Members of the public who listen to St. Paul police’s emergency radio dispatches will be met by radio silence beginning this fall.
The police department is moving to encrypt its communications with dispatchers and officers. They say it’s to meet privacy requirements and for the safety of officers. For scanner listeners, especially those who post in real-time on social media about what they’re hearing, they say it takes away transparency.
The move to encryption has been seen around the Twin Cities: Minneapolis’ main emergency-response communications channels will become fully encrypted Thursday. Dakota, Washington and Hennepin counties previously encrypted law enforcement dispatches, and Anoka County is making plans to do so.
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher announced the St. Paul Police Department’s plans, before the department had publicized them, during his “Live on Patrol” livestream on Friday night.
“The only way you really have accountability is if you have transparency,” Fletcher said in his livestream, adding that he’d learned the day before about St. Paul’s plans and saying he’s opposed to encryption. “We think the public ought to be able to hear what’s going on. The argument for encryption … has been officer safety, but we’ve been at this for 45 years, and rarely, rarely are there issues of officer safety because of calls being transmitted.”
St. Paul Deputy Police Chief Tim Flynn said in a Wednesday interview that officer safety “is always a concern of mine.”
When a major incident is quickly unfolding, information is currently publicly dispatched before officers have time to coordinate the switch to an encrypted channel, Flynn said. In a standoff, that could include where officers are located along a perimeter, which could put them at risk, information about negotiations and details about a “person who’s currently in crisis,” Flynn said. “And these are things that simply cannot be broadcast.”
State laws, regulations and FBI rules require law enforcement to protect sensitive information about investigations and crime victims, according to Leah Palmer, director of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Emergency Communication Networks division.
‘Huge step backwards,’ says scanner listener group
News media outlets traditionally monitor police scanners, so they know about major incidents and can get to the scene to cover them. There has also been a large increase in people listening to scanners — public feeds are available for free online — and posting about what they’re hearing on social media.
Rick Abbott, founder and owner of MN Crime, has 337,000 followers on Facebook and 125,000 on X (formerly Twitter). He and volunteers listen to emergency radio dispatches and post about them on Facebook and X, updating as they get more information.
“It’s a huge step backwards in terms of public safety, accountability and transparency,” he said Wednesday of agencies deciding to encrypt. “… A lot of people rely not only on my group, but several others in the Twin Cities, to find out what’s happening.”
Having information in real time can help keep people safer in their neighborhoods or places they’re visiting, and could prompt witnesses to a crime to come forward if they’re aware of a description of a suspect or suspect vehicle, Abbott said.
MN Crime started in 2018. Abbott said he’s learned to wait to post, for example, until police respond to a shooting and he hears them dispatch that it’s safe for medics to come into the scene. He said he doesn’t want to jeopardize investigations or the safety of first responders.
In posts about the topic of encryption, Abbott said MN Crime’s social-media followers seem split down the middle between thinking it’s a good idea and disagreeing with the change.
Police radio dispatches also have “an oversight purpose,” said Matt Ehling, board member of Minnesotans for Open Government.
“For folks that are concerned about … tracking police activity and accountability, these are very useful channels to be able to know in real time what police agencies are up to,” he said. “It’s often the first indication that police are undertaking certain activities.”
St. Paul Fire Department also plans to encrypt
There won’t be an additional cost to St. Paul police to encrypt its radios, Deputy Chief Flynn said. The radios purchased by the department about four years ago all have encryption capabilities and they’ll be programmed by department staff, Flynn added. They plan to start encryption in October and be finished programming in January.
Flynn said he’s heard of a success story of an agency that encrypted its dispatches — law enforcement responded to a report of people trying to use stolen credit cards and surprised the suspects when they arrived because they’d had a scanner with them, and expected to hear when law enforcement was dispatched.
The St. Paul Fire Department currently has a limited number of encrypted radios. When the department purchases new radios in batches, as funding is available, they intend to buy ones that will be encrypted, said Deputy Fire Chief Jamie Smith.
For the rest of Ramsey County, there are plans to encrypt the data channel that airs information that now needs to be encrypted, but not the county’s main channels used by other agencies, said Casper Hill, a county spokesman.
The FBI requires that certain information it maintains only be transmitted on encrypted channels, including about people who are convicted and on supervised release, sex offender registry information, missing people and various other types of information that was specified in a January memo from Minnesota’s Statewide Emergency Communications Board.
The “encryption requirement applies only if” information maintained by the FBI “is being communicated,” the memo said. “It does not require that a law enforcement main or county main be encrypted. It may require that agencies use an alternate talkgroup or other means of transmitting” such information.
‘People should be able to call 911 without fear,’ sheriff’s office says
The city of Minneapolis announced April 14 that it was testing encryption to comply with data privacy regulations, and provide additional safety and privacy for first responders and residents; encryption takes effect on Thursday morning. The city rolled out a 911 emergency incidents dashboard, saying it would be updated every 30 minutes with incidents categorized by date, street and block number, and nature of the incident.
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Other local agencies that are encrypted for law enforcement dispatches include: Washington County since June, Dakota County since September 2023 and Hennepin County since 2019.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office dispatches for 38 communities. Megan Larson, sheriff’s office spokeswoman, said the biggest reason for encryption today is to be in compliance with the FBI requirements.
Additionally, the information dispatched is preliminary information, “so the facts often can change when a deputy/officer arrives on scene,” Larson said. “People should be able to call 911 without fear that their personal information and incident details could be made public on social media, on the news.”
The Anoka County Emergency Communications Center – 911, which provides dispatch services for the entire county, will encrypt its main law enforcement channels; a date hasn’t yet been set, according to Erik Thorson, county spokesman.
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