The Visalia Police Department has encrypted its transmissions as of March 20 – marking the end of real-time reporting for media outlets focusing on Visalia, including the city’s popular online outlets like Visalia Stringer and Visalia Watchdog.
The encryption conversion also means that regular citizens with radio scanners or listening through online platforms like Broadcastify will hear nothing – or garbled noise. The owners of the popular Stringer and Watchdog pages have expressed their disappointment in the loss of transparency and believe the move to encryption will impact public safety.
To mitigate the loss of communication, the department set up an interactive map showing incidents such as burglar alarms going off, or traffic stops, but with little supporting information and no follow-up.
Officials with the department have acknowledged the website needs further work – though the writers of Stringer and Watchdog say the website is simply worthless