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For almost 100 years, police scanners have allowed journalists to chase down news in real time, to witness and record it personally—instead of relying on information disclosed later, if at all, by public officials.

Scanners hum 24/7 in the background in all the City's newsrooms. A scanner allowed a New York Daily News photographer to beat the NYPD to bystander video of police killing Eric Garner in 2014 and preserve public access to it, as reported by The Free Lance. 

Scanners also saved lives during the Highland Park parade mass shooting in 2022,the Virginia Beach Municipal Center mass shooting in 2019, kept locked-down Bostonians informed during the hunt for the marathon bombers in 2013 and revealed that the police response to the Uvalde, Texas school mass shooting in 2022 was not what authorities claimed. 

“There are countless examples of how the media’s access to scanner transmissions have helped the public avoid dangerous situations, the Highland Park July 4th tragedy being just one recent example,” a coalition of Illinois media organizations wrote last year.

Now the NYPD is months away from making scanners obsolete by modernizing their radio system with digital encryption technology—and its refusing to guarantee journalists will have access to the secret radio transmissions, The Free Lance has learned.

Encrypted transmissions are not susceptible to capture by scanners. While some specialized police units have had digitally-encrypted radios for some time, the vast majority are not encrypted and thus remain susceptible to scanner capture—for now.

The City Council appropriated $21 million for an NYPD radio upgrade to a digital system capable of encryption in 2021. 

"The NYPD is undergoing a systems upgrade," it told The Free Lance, "that will be complete after 2024."

Some parts of the City, the NYPD revealed, already have "the necessary equipment installed and the Department will begin testing the technology in these areas later this year."

News photographers would be particularly impacted by encryption. 

While reporters may be able to piece together a story in reverse, photojournalists can never travel back in time to replicate an image they weren’t there to capture when it happened.

The power to be there—and be there within minutes—is what close and careful surveillance of police radio transmissions captured by a scanner gives journalists. No other news gathering method or technology comes close to duplicating it.

Modern journalism started with the police radio in the early 20th Century.

"Photographers covering the police beat would have to spend their time around a teletype machine at police headquarters on Mulberry Street waiting for the first hint of a story," says Marc A. Hermann, historian for the oldest professional association of photojournalists in America, The New York Press Photographers Association, founded 1915. 

That changed in 1932 when police radio first went live in New York City. 

"Anyone with a good shortwave set could tune in to 2450 kilocycles," Hermann explained. It was "a seminal moment in photojournalism." 

That's because it occurred simultaneously with another important technological development: flashbulb synchronization. Together, the innovations "changed the caliber of work being produced. A spot news photo was no longer necessarily a static view of an investigation-in-progress or an after-the-fact shot of a suspect in the station house; there was action."

The public loved it. So did the cops.

"Every patrolman with a war story could count on sharing a silver gelatin print of it with their grandchildren," Hermann says. "And, whether the officer knew it or not, it started with a photographer tuning in on a radio."

The NYPD liked news photographer Arthur Felig so much it gave him an actual police radio. The radio armed the Lower East Side native with the Svengali-like ability to show up at crime scenes so fast it earned him a nickname: Weegee. Like the mystical Ouija board, Weegee possessed seemingly supernatural power. New York news photographers have started their work day by turning on a police scanner almost ever since. 

The NYPD is the latest American police department to move toward encryption.

Denver and many Colorado police departments "encrypted their communications in the name of officer safety and protecting police operations" in 2019. Chicago began encrypting transmissions in 2022. Indiana began encrypting transitions in 2023. Other jurisdictions with encrypted radio systems include San Francisco, San Jose and Louisville, counties in Illinois, Minnesota, Virginia and North Dakota, Pennsylvania and the City of Baltimore. 

Several California counties and cities encrypted police transmissions in 2020.  Reporters "don’t learn about crime and disaster scenes until hours or days later, if at all, and are dependent on cops’ accounts of events," the San Jose Mercury News reports.

In other words, police get to decide what information they want out there and put their own spin on what transpired. That’s anathema to the notions of a free press and police oversight. This massive coverup needs to stop.

The news blackout is legal because the Supreme Court held in Houchins v., KQED, Inc. (1978) that journalists have no greater right of access to information under Government control than the general public. That means police are not required by the Constitution to provide journalists access to their radio transmissions if they don’t allow the general public access.

"There is no federal law that requires public access to police radio, and unless a state’s Freedom of Information law builds a strong case for disclosure of all police records, there is little legal action that can be taken," the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says.

That leaves it up to each and every police department, town, city, county and state to decide for themselves whether they want to require the law enforcement agencies they control to allow journalists' access to the broadcasts through special licenses and smartphone apps. Access can pricey. Denver, for example, "offers decryption licenses, but at a cost of $4,000 and subject to substantial and expensive insurance requirements," according to the reporters' committee.

The NYPD hasn't yet decided whether its going to allow journalists access to its digital broadcasts and, if it does, how, it told The Free Lance. 

A coalition of journalists' advocacy groups met last month in secret with the NYPD at police headquarters to convince it to continue to afford professional journalists access to police radio transmissions.

The group included representatives from the New York Press Photographers Association, the American Society of Media Photographers, the New York Press Club, the National Press Photographers Association, the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the New York News Publishers Association and the New York State Broadcasters Association, a person with knowledge of the meeting said.

The NYPD refused to commit to providing journalists' access. 

Bruce Cotler, President, New York Press Photographers Association, called NYPD's plan to use encrypted radios without including journalists the "biggest step backward for transparency that the NYPD could take." 

Colin DeVries, past President of the Deadline Club, said it puts not just press freedom but "lives at risk."

Meanwhile, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams refused to commit to a local law requiring it: "We have our own concerns about how any potential change to radio access might impact the health and safety of New Yorkers, and have been doing our due diligence to look further into the issue."

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