After tech snafu, most East Bay police radio channels to go silent soon

"The multi-million dollar effort to remove public access to police radio communications across the East Bay has a new start date, roughly a month after similar plans were undone by a technology snafu. Every law enforcement agency in Contra Costa County including all police departments and the county's sheriff's office will end public access to their radio chatter on Oct. 7, said David Swing, head of the East Bay Regional Communications System Authority. Nearly every such agency in Alameda County plans to follow suit on Oct. 9, he said. The only holdout appears to be the Berkeley Police Department, which vowed last month to keep their conversations public."

"The move comes about a month after regional authority tried to encrypt or make secret those radio communications, only to see its plans falter within hours due to a still-unexplained technology problem. Police and sheriff's deputies experienced intermittent loss of radio communications an hour or two after the switch began on Sept. 3, prompting the authority to keep radio traffic public while it sorted out the issue. In an email, Swing said the problem was due to a conflict between radio technologies, but it was not an issue with any vendors or outside entities. He added that we applied an update and tested it widely to ensure the issue was resolved."

"The encryption decision has garnered considerable blowback from police accountability organizations, First Amendment advocates and a Bay Area state senator all of whom call it a massive blow to transparency and the public's ability to hold officers to account when they err on the job. For decades, the public could listen in on most communications between officers and their dispatchers providing a real-time window into crime as it was reported, as well as how police responded. Recordings of those conversations allowed journalists and the public to instantly go back and fact-check police agencies after officer-involved shootings and other incidents."

A multi-million dollar program will end public access to police radio communications across the East Bay, with Contra Costa agencies cutting access on Oct. 7 and most Alameda agencies following Oct. 9. Berkeley appears to be the sole holdout. A prior attempt to encrypt radio traffic on Sept. 3 faltered within hours after a conflict between radio technologies caused intermittent loss of communications, prompting a rollback and subsequent update and testing. The decision has drawn strong criticism from police accountability groups, First Amendment advocates and a state senator, noting that public monitoring and recordings have long enabled fact-checking of officer-involved incidents.

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