the cops be tryin to hide their radio traffic from people like me :)

WASHINGTON – Police departments around the country are moving to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes. The practice of encryption has become increasingly common from Florida to New York and west to California, with law enforcement officials saying they want to keep criminals from using officers' internal chatter to evade them. But journalists and neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensure that the public receives information as quickly as possible that can be vital to their safety. D.C. police became one of the latest departments to adopt the practice this fall. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said recently that a group of burglars who police believe were following radio communications on their smartphones pulled off more than a dozen crimes before ultimately being arrested and that drug dealers fled a laundromat after a sergeant used his radio to call in other officers -- suggesting that they, too, might have been listening in. Read more: www.foxnews.com...

its just another sign of things that are coming, the police are working to shields their radio frequencies to they can better hide the planned brutalities.

shame on this mess.

we used to listen to them in my class with a radio we made.

reply to post by radiotracker350


I saw this today too....its so hard to draw the line on stuff like this. On the one had police scanners are fun to listen too, they can provide valuable safety info, and who knows maybe they save your life if the cops ever do go into storm trooper mode

But then you have the problem of balancing that with the concern that the bad apples out there will use the radio traffic to no only evade police but to ambush them. Its really unfortunate that criminals always end up ruining good fun for the rest of us

Oh no! Now how will I be able to get all the folks' in my town information?
Wide range broadcasts of their full names with Social security numbers, phone numbers, D.O.B., addresses, make/model of what they drive, and who has a drug raid on route... I'll miss those blatant violations of personal privacy. Won't you?

I think the balance between public need and police privacy is pretty well respected as it is now. The police have always had their tactical channels or 'color' channels as I knew them growing up. However, main dispatch really ought to remain open.

From small towns to big cities, there are a wide variety of legitimate reasons for normal people to want to hear the basic radio traffic. In a disaster situation hearing the direct police radio traffic could be life saving.

Undercover channels and specialized radio traffic like SWAT teams have been using secure radios or channel hopping technology for years. I just don't see why that balance between private and public is such a bad thing? Oh well.

This whole argument is hogwash. It claims that "new technology" is enabling criminals to listen in to police frequencies so they can evade them. BULL! When I was a cub reporter one of the first things I bought was a Radio Shack police scanner the size of a walkie-talkie. This technology has been around for THIRTY YEARS!

This is nothing more than a move by Law Enforcement to hide their activities - which should be open to the public lest we become a police state - from everyone from the crooks, to journalists, to hobbyists who listen for fun. That they would lie so blatantly just shows what I've been saying for months: TPTB don't care anymore, not even enough to concoct a plausible excuse.

No they arent heres a link for the worlds police scanners. I listen every day
www.radioreference.com...

Originally posted by OldCorp
This whole argument is hogwash. It claims that "new technology" is enabling criminals to listen in to police frequencies so they can evade them. BULL! When I was a cub reporter one of the first tings I bought was a Radio Shack police scanner the size of a walkie-talkie. This technology has been around for THIRTY YEARS!

This is nothing more than a move by Law Enforcement to hide their activities - which should be open to the public lest we become a police state - from everyone from the crooks, to journalists, to hobbyists who listen for fun. That they would lie so blatantly just shows what I've been saying for months: TPTB don't care anymore, not even enough to concoct a plausible excuse.

yea, very true words there, they dont care, this movement needs to be ended now, aren't trunked systems enough? just another way to hide, o well, if the radio companies like uniden, radioshack, and a few others dont adapt to the new systems, im sure the the Bigtime hobbyists will just start crackin open their
uniden bases and handhelds to modify their radios to tap into these new radio systems.

i have my uniden bc898t ready here, their not gonna hide from me, i'll just keep lockin em in.