Centralized radio system set to silence police scanners

Closed communications will affect how media and public receive information

Radio scanners that media and members of the public use to listen in on police and other first responders are set to go silent as the province moves to a centralized radio system, Edmonton police Chief Rod Knecht said Thursday.

The province’s goal is for “every police service in the province to be on that radio system, every EMS, every fire department, every emergency services, will all be on that radio system,” he said.

“It’s going to be a closed system, it’s going to be a coded system,” Knecht added. “Historically, if you’ve been able to monitor that, there won’t be that possibility to do that any more.”

The shift could impact how media and the public receive timely information about major police incidents, as well as smaller scale crime and disorder in neighbourhoods.

The province has been moving to a network called the Alberta First Responders Radio Communications System, which went into operation in 2016. Agencies have since been shifting over to the new system. A Service Alberta spokesperson said the system will allow first responders to better share information. Agencies have the option of encrypting communication on the network so the public cannot listen, but encryption is not mandatory, said the spokesperson.

Sean Holman, a journalism professor and freedom of information researcher at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, said police services across Canada are moving to radio systems that are encrypted and can’t be monitored by the public.

He said that raises transparency concerns.

“It allows us to … know what the police are doing for ourselves,” he said. “In other words, we don’t require an intervener to tell us what the police are doing — for example, a communications spokesperson or the sergeant on duty.”

“This is entirely in keeping, whether purposefully or not, with the overall approach of Canadian police forces to transparency and information,” he added. “They will only provide the information that they want to provide.”

Whether or not that’s the intent of the new system, “it’s certainly an inadvertent consequence,” he said.

One high-profile example of how police scanners allow media to report on real-time events is the Sept. 30, 2017, attack in which an assailant struck police Const. Mike Chernyk with a car and stabbed him before driving a U-Haul truck through downtown Edmonton, striking pedestrians.

Media first learned of the attack on the officer through police scanner communications. During the events, a CTV cameraman was able to spot an Islamic State group flag in the vehicle used to attack Chernyk.

Knecht told the CBC he also learned of the flag through media reports, saying it was “a bit of a game changer” in terms of his own thinking about the event.

The chief said police are looking at a system to provide timely updates to the media.

“We want you (the media and public) to know what we’re doing,” he said. “What we’re looking at is a system where we can brief you better, we can let the media know what’s going on.”

He could not provide a firm date when the scanners would fall silent, but said there will be a period when both systems are operating at the same time.