The distance between the police and public is literally widening. So is the accountability gap.

The author's now largely useless police scanner. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

Not long ago every newsroom had a police scanner.

I’m not talking about the days when ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts and a bottle of scotch was kept in a desk drawer to toast special occasions. Like Thursday. But sometime between the pandemic and now, everything changed.

Reporters used to work with the damned thing squawking in the background because they knew that all of the important breaking news stories would come across that box. Every murder, every fire, every chemical spill. So would the routine calls, the domestic disturbances and the petty larcenies, but after a while you learned to tune out the background noise and listen only for the 10-codes that mattered.

A 10-40 was a fatality. A 10-32 was a chase. A 10-99 was a jailbreak.

You used the radio traffic, which was sometimes inaccurate because of misunderstandings or stress, as an alert to start asking questions. You didn’t report the scanner traffic, you verified it. There was no substitute to being on the scene, and some of my best reporting was based on my observation.

In covering a storm once, I described how a man stood in the doorway of his upside-down mobile home and described “what it feels like to shake hands with a tornado.”

If you were a police reporter, you likely had a scanner in your car or a handheld unit to slip in your pocket. Years ago I left my handheld scanner on a table at Otto’s Café in Pittsburg. The manager of the restaurant rang me at the Morning Sun newsroom and begged me to come get it, because the constant chatter was driving him crazy and he didn’t know how to turn it off.

The press — and the public — have been listening to police calls since Bayonne, New Jersey, installed a two-way radio system in 1933. For most of the 93 years since, police dispatch calls were considered public because they used a shared medium — the airwaves. The 10-codes and related signals (Signal One, for example, meant armed and dangerous) developed as a kind of shorthand and as, perhaps, a way to confuse the casual listener. And there have been plenty of average citizens who relied on police scanners to know what was going on in their neighborhoods.

“Although no one knows exactly how many Parsons homes are equipped with scanners,” Hurst Laviana wrote for the Parsons Sun in 1982, “estimates from law enforcement officers indicate anywhere from 10 to 40 percent.”

The story is a neat bit of enterprising reporting, with Laviana calling local telephone numbers at random to ask if they had a police scanner. Some did. One man said he didn’t use the scanner much, except when “something was going on.” A police officer Laviana spoke to said you’d think crooks would make scanners an essential tool, but that he’d never found a criminal who had one.

That may have been because the police didn’t use radio traffic for truly sensitive material, such as coordinating to execute a search warrant. For that and many other things, you’d often hear a request for the officer to contact dispatch via “public service,” meaning a telephone call.

Laviana, who would go on to become an investigative reporter for the Wichita Eagle and broke the story of the BTK serial killer’s return, died of cancer in 2023. He was 72. I didn’t know him, but I had a few phone conversations with him, and I remember once he called me and generously said “hats off” for a story I’d done about a local candidate running for governor who hadn’t voted in a general election for years.

When Laviana wrote the scanner story, the transition to programmable scanners was taking place. Instead of opening up the radio and inserting a crystal house inside a little metal canister about the size of a Chiclet for each channel, you could just punch a series of numbers into a keypad to select any frequency you wanted. At the Morning Sun at Pittsburg, my boss sent me down to Dick’s Electronics to get a new scanner for the newsroom, and I came back with one of the new programmable models, which cost about five times what he wanted to spend. It was probably the closest I came to being fired, at least over a piece of equipment.

A couple of decades later, in the 2000s, many agencies made the switch to trunked radio systems. It was more difficult to program a trunking radio, but if you had the patience (or you paid somebody else to do it) it was still possible to listen in to police dispatches. I have a trunked police scanner here in our house on Constitution Street, and I used to turn it on whenever red and blue lights painted the neighborhood. Most of the time it was the police pulling somebody over for going the wrong way down our one-way street.

From traffic violations to major disasters, journalists have used police scanners to monitor, in real time, news of all sizes. Even the most storied bit of reporting in memory began when an editor listening to a police scanner in the Washington Post newsroom heard that an open door to the Watergate complex was being investigated.

Now the police scanner is no more.

Law enforcement in Kansas and across the country have largely moved to encrypted communications for all calls, when formerly encryption was reserved for tactical channels. Oh, there are scattered departments that have not yet made the switch, but the move to secrecy is all but complete. You couldn’t listen on your old scanner if you wanted to, and even if you had a new radio capable of listening in and the decryption key to go with it, you’d be committing a felony under federal law.

Police nationwide are citing guidelines from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding sensitive information as the excuse to move to encryption. The Wichita Police Department, for example, went to encryption in April.

“The change is being made to comply with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy, which requires (such information) be protected during transmission outside of secure environments,” according to a press release from Sedgwick County. “Because radio communication is not inherently secure, encryption is necessary to meet this federal requirement.”

Fire and emergency medical service calls would remain unencrypted, according to the press release.

“Media partners can continue to contact Sedgwick County Emergency Communications with time-sensitive inquiries,” the statement said. “Residents are encouraged to follow official department pages for local law enforcement agencies for safety alerts and notifications.”

Similar messages have gone out to communities across the country, citing a federal mandate that requires FBI Criminal Justice Information Services data to be protected by encryption. The 461-page policy includes not just radio traffic, but all  CJIS data stored or transmitted, and the deadline for compliance is Oct. 1, 2027. It does not cover all dispatch traffic, but most agencies are opting to go all-in with encryption. Officer safety often is cited as a rationale.

