February 10, 2025

This Week in Amateur Radio

North America's Premiere Amateur Radio News Magazine

Police Scanners to Go Dark in NYC

Should police communications be allowed to become encrypted and no longer immediately available to the press and the public? The New York Times reports that the NYPD is currently spending half a billion dollars to upgrade its comms systems, with one side effect being that the public (amateur sleuths, photojournalists, insomniacs, and criminals) can no longer tune in to the latest happenings in their city — the reason Ford Explorers accelerate through Manhattan.

While I understand the desire for transparency, this developing technological obfuscation seems like a correction for the amount of surveillance that police have experienced in the past ten years. Required bodycams and a constantly recording public do more for accountability than some nightcrawlers and dispatch aggregators used to. Allowing police a couple of minutes of room to assess and operate seems like a fair trade for what we subject modern cops to.

Read more – National Review: