Baltimore City Police

So I guess BPD will be going encrypted...at least with the C channels...


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...of-the-baltimore-police-department/?tid=sm_fb

I guess its possible but I kind of doubt it.

There have been some issues over the years with scanners but they haven't encrypted anything. During the Furgeson protests in the city, a couple years back, a reporter was tweeting play by play. The Police Department demanded publicly for them to stop which they didn't. They didn't encrypt anything after that.

During the riots, 100% of the communications and even department level comms were in the clear. Since then, they haven't encrypted even though media publicly released comms on the airwaves.

Even after the riots, with the threat of issues because of the trails, they still didn't encrypt anything.

The system has such minimal encryption on a couple of the Vice/NARC and the Executive protection channel talkgroups but they aren't strapped encrypt and it is up to the user and 99.99% it is in the clear.

From what I have seen with the Commish, I kind of feel that he is pro media/public communication so I kind of doubt he will force encryption but with a new Mayor next year and likely a new commissioner, who knows?

Just FYI, that will mean finishing the purchase of all new subscribers for all patrol/spare/non-special units to replace all the XTS5000s that don't have encryption capabilities. That's a big chunk of change and will very definitely not happen overnight.

Encryption does not address any of the "policy" issues of the BPD that the report uncovered, nor was anything uncovered for this report due to monitoring of their radios.

With so much focus and scrutiny on BPD right now, I'm sure they are aware that encrypting anything would be counter to efforts to build public confidence (with the possible exception of special tactical team talkgroups). It would simply give the appearance that they are trying to hide something.

But who knows what the distant future holds....

troymail said:

With so much focus and scrutiny on BPD right now, I'm sure they are aware that encrypting anything would be counter to efforts to build public confidence (with the possible exception of special tactical team talkgroups). It would simply give the appearance that they are trying to hide something.

But who knows what the distant future holds....

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Agree. After all this time, if they elected to encrypt now, they would be blasted by the news media and watch groups.

Down the road that might be different, but while DOJ and everyone else is paying attention to see effects of reform, they would be stupid to encrypt at this point.

Mark
WS1095/536/436/996P2/HP1e/HP2e/996XT/325P2/396XT/PRO668/PSR800/PRO652

Gotcha. The cops I work with (not BPD) must have heard somewhere that comms were being monitored and were talking about it...

JoeyC said:

Encryption does not address any of the "policy" issues of the BPD that the report uncovered, nor was anything uncovered for this report due to monitoring of their radios.

Click to expand...