Plans for Montgomery County’s police department to fully encrypt its radio channels and dispatches are still in the works, according to Montgomery County Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard, who told Bethesda Today on Monday that the plan had “leaked out” before any final decisions had been made.
County police are moving forward with plans to fully encrypt their radio channels, including dispatch, with the goal of following national best practices, protecting potential victims and witnesses and enhancing officer safety, according to Assistant Chief Darren Francke of the department’s Patrol Service Bureau. In recent years, law enforcement agencies around the country, including the New York Police Department, have moved to encrypt their emergency communications and radio channels despite critics saying that it will impact transparency.
County officials and the police department will likely announce the rollout of the radio encryption by the end of April, with implementation starting in June, Stoddard said.
Encrypting all radio channels means transmissions that are currently available for the public to listen to via police scanner apps and websites such as OpenMHz.com will no longer be available.
“Unfortunately, [the encryption plans] became known to the public before we had done all the work to be able to have a well-articulated, not just strategy, but timeline and answer questions … all those things hadn’t been fully fleshed out yet and now we’re having to respond to it in real time,” Stoddard said.
The method by which county police will encrypt their radio transmissions and whether members of the media will have access are still being investigated, Stoddard said. He mentioned that the county was considering other ways to allow access while still encrypting the transmissions, such as how the Baltimore Police Department does so by making them available to the public with a 15-minute delay.
“Our current understanding is that some other jurisdictions that do have encrypted radios do provide certain limited access for certain stakeholders under sort of like a user agreement,” Stoddard said. “So, there’s an understanding of how it will be used. And so that’s something that we’re still obviously investigating at this point.”
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service (MCFRS) does not plan to encrypt its radio transmissions, according to spokesperson Pete Piringer.
In a statement sent to Bethesda Today on March 27, Francke said other law enforcement agencies in the state and nationally have moved to encrypt their radio channels. His statement also listed a handful in the region, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia and the Anne Arundel County Police Department, that encrypt radio transmissions.
The decision to encrypt radio transmissions is also related to privacy and ensuring that personal or “sensitive” information about victims and witnesses is not available to the public, Francke said.
Stoddard echoed this rationale, stating that “very sensitive” information regarding residents’ health and personal lives can be available for anyone with a police scanner to hear.
“We’ve always had some concerns about the implications,” Stoddard said. “We have certain, for example, residents who have young adults or children who have significant psychological disorders, who call periodically for support and obviously it sort of can be distressing for them to have their neighbors knowing intimate details of what’s going on inside their houses.”
Francke also said that the move to encrypt the radio transmissions is to “ensure operational, tactical, and investigative integrity for our officers” and “remove the ability for criminals to intercept transmissions” and get information about police tactics and investigations.
Without offering specific examples, Francke said the department confirmed situations in which suspects have benefitted from listening to the department’s unencrypted radio channels. The department did not respond to Bethesda Today’s request for specific examples of such situations in the county.
Stoddard said that while he was not aware of any instances of that occurring in the county, he knew of examples occurring elsewhere in the country.
“It gives us pause to know that the perpetrators of crimes could be listening to radio traffic with regard to officers arriving on scene, with regards to how officers are conducting searches for individuals,” Stoddard said. “That information being out there in real time creates other challenges from an actual law enforcement perspective.”
Although the details of how the police department plans to encrypt their radio channels are yet to be determined, Stoddard said the county and the police department are still considering ways to potentially allow media access. He also mentioned that there may be an opportunity to use artificial intelligence.
“I can’t tell you exactly what we’re going to do right now, but I’m saying we’re interested in figuring out some sort of balancing of the interests here, whereby we protect the information we need to protect from being made public, but also still afford people the opportunity to verify the police department’s doing what it is supposed to be doing, responding in a timely fashion, being aware of incidents,” Stoddard said.
He added that the decision to encrypt was not intended to be a “gotcha for media.”
Right now, Stoddard said, the county and police are still investigating: “How can we do this in a way that protects people’s private information in the moment while still allowing people in the legacy and new media to still be able to do their operations?”
In late April or early May, the county and police department will be prepared to release more information about the encryption plans and answer questions, according to Stoddard.
