By Caleb Lunetta Teri Figueroa
It was police radio traffic on the scanner that drew freelance photojournalist Juan Ruiz to an Encanto home last year, where he captured video footage of an unarmed man being bitten by a police dog and shot with bean-bag rounds.
Footage of the encounter went on to raise public concern over the officers’ use of force, prompting a formal complaint to be filed with the San Diego Police Department and an internal investigation.
Today, it is much more difficult to learn in real time what police are doing and why, creating challenges for police accountability groups and journalists such as Ruiz.
On June 2, the department flipped the switch to encrypt its radio communications, shutting out the public from hearing what police are responding to and receiving instant public safety updates.
Anyone tuning to San Diego police radio communications — often called “scanner traffic” — will find dead air.
San Diego was the last municipal or regional law enforcement agency in the county to go radio silent. Departments throughout California moved to encryption to comply with a 2020 directive from the state’s Department of Justice, which tells police to ensure they keep people’s personal identifying information off public radio traffic.
Watchdog groups, journalists, advocates for open records, and everyday folks who had regularly tuned in to scanner traffic decry the lost access to police radio communications as a step away from transparency.
Journalists “need to hear what’s going on in real time so they know the questions to ask police. Otherwise, journalists are forced to just believe the sort of PR version of events that officers choose to put out,” said Ginny LaRoe, advocacy director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit in California that focuses on open government and press rights.
Darwin Fishman, a professor in the African-American Studies department at San Diego State University and a former member of the city’s community police review board, said that without real-time scanner traffic, he worries that community members trained to monitor the police and journalists will arrive late to police scenes, if at all.
“The tug of war always is about how secretive they are, and it feels like we’re always pushing for them to be more transparent,” Fishman said of law enforcement. “It’s always a question of: ‘What are you hiding if you’re doing your police work right? Why aren’t you willing to open that up and share that with us?’”
Why it happened
Personal data — names, addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers — could be the sort of thing an officer might rattle off to dispatchers to check for warrants or get needed information during a traffic stop.
In an October 2020 information bulletin, the California Department of Justice laid out for agencies two options to ensure such personal information was kept private: craft a policy and approach that ensures no one transmits personal information on public channels or encrypt the radios.
Most departments throughout the state chose encryption. Chula Vista and Escondido made the change early on. One by one, others in the region followed. San Diego’s switch had long been in the works; Assistant Police Chief Shawn Takeuchi said the department was already looking to upgrade its old system when the DOJ bulletin went out.
In September 2021, the city approved a $51 million, 10-year contract with Motorola to update the radio system for departments throughout the city, from police to fire to parks.
In 2022, the department began the gradual rollout of switching about 3,400 handheld radios and upgrading the 1,050 mobile radios in its vehicle fleet. By the beginning of this year, the communication system was in place.
Takeuchi said it was not feasible to continue to balance communicating between public and private channels, as the department had been doing for the past few years. If an officer in the field accidentally forgot to switch to a private channel and shared personal identifying information over the radio, the department would be liable under the DOJ directive and possibly subject to an inquiry from the state or a lawsuit filed by someone whose information was improperly shared. He also said having officers bounce between public and private channels during an active incident is dangerous.
“Having it be both public and private, although it sounds like a solution, operationally it hampers us and makes us less efficient,” Takeuchi said.
Jeff Hebert, communications coordinator for the Sheriff’s Office, said the county agency made the switch in 2022 after it, too, realized it wasn’t feasible for command staff to expect deputies in the field — especially during high-pressure, high-intensity situations — to adhere to the directive in real time.
“With over 4,000 employees, all it takes is for one error, for one person to broadcast information over an unencrypted channel that they weren’t supposed to and then we’re in violation of that DOJ requirement and we’re liable,” Hebert said.
San Diego police officers union President Jared Wilson views the move to encryption as positive. Wilson said he believes scanners are being used by everyone from street racing take-over crews to fentanyl dealers to cartel groups to stay one step ahead of police.
