Beginning June 14, members of the public will no longer be able to listen in on the emergency radio traffic of police officers in Clark County.
The change comes as the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency, or CRESA, implements a $20 million project that switches dispatching services from an analog to digital radio systems.
Dave Fuller, director of CRESA, said the new technology replaces an outdated system built in 1995 that has reached the end of its life, meaning it is no longer supported by the manufacturer.
With digital radio, there comes many benefits, Fuller said. The signal is clearer and covers more of the county than the current system. When the system was tested, he said the background noise heard from the field is nearly nonexistent.
And one of the abilities that the vendor, Motorola, offered is the ability to encrypt transmissions, essentially scrambling the signal for devices, such as police scanners and cellphone applications, that don’t have the proper encryption key.
Agencies talk encryption
Local officials have been planning for the radio changes since 2012, Fuller said, and so there were many discussions between law enforcement, fire and medical agencies on how to utilize the capabilities of the new technology.
While CRESA owns and maintains the radio system, Fuller said that the agency does so at the behest of the area’s various police, fire and medical agencies, so ultimately the decision was left up to the heads of the emergency agencies.
Leaders of police agencies discussed their options at the Law Enforcement Council of Clark and Skamania Counties. The monthly meetings, which are not open to the public, bring together heads of local law enforcement agencies to discuss policies, procedures and topics that are of mutual concern.
Eventually it became apparent that the priority among law enforcement agencies was to encrypt their radios for officer safety reasons, Fuller said.
Though there was an option to only encrypt certain operations channels, used during large events to free up the main communications airways, the group collectively decided to encrypt all of the channels.
Vancouver Police Chief James McElvain said that when the conversation of encryption started, he was in favor of transparency and keeping the airways open to the public to listen in.
However, after he did more research, he said he quickly changed his mind.
“In light of our upgraded technology, smartphones and applications, it’s made it a lot easier for the criminal element to monitor the police … We have had citizens calling in as a reporting party saying that they’ve seen suspects with smartphones, by all appearances monitoring the call and fleeing,” McElvain said. “In conjunction with officers being ambushed and attacked across the U.S., I became even more concerned with officer safety.”
Part of what alleviated concerns of lacking transparency was a group decision to create a map of police and fire incidents that can be accessed by those interested on the CRESA’s website.
Though there is a built-in delay and will include only limited information, McElvain said that the map provides an opportunity for the public to see what’s going on.
Another priority among police, Fuller said, was the ability to add GPS technology to portable radios.
“If an officer is outside of his vehicle and not answering their radio, we can at least locate where they are by the technology in their portable radio,” McElvain said.
Fire agencies keep airwaves open
While encrypting communication was important to many police agencies, leaders of fire agencies in Clark County came to a consensus to keep their radio transmissions unencrypted.
Clark County Fire District 13 Chief Ben Peeler, who is the chair of the Clark County Fire Chiefs Association, said that it would be nice to encrypt fire radios, in part when personnel is discussing medical information, but that it ultimately wasn’t as necessary.
“Law enforcement needs are different from fire needs,” Peeler said. “Fire tactical operations don’t need to happen on encrypted channels.”
Peeler said that the decision came down to cost. Instead of spending money on encryption, many agencies chose to upgrade to more intrinsically safe radios, built to be more waterproof and guaranteed not to spark in hazardous environment.
“Radios are one of the most important tools we carry on our belts,” Peeler said. “They’re very robust and expensive to begin with.”
The radios purchased by fire personnel cost $3,457 each. The base model for radios used by police officers cost $2,739, with an added cost of $911 to encrypt each radio and $75 to add GPS capability to each radio.
When it comes to communicating with police officers, Peeler said that each fire agency is establishing workarounds based on how frequently they communicate with law enforcement.
For example, Fire District 13 will have one radio that has encryption capability on each rig, Peeler said. Vancouver Fire Department, on the other hand, is including in each of its portable radios used by line staff the capability to switch and be able to hear and respond to law enforcement’s transmissions.
A portion of CRESA’s budget is paid by the 19 primary emergency services agencies, and the digital radio project was no different. Over a several year period, the various agencies increased their fees to CRESA to pay for the new equipment outright.
“Through planning and budgeting, we were able to pay cash for this system,” Fuller said.
The project also pays for a backup system near the Vancouver Mall. Fuller said that if anything were to happen with the downtown CRESA building, the radio system would be able to survive and continue working.
The transition to digital begins this weekend, with CRESA switching over C-Tran radios first. Fire and medical radios are scheduled to switch over on Wednesday and police will be switched over June 14.
During the week that fire and police personnel won’t be using the same system, firefighters have been trained on how to switch their radios back to the analog system, which their devices are capable of doing, Fuller said.
Hobbyists lose capability
Arguably the most impacted by the change are the members of the public who have made a hobby of listening to the emergency radio traffic.
Tomisa Bates started and manages a Facebook group “SW Washington Emergency Services Alerts,” which allows members to post information about public safety incidents including fires, crashes and robberies.
Bates said she understands the reasoning for the decision, but wished that police had decided to encrypt only certain operations channels.
“One of the things our group has always emphasized is officer safety,” Bates said. “It’s going to be less timely information … but overall, I think we’ll continue what we intended for the group in connecting the public with law enforcement.”
When the police radios on her end go silent, Bates said she and other users will still feed information to the page from the CRESA incident map, information put out by agencies FlashAlert, Twitter and their Facebook pages.
Group members also will continue to share information on helping victims and connect users with information and services.
What will be lost, Bates said, is the group’s ability to share information to its online users quickly — letting people know which intersections to avoid due to crashes and relaying descriptions of robbery suspects and suspect vehicles.
“It’s been an enhancement to their presence … Police can’t be everywhere,” Bates said. “We have a wide net in the community, we have eyes everywhere. That’s one of the things that will be unfortunate to lose.”
While the public will no longer have access to police communications, The Columbian will continue to monitor police and fire radio activity using a radio leased from CRESA.
Law enforcement officials recently decided to allow the newspaper to retain the lease and use an encrypted radio to monitor calls and alert the public online to potentially dangerous situations in the community.
