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Under Mayor Adams, who once declared that there was nothing more important to him than transparency, the NYPD is continuing on its quest to encrypt all radio communications, shutting out the public’s ability to hear what its officers are doing.
For an administration that has touted its reliance on data, it should be a powerful data point that there’s never been a reported example of a person using a public police frequency to evade enforcement or otherwise commit a crime. In the decades that frequencies have been open, the police brass can’t draw on any specific incidents to argue that broadcasts are dangerous except for vague assertions that, surely, someone must have done it.
Meanwhile, we certainly can point to multiple instances when access to the frequencies allowed the press and others to observe and record important happenings occurring in our city. Perhaps most famously, a Daily News photographer was quickly on scene to find Ramsey Orta, the bystander who had taken a video of the sequence of events leading up to and including the police’s killing of Eric Garner.
The Garner killing led to public outrage and fed into a broader movement towards greater accountability of police tactics and conduct. It was not a one-off; police scanners were also integral to the press response and coverage of the Amadou Diallo killing a generation earlier.
No conspiratorial thinking is necessary to wonder what the NYPD has to hide; it’s pretty straightforward. The police want to be able to control crime scenes and conduct their operations out of public view and the accompanying accountability, and the specter of a response by press or legal observers or merely interested members of the public complicates that. Not to mention that, at a time of steep budget cuts, the department is projecting costs somewhere around half a billion dollars for this new encrypted radio system.
It’s obviously reasonable for police to secure the area around a still-active enforcement situation, but nothing about public access to radio communications complicates that. They still have manpower and authority and yellow police tape. Often absent from their dire warnings is the key fact that, prior to this new effort, the NYPD already had encrypted radio channels for sensitive functions like command, internal affairs and VIP protection. It’s the precinct-level, everyday communications that would go silent under this plan.
What the department fears is scrutiny. An amNewYork story last year on the department’s plans to move towards encryption featured two longtime press photographers’ account of the real sentiment behind the encryption: after they had stopped to investigate a crash in Brooklyn, an officer told them “I can’t wait for the city to take those radios away from you guys. I don’t like the media.”
If the department won’t change course by itself, it’s reasonable for it to be made to comply via legislation. A bill introduced by state Sen. Mike Gianaris has the right idea, though it treads on some thorny territory around the notion of determining who is and isn’t a legitimate member of the news media. Nonetheless, it would still preserve full access to the general public with a time lag, which seems like a reasonable enough nod to any concerns that the NYPD might raise.
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