first inquiries he received about encrypting police dispatches came from the Harrisburg Bureau of Police, the county’s largest and busiest department, about a year ago.
PennLive reached out to Harrisburg Police Commissioner Thomas Carter and the department’s public information officer for this story, but did not get a response.
Enders said the lastest change will cost nothing to the county, other than taking a little time and effort from his staff to make the switch.
There are no plans to change the open-air nature of fire and ambulance dispatches, Enders said. That’s partly a function of money, he said. Unlike the police radios, Enders explained, many of the fire and EMS departments in the county have equipment that is not capable of encryption, and there is no appetite for a wholesale replacement of those radios at this time.
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