Takeuchi also pointed to “nefarious individuals” who might listen to scanner traffic with the intent of grabbing information for identity theft.
That sort of possible eavesdropping by bad actors has been a concern with public scanner traffic for decades. The solution was to move sensitive work — such as undercover drug operations or high-risk search warrants — to encrypted channels while making the day-to-day calls for service accessible.
The California Highway Patrol largely doesn’t encrypt day-to-day traffic. The vast majority of access to personal data by officers in the field is done over a computer in their car rather than radio chatter, although sometimes officers in remote spots can’t get an internet connection, CHP Lt. Matt Gutierrez said.
However, he said the department is actively testing new technology and plans to encrypt its radios “sometime in the future.” One big reason, he said, is that most law enforcement agencies across California are now encrypted and “we want to be able to work seamlessly” with them.
What it looks like
Since San Diego police flipped on their encrypted radio communications, it has cut off journalists like Ruiz and everyone else from hearing what is happening and what police are doing.
Ruiz, 43, is an overnight freelance photographer who primarily covers breaking news. He used to jump from city to city chasing calls to produce video under the name 619 Media that he then sells to local TV stations and other media, including at times the Union-Tribune. But for the last month, he said, “It’s been stagnant.” On a recent day, all he covered was a single traffic crash.
“There could have been so many events going on in the city, in the county, and I was not aware of it, because I don’t know what’s going on,” Ruiz said.
He listens to fire department radio traffic, which remains unencrypted, alert for clues indicating the call also involves a police response. He monitors online dispatch logs — generic, sparse and sometimes outdated — that some policing agencies in the region provide. He also watches flight radar to see if law enforcement helicopters are up and flying.
Like Ruiz, freelance photojournalist Bill Paul also tries to “read the tea leaves” to figure out what is happening and where. He fears the public is not hearing about notable events, nor is it getting the complete picture.
“Scanner audio gives more than just raw facts. It helps us understand the situation based on tone, pace, and urgency,” Paul wrote on his blog June 24.
Some agencies post online dispatch logs with limited information. The Sheriff’s Office has a “calls for service” webpage that supplies type of call, time and location. Oceanside police offer a dashboard with a color-coded map of current calls.
San Diego police also post where officers are being dispatched. The details are sparse, and while it provides the name of the neighborhood — say Rancho Bernardo or Allied Gardens — it does not specify a street. And there is an hour-long delay for calls to post.
Takeuchi said he is looking at improving it.
Why it matters
Without access to police radio traffic, the public has to largely rely on law enforcement to disclose incidents.
Paul, the photojournalist, noted that on June 10, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the leg at a Bay Terraces apartment complex. The teen’s injuries were not considered life-threatening. The gunman was not apprehended at the scene. San Diego police eventually supplied basic information about the incident, but only when asked after news of it hit social media.
In the Encanto use-of-force incident in October, Ruiz’s video remains one of the only visual depictions of the police encounter. The First Amendment Coalition recently sued the department seeking access to the officers’ body-worn cameras as well as other records that the group alleges are public.
Watchdog groups also rely on scanner traffic to help police the police. Tasha Williamson, a local law enforcement accountability advocate, has trained community members to monitor and record actions of officers in the field.
“(The monitors) make the community more aware of what’s going on, and they have increased the number of people standing up for their rights,” said Williamson. “And if there’s a viral video, and there’s too much negative attention and media, that can shift the direction of how the department wants their officers to act.”
State legislative attempts to block a move to encryption — including one from Mayor Todd Gloria in 2019 during his days in the Assembly — have repeatedly failed.
There are currently no bills addressing access to encrypted scanners. A spokesperson for Gloria said there was “no feasible way” to have journalists listen in on scanners.
“(The San Diego Police Department) is working to improve the calls-for-service portal to provide media with information they need in order to follow and cover calls for service,” the spokesperson said.