Others like Carlsbad, National City and La Mesa plan to encrypt their channels but have not completed the switch.Įditor Dana Littlefield contributed to this report.My parents, John and Barbara Stonehouse, celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary at their favourite restaurant in London on the evening of November 13, 1974.
The move toward encryption hasn’t generated much public outcry, and Boyd said he believes that’s because many people aren’t aware that scanner traffic had been publicly available.Īgencies that already operate on encrypted channels include police departments in Chula Vista, Escondido, El Cajon and Coronado. It will also allow users to make a note of police activity, allowing “cop watchers” to respond, Boyd said. He said the app, which is in a testing phase, will allow users to write reviews for officers and deputies and file complaints with the appropriate entities. He added, “This is giving them the ability to hide.”īoyd, a former database programmer, has built his own tool: CopWatcher, a cellphone app with a variety of features, including a database with publicly available information about San Diego police officers and county sheriff’s deputies, including hiring dates and salaries. “That (momentum) gave us one step forward,” he said, “and (agencies) are taking two steps back.” He also spoke at the Friday news conference.īoyd pointed to state laws enacted in recent years that aim to increase transparency, and faulted the Department of Justice for crafting an order that slows that progress. “Now all we have is silence,” Boyd said in a recent interview. He said he regularly video records encounters between law enforcement officers and the public - he views it as a way to hold officers accountable - and sometimes relies on scanner traffic to accomplish the task. One person who often listens to radio scanner traffic is Imperial Beach resident Marcus Boyd. "(For) folks that are doing formal cop watch or people that are simply listening in and seeing about whether it’s fires or something in their apartment building, some kind of police action, (full encryption) really can have a significant impact,” Fishman said.
Miller noted that he was not advocating for access to the personal data of people being investigated by the Sheriff’s Department or other law enforcement agencies.ĭarwin Fishman, who has served on the city of San Diego’s Community Review Board on Police Practices, criticized the county Sheriff’s Department’s record on transparency and said full encryption of radio communication is the “wrong way to move into this era.”
Police shootings, any active shooter, rapes, thefts - these directly impact our families, and we need to know and be ahead of what going on.” “We cannot wait for law enforcement to inform us of things that are happening in our community. “We need this type of access for trust and transparency’s sake,” he said. Miller, from the Racial Justice Coalition of San Diego, said at the Friday news conference outside Sheriff’s Department headquarters that the move to full encryption of radio communications runs contrary to the current demand for more transparency from law enforcement agencies. Some agencies said it wasn’t feasible for their dispatchers to manage both unencrypted and encrypted channels.įor years, anyone with a scanner has had the ability to tune into the unencrypted radio communications, more so in recent years with the advent of web and cellphone scanner apps.
Officials from several police departments across the county took a similar stance in explaining their switch to encryption to the Union-Tribune in July. “It’s not always feasible for us to switch channels,” Baggs said, adding that it could be “difficult or sometimes impossible” for deputies to switch from an unencrypted to an encrypted channel to protect personal information, especially in situations that unfold quickly. Amber Baggs, a spokesperson, said full encryption was the better option for the department to comply with the Department of Justice order. The Sheriff’s Department made the switch to encrypted channels Tuesday. That’s usually when personal information is broadcast over radio traffic. Other times they ask dispatchers to pull the information from the databases.
Police officers sometimes run background checks on their own, using their department-issued cellphones or computers in their patrol vehicles.