The result is not only to silence journalists’ primary source of breaking news, but to control the flow of information to news outlets through public information officers, PR professionals who know how to spin a story. It also encourages the public to monitor law enforcement social media accounts, which by nature offer an uncritical accounting of an agency’s activities.

“Police like to think they are protecting officers by encrypting radio, but in reality, they are endangering the public,” Tara Puckey, the president of the Radio Television Digital News Association, told me via email. “People need to be informed in emergencies, and journalists and the public have always used police radio to share vital information at critical times.”

The public has a right to know what is happening in their communities, she said, and “restricting the flow of information does not serve the greater good.”

There have been so many stories of national significance in the past year or so that the law enforcement migration to encryption hasn’t gotten the coverage or the public attention it deserves. It’s also an issue that’s difficult to explain to the public. But a reporter for LoudounNow, a nonprofit news site in Virginia, recently managed to do it.

The reporter, Patrick Lewis, in reporting on a planned move to encryption, quantified how news would be lost.

“Loudoun Now analyzed the Sheriff’s Office’s public notifications for 27 incidents that have happened in 2026,” Lewis reported, “including every robbery, shooting, stabbing, and active incident involving a firearm that Loudoun Now has reported on this year.”

Most of those incidents were first discovered by monitoring radio traffic or when information showed up in court filings. When the local sheriff’s department sent out public statements or posted about the incidents, it was typically hours or days later, and some incidents weren’t mentioned at all.

In Kansas, the press and the public face another burden, the HALO Act.

Patterned after proposed federal legislation meant to give ICE and other federal agents greater authority, the Kansas act creates a 25-foot buffer zone around law enforcement officers while engaged in official duties. Senate President Ty Masterson, a GOP hopeful in the GOP gubernatorial primary who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, said the law would keep “radical protestors” at bay and keep officers and bystanders safe. He promised Kansas wouldn’t become like Minnesota, referring to the immigration raid protests that rocked Minneapolis early this year. In that unrest, two American citizens were killed by ICE agents.

The HALO law has been roundly criticized by the Kansas Press Association and free speech advocates as being unconstitutional. The GOP-controlled Legislature overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to pass it into law, effective July 1.

It was used July 11 by ICE agents to move back a Lenexa woman who was recording video from her car, as reported by Kansas Reflector intern reporter Baya Burgess. An agent shouted “25 feet, 25 feet.” The woman wasn’t arrested, but the incident is representative of how the law is changing the way the public is documenting interactions with ICE agents.

It will also change the way reporters cover news, because it’s difficult to ask questions from 25 feet away.

If you’re having trouble visualizing just how far that is, imagine you’re standing on the sideline of a basketball court. Twenty-five feet is the center circle in the middle of the court, where the tipoffs happen.

The Kansas HALO law is bound to be challenged sooner or later because it hampers a journalist’s First Amendment right to gather news. But until that happens, a reporter’s rights — and your right to free speech as an average citizen — are being suppressed by lawmakers who choose to shield the actions of federal agents and other law enforcement officers from scrutiny.

In a just world, our lawmakers would be protecting citizens from the abuses of ICE officers, who have shot at 23 people since last year, killing six, according to research by the New York Times. Instead, the quisling majorities in the Kansas Statehouse are falling all over themselves to increase the distance between the public and its servant, the press, to protect the beer-bellied thugs in balaclavas.

It’s enough to make one reach for that bottle of scotch.

But for the record, I never drink while practicing journalism. Not while interviewing, not while writing, not while editing. The idea of having that bottle in my desk meant more to me than actually drinking it. Ah, those days are gone, like my Radio Shack PRO-70 scanner.

What the rush to encrypt police radio traffic and the craven passage of Kansas HALO has done is create an accountability gap between unbridled authority and the public’s right to know. Twenty-five foot buffer zones make it harder for the public, armed with smartphone cameras, to document abuses. The encryption of radio traffic is not about protecting the personally identifiable information of victims of crime and others, but is an excuse for agencies to clamp down on the sharing of real-time knowledge to journalists and the community. The FBI directive was to protect CJIS data, and some states — including Minnesota — concluded that it didn’t require blanket encryption of all dispatch traffic.

A democracy can be judged on how freely information flows to the public.

As a country, we’re backsliding.

The United States has dropped to 64th in press freedom, as calculated by Reporters Without Borders, between Botswana and Panama. In 2020, the U.S. was ranked 45.

“After a century of gradual expansion of press rights in the United States,” according to Reporters Without Borders, “the country is experiencing a significant and prolonged decline in press freedom, with Donald Trump’s return to the presidency greatly exacerbating the situation.”

Norway is ranked No. 1 in press freedom, as it has been for eight years.

An informed electorate is essential to democracy, and you can’t have that without a free and vigorous press — nationally, regionally, locally. If your town is still lucky enough to have a local newspaper, like mine does, support it by subscribing. If it doesn’t, start one. Donate to nonprofit news sites like Kansas Reflector. And the next time you meet a reporter, one who might even have a difficult question for you, tell her how much you appreciate the time and dedication good journalism takes.

She might be the one who breaks the next Watergate.

Police scanners aren’t coming back, but a reporter’s curiosity remains their most valuable asset.

Meanwhile, we’ll be left to ponder if the next set of red and blue lights on our block is for a traffic stop or a serial killer. In Kansas, we can’t even approach to ask the question.