Every holiday season, like clockwork, I get a whole bunch of messages from people wanting help with their Christmas shopping. 

“My wife — or husband or son or brother-in law — would like to buy a police radio scanner. Do you have any suggestions for a good one?” 

I do, as it happens. But before I get to that, I have to ask them a simple question. 

“Does your wife or husband or son or brother-in-law live in Lewiston or Auburn?” I’ll ask them. “Because if they do, it’s probably not worth the money to buy a police scanner.” 

They want to know why, so I tell them. In Lewiston and Auburn, we are not allowed to listen to police radio traffic. At some point in 2021, some high-ranking police officials got together and decided that the public no longer was entitled to listen in on the police work that their taxes paid for. 

Local departments got fancy new radios, also paid for by us, mind you, and had them fully encrypted so nobody but the police themselves would be privy to the day-to-day operations of the department. 

Not the reporter sitting slumped at his desk and waiting for news to report for his readers. Not the fretful mom who liked to listen in on police traffic to decide for herself whether her neighborhood was safe enough to let her children out to play. Not the old man who wiled away his early evening hours listening in to the gritty drama of police work around him.  

Not me, not you, not anyone who’s earnestly concerned with the goings on outside their doors. After loudly promising transparency within their departments in the summer of 2021, police chiefs in both cities got on board to do the least transparent thing of all.  

On “Encryption Day,” as some cops called it, the radios went silent for all of us outside the two departments. I’ll remember that day as long as I live because in my view, after working the local crime beat for 30 years, it’s the most despicable thing police could have done to us in a time when the relationship between police and the public was at its most precarious. 

On that day, when I came to realize that I wasn’t hearing any Lewiston or Auburn police radio traffic, I wrote first to the Lewiston police chief, who referred me to Lewiston-Auburn 911 Communications Director Paul LeClair. 

What does this mean, I demanded to know? Why do we hear only a hiss when we try to tune into police radio chatter?

The man seemed to have an answer at the ready.

“The 800MHz Radio System police frequencies,” he told me, “are 100% encrypted. The translation is that Lewiston-Auburn 911 Center will ensure the police frequencies remain secure and encrypted by managing the new radio system technology. L-A 911 WILL NOT grant access to the police department frequencies to NONPUBLIC SAFETY AGENCIES. Let me know if you have additional questions.” 

To me, it sounded like gloating. It certainly didn’t come off as sympathetic to the idea that the police departments had gone dark to the entire community, and with no forewarning or valid explanation. There was no obvious concern there for those fretful moms worried about crime in their neighborhoods, or for that old man trying to listen to his police radio before deciding if it was safe enough to walk to the park. 

All I got from police officials — the high ranking ones, that is, as most street level cops seemed bewildered by the idea of encryption — were mainly self-satisfied shrugs. What can you do, they said? The times they are a’changing. 

So, why’d they do it? Why, after so many years of open transmission did they basically tell us all to go pound sand?

I guess the short answer for police must have been: why not? A handful of bigger departments around the country — in Denver, Baltimore and Chicago, mainly — had recently gone with full encryption, so why shouldn’t the cops here in little Lewiston-Auburn do the same? 

Asked for a specific rationale for the change, police repeat that rehearsed bit about personal information going out over the airwaves. Or they’d say it came down to the safety of officers during tactical operations, and just you never mind the fact that they already have encrypted tactical channels to use in those situations. Also never mind the fact that none of these issued were ever raised as issues before “Encryption Day,” or that 95% of police departments around the country haven’t gone the encryption route. 

How big a problem can public scanner traffic be if every other police agency in the state — and most others around the country — doesn’t seem to share the problem?

As far as I’m concerned, the police have never provided a convincing argument for making the average Joe and Jane in the community deaf to their transmissions. They’ve never provided a good argument because they don’t have one.

It worked out pretty well for the police, though. With no outsiders monitoring their work, the police themselves get to pick and choose what information the public deserves to hear about.

If there is a crime trend that might not be good for city business, maybe the police just keep that to themselves. Why not? It’s not like anybody would have heard about it over the police scanners or anything. The public and the media alike are left to simply hope that the police are being upfront and honest about crime and other matters of public safety, and if you’re not unsettled by that, you’re not thinking it through. 

The way police around the nation have gone about achieving encryption in itself is slimy, according to the group OpenSecrets. Police unions and associations have invested more than $48 million in state lobbying efforts and have donated nearly $71 million to state-level candidates and committees to get around public information laws and the like. They wanted to shut the public out and by God, they got it. 

Maybe their reasons for going this route are deeply personal — some say that police radios going silent is a direct result of the tumult that followed the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. At the time, police all over the country were largely maligned by national media. It was a tough time to be a cop as fiery riots rolled through cities across the nation and the average cop was portrayed as an unrepentant killer. 

I agree the police were not treated fairly by the mainstream media as all of that ugliness unfolded. I personally despise what has become of big media and have said so many times. But the police reaction to it was WAY out of proportion — you don’t shut out your entire community as a form of protest against CNN or MSNBC or whatever talking heads you happen to be mad at. By imposing this punitive measure on local news reporters and every Tom, Dick and Sherry with a now useless police scanner, our local departments have only widened the divide between themselves and the people they serve. 

They’ve chosen to do their work in the dark rather than out in sunlight where trust grows. To me, the police officials behind this move have betrayed the people in grotesque fashion. They’ve embraced the Us vs. Them mentality with both hands and thus have made conditions, not safer, but more volatile. This will be their legacy.  

Is police radio traffic ever coming back to the Twin Cities? I have my doubts. 

Sun Journal Executive Editor Judy Meyer has fought on the local and state levels to get police to bend on the issue, but bend they have not. It’s the same nationally, where public rights activists have been working on the legislative level to force these law enforcement agencies to allow media access to police radio communications. 

Nope. Police in Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, San Diego, Lewiston and Auburn have dug in. They don’t want their local press or their citizenry to have any access at all and so we remain deaf and in the dark where local police work is involved. 

You can write me for police radio suggestions if you want, good buddy, but if you live in Lewiston or Auburn, I say don’t bother. If you want to know what’s going on in your community, you’ll have to trust the rumors that fly on social media or just stand by and hope that one day, maybe the police themselves will come forth with and tell you what’s going on in your neighborhood. 

Surely they wouldn’t withhold anything from us. 

Right?