John Rocca was driving through Midtown Manhattan one recent evening just as the street lights came on, his camera in the back seat of his sedan.
It was a slow day for Mr. Rocca, a photojournalist who has covered breaking news in New York for half a century. He knows what fewer and fewer reporters do: how to decipher the codes that come through a police scanner, a device that broadcasts radio communications between 911 dispatchers and emergency responders.
There’s an art to monitoring radio stations, Mr. Rocca said, and he has a knack for knowing what havoc he can “make ink.” At 7:54 p.m., while driving south on Ninth Avenue near 34th Street, a “10-30” message came in: code for a robbery in progress. Police officers went to the place.
“This one might have legs,” said Mr. Rocca, and he hit the car’s gas.
His way of gathering news has been around for decades. But a new $500 million radio system the New York Police Department rolled out last summer encrypts officers’ communications, meaning the public, including members of the press, will no longer be able to listen. The project will take at least five years to complete, although some frequencies have already gone dark.
The debate over whether to encode broadcasts is playing out across the country. Most law enforcement agencies in California have hidden their communications in real time to comply with a 2020 state mandate designed to protect the names of victims and witnesses who speak over the air. Chicago police were expected to do so fully encrypts its system until this year, with broadcasts only becoming public after a 30-minute delay.
Those who oppose the change – including elected officials, news publications and advocates for demanding more accountability from law enforcement — argue that encryption impedes such transparency, undermines trust in police and prevents the rapid reporting of important information.
The broadcasts are followed not only by newsmakers, but also by neighborhood groups and people who make a hobby of tuning into city life.
“The idea that we would turn this kind of vital information into something that is only available to the public at the whim of the police is really chilling,” said Albert Fox Kahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York.
In July, the New York City Council called encryption move ‘disturbing’ and said there “should have been a comprehensive plan to maintain access and transparency, instead of being an afterthought.” The organization’s public safety committee plans to discuss the new system this week.
Chief Ruben Beltran, who leads the police department’s Information Technology Bureau, said the department needs a system that is faster, more reliable and more secure.
It was too easy for outsiders to disrupt the shows, he said in an interview. It used to be that anyone could buy a radio for as little as $40 and with a little research learn how to call in fake emergencies. These outages have blocked other vital calls.
Chief Beltran’s office created a better system to track false calls in 2021. There were at least 58 as of Oct. 23, according to department records.
Several were reviewed by The New York Times: In one on June 17, someone falsely reported “10-13,” the code for an officer in distress.
Six days later, the prankster was cursing while playing music in the background of a conversation, holding down the transmit button so no one could break in. The episode silenced the airwaves for about five minutes, an eternity in police communications, Chief Beltran said.
The move marks the end of an era for Mr Rocca. Bought his first police scanner in 1968, aged 16, and rode his bike through Brooklyn chasing news.
In the 55 years since then, he has captured some of New York’s most memorable pictures: The Avianca plane crash in Long Island in 1990 that killed 73 people on board; Michael Jackson after he collapsed on stage in 1995; and in 2003, a full grown tiger in a Harlem building while watching a police officer through a fourth-floor apartment window.
“This scanner has changed the paper many times,” said Mr. Rocca, a former Daily News photographer, as he pointed to the device bolted to the console of his car.
He pulled a portable radio from his breast pocket. “No well-dressed man should be without one,” he said.
The way the nation’s largest police force communicates has evolved over the past 200 years. In the early 1800s, officers whistled and tapped their batons to warn people of crimes. In the late 19th century, they started using telephone booths, booths where they could send telegraphs or dial a station.
The radio system Mr. Rocca relies on originated when President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited New York for the opening of the Triborough Bridge on July 11, 1936. Four thousand people drank beer and ate sausages on Randall’s Island as Roosevelt’s motorcade crossed the East River.
A police car equipped with the new technology was in the procession. As soon as Roosevelt crossed, “Word of the bridge opening to toll traffic was relayed by a special shortwave field station to police radio cars and motorcycles,” according to front page article in The Times the next day.
“This was the first time a police department used radio transmission in the field and was said to represent the beginning of two-way communication here,” the article continued.
In his office last month, Chief Beltran took a Motorola MX-350 from his desk. The bulky hand-held radio, about the size of a Chihuahua, was the same model he used in the 1980s when he joined the force.
The chief, a 38-year veteran of the department and longtime tech buff, knows every aspect of the vast communications network and how it works: A call from one of 42,000 hand-held radios, or one of 3,400 in boats, helicopters, patrol cars and other vehicles, is picked up by antennas all over New York, then transmitted to a dispatcher, all in nanoseconds.
But the network was overdue for an upgrade, Chief Beltran said. The decades-old analog system used an outdated copper wire circuit that was susceptible to harsh weather and took longer to repair.
Currently, there is no way for New Yorkers to be able to listen to encrypted communications. Ideas to increase transparency are discussed around: broadcast delay, where sensitive information is redacted before it is publicly broadcast; a phone app that allows accredited reporters to listen in, perhaps in real time.
“There are a range of options that we have the ability to support,” Chief Beltran said, but those “are policy decisions based on public safety” by elected officials.
At a news conference in July, Mayor Eric Adams said the “bad guys” had been listening to the radio stations and that “I’ve got to make sure the bad guys don’t keep attacking us.” He did not say whether reporters or members of the public would have access to those messages.
Mr. Kahn, of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said the mayor’s reasoning undermines New Yorkers’ desire for greater law enforcement accountability.
Police field millions of radio calls each year, but officers can only identify a small number of problematic communications, Mr. Kahn said. That’s not enough to justify the half-billion-dollar system, which he said was too much money “to pay for greater impunity and greater opacity.”
Mr. Rocca’s livelihood depends on his ability to hear what’s going on and then see it first hand.
On his tour that night, he arrived at a Target store on West 34th Street within nine minutes of hearing a robbery report on the radio. He waited outside with his camera strapped around his neck and could hear the chatter of his pocket police radio, but the suspect had fled.
Mr. Rocca returned to his car when another call came in at 8:12 p.m.: reports of someone threatening to jump from a building on West 25th Street. Seconds later, a message from headquarters said someone had been pushed or jumped onto the subway tracks.
“It’s shaping up to be a busy evening,” he said. “You roll the dice. Where do we want to go next?”
Comments are closed.