OAKLAND — The Oakland Police Department’s plan to shield its officers’ conversations from the public hit an unexpected snag this week.
The agency on Thursday said “unexpected technical issues” delayed its plan to encrypt its police channels and end public access to live radio feeds, which for decades provided by-the-minute transparency about crime — and its officers’ actions — in the city.
The glitch appears rooted in a broader, little-publicized push to silence police scanner traffic across Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Until that technological snafu, dozens of agencies this week had timed their scanners to go dark to the public throughout the East Bay Regional Communications System Authority — the board overseeing a switch that has been widely condemned by police accountability and open government advocates.
No one has confirmed how long the delay will be, but if and when the dust settles, it seems only one East Bay agency — the Berkeley Police Department — will opt out of the effort, which appears to have cost millions of dollars in public funds.
The prospect of dozens of agencies joining Oakland in hiding their radio traffic is “deeply frustrating,” said Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of San Francisco-based nonprofit Media Alliance and advocacy director of Oakland Privacy. She joined a state senator, multiple Oakland attorneys and First Amendment advocates in condemning such encryption.
“This is a huge blow for journalism,” Rosenberg said. “Some of the best journalism in the country comes directly from the scanners. The transparency is a check on disturbing actions by police.”
David Swing, executive director of the regional communications system authority, said he is “working with a vendor” to find a fix for this week’s glitch. Law enforcement agencies that will encrypt once the issues are sorted out include city of Alameda, Alameda County, the Contra Costa Community College District, Fremont, Hayward, Moraga, Oakley, Piedmont, Pinole, Pittsburg, Pleasanton, Pleasant Hill, Richmond, UC Berkeley police, Union City and Walnut Creek.
Swing — as well as a raft of police chiefs and police department spokespeople — suggested the move was to satisfy a 2020 California Department of Justice directive that required agencies to safeguard private information. The memo by then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra said that information generally included Social Security, passport and driver’s license numbers.
Several East Bay police leaders also said the switch could help officers stay safe, claiming some criminal suspects listen in to police scanners to help them avoid capture.
“I would have never considered encrypting that information until that state mandate came out,” El Cerrito police Chief Paul Keith said Thursday. “Prior to that, I was always a big advocate of having the public know what their police officers are up to.”
The DOJ memo, however, did not require law enforcement agencies to fully encrypt their communications. Rather, it expressly said agencies could instead use a host of other methods to keep that information private, while ensuring radio traffic remained transparent.
“Full encryption of everything was basically the thermonuclear choice, but they took it,” Rosenberg said. “Even though we have empathy to those (privacy) concerns, the message that they’re choosing to respond is so anti-transparency, and so hostile to the communities that they’re supposed to be serving.”
Already, at least one law enforcement agency — the Palo Alto Police Department — has reopened its radio feeds after encrypting them for about a year.
The city — which is within the district of state Sen. Josh Becker, who spearheaded failed legislation to significantly limit radio encryption across the state — cited those other methods in reversing course.
Even the lone apparent holdout isn’t making any ironclad promises that it won’t someday pull its radio feed behind a curtain.
In an email, Berkeley police spokesperson Officer Byron White said that the department’s radio feed’s “current settings will not change,” despite the regional transition to encryption. Still, he said the agency is “continuing to assess the balance of costs, privacy protections and operational efficacy,” adding that “a transition to countywide encryption standards may be necessary in the future.”
“We value transparency and accountability, and we also respect the need to protect the privacy and identity of any person whose information is broadcast over a police radio frequency,” White’s email said.
The region-wide effort has been in the works for years, likely costing taxpayers millions of dollars. The authority spent more than $1.5 million from July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2024, on an “encryption update,” according to budget documents for the agency. Details of that spending were not available Thursday.
Numerous police agencies also said they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the encryption initiative. That includes $650,000 in Emeryville; $130,000 in Brentwood; $129,000 in El Cerrito and $100,000 in Martinez. It was not immediately clear whether those costs were in addition to those incurred by the regional communications authority.
Oakland spokesperson Sean Maher said in April that the city “will not incur additional costs” for encrypting its radios, because the officers’ devices are already equipped with the needed software.
The silencing of those radio feeds in particular has raised alarms among police accountability advocates, given the Oakland Police Department’s long history of scandals and stalled reforms. The agency remains the only one operating under a federal judge and court-appointed monitor, who was installed after the Riders police brutality scandal of the early 2000s and has continued amid numerous reform setbacks.
In a statement this week, the Anti Police-Terror Project said it was “dismayed, but not surprised,” at the move, adding that the encryption appeared to be about “dodging accountability — plain and simple.”
“This is not just a bad decision — it’s a dangerous precedent,” Cat Brooks, a co-founder of the group, said a statement. “If OPD can’t operate with public oversight, then they have no business operating at all.”
On Thursday, a note was posted beside the Oakland Police Department’s radio feed on the website of Broadcastify, which provides as well as archives law enforcement communications.
“If you care about public safety and transparency, please make your voice heard,” read the note, which included the email address for the mayor’s office.
Staff writer Shomik Mukherjee contributed to this report.
Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at [email protected].