"Every law enforcement agency in Contra Costa County - including all police departments and the county's sheriff's office - will end public access to their radio chatter on Oct. 7, said David Swing, head of the East Bay Regional Communications System Authority. Nearly every such agency in Alameda County plans to follow suit on Oct. 9, he said. The only holdout appears to be the Berkeley Police Department, which vowed last month to keep their conversations public."
"The move comes about a month after regional authority tried to "encrypt" - or make secret - those radio communications, only to see its plans falter within hours due to a still-unexplained technology problem. Police and sheriff's deputies experienced "intermittent loss of radio communications" an hour or two after the switch began on Sept. 3, prompting the authority to keep radio traffic public while it sorted out the issue."
A multi-million dollar effort will remove public access to police radio communications across the East Bay. Every law enforcement agency in Contra Costa County will end public access on Oct. 7, and nearly every agency in Alameda County plans to follow on Oct. 9, with Berkeley Police as the apparent holdout. An earlier attempt to encrypt communications on Sept. 3 failed within hours due to a technology conflict that caused intermittent loss of radio communications. Officials reported applying an update and widely testing the fix. The encryption decision has drawn criticism from police accountability groups, First Amendment advocates, and a state senator.
Read at The Mercury News
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