SALT LAKE CITY -- It's how we in the local news field often get our information.
By listening to police, fire and medical calls, we can find what's happening in your community and bring you the news you need to hear.
But a new push could take the ability to hear these radios away. Some agencies are saying it's to protect the public, while others disagree.
Every day at FOX 13 News, dozens of stories are gathered because of our ability to listen to scanners.
A nationwide effort is underway to upgrade police scanners to something called Project25, or P25.
In essence, it means agencies can talk to each other and receive clearer transmissions -- an overall benefit to law enforcement across the country.
In Utah the project is almost finished with only Salt Lake, Juab and Utah counties left to upgrade. But agencies across the state are using P25 as an opportunity to encrypt their radios and shut everyone out.
"You know, it's not just journalists who would be harmed by this action. It's the general public," said Dan Shelly, the president of the Radio Television Digital News Association. "If I hear a loud explosion near my home and I happen to be listening to a police scanner, if I can't hear that information, I don't know whether I'm in danger or not."
Agencies from New York to California have encrypted their signals, with battles being fought in almost every state over this topic.
In our neighboring state of Colorado, agencies encrypted their radios in 2018. Then in 2021, a law was passed to unencrypt certain channels for the media. But still today, some agencies refuse to cooperate.
Here in Utah, Washington County is the only agency so far that has already encrypted its scanners.
The state's largest police department -- Salt Lake City PD -- has also decided to move toward completely encrypting.
SLCPD says Beaver, Box Elder, Cache, Kane, Weber, Carbon, and Salt Lake counties are also considering the option to encrypt their scanners -- either in part or completely. But that could change completely with agencies having until the end of the year to decide.
"We certainly recognize that we had to balance and navigate this issue, this very difficult issue, as best we can," SLCPD spokesperson Brent Weisberg said. "So as we looked at this technology, we decided that it is our responsibility as a public safety agency to make sure that we are protecting that personal identifiable information."
The risk of transmitting sensitive information is the predominant theme across law enforcement agencies looking to encrypt, meaning those agencies will now be responsible for the information flow.
That's something Shelly doesn't agree with.
"In a word, baloney," the RTDNA president said. "I have no reason not to trust the Salt Lake City Police Department, but I will say this: If they're going to great lengths to hide some of their real-time dispatch radio channels, there's no law saying they have to encrypt, then why are they encrypting?"
A solution could be to encrypt some channels that are meant for tactical operations or sensitive information -- which is the way the scanners already work, with many agencies encrypting sensitive channels but leaving general ones open.
"Law enforcement agencies have been able to do that for decades. Why now all of a sudden, 'Whoops, we're going to take this access away from the public?'" Shelly said.
FOX 13 News asked Weisberg about that very topic to see if it was a solution the department considered, and his response was this:
"Certainly it was. So one of the things that we looked at was, should we encrypt just our tactical channels, whether it's our SWAT channels or the channel that detectives might use if they're out on surveillance? We still recognize that on our main channels, though, that personal identifiable information is still going out in real-time. It doesn't make sense for an officer when seconds matter to get information relayed to each other, they don't have the ability to do channel switching."
The Salt Lake City Police Department pledges that without access to police scanners, they will remain transparent and respond to all media requests, Weisberg reaffirmed that when asked Tuesday.
Shelly, on the other hand, thinks that's not enough, saying it should be a public right to listen.
"Police officers are not qualified to determine what is news and what is not news. That is the job of the public, and that is the job of the journalists -- we are their surrogates," he said.
The bottom line: this is going to change a lot of things about how media and the public find out their information.
"We recognize that this is certainly going to be a change for media. It's going to be a change for our community members, but our commitment at the Salt Lake City Police Department remains unchanged," Weisberg said.
Shelly rebuffed the change, saying in conclusion: "The presumption should always fall on openness and transparency, not on secrecy and opaqueness. What do they have to hide?"
As a result of these agencies moving to encrypt, FOX 13 is going to rely a lot more on you, the viewer, to let us know what you see happening. Our phone lines and email are always open for news tips. Our email address is [email protected] and our phone number is 801-536-1313.
Anytime, day or night, let us know what's happening so we can continue to help Utahns stay up-to-date as best as possible. We will continue to follow this story as it develops over the next few months and continue to advocate for our viewers and readers.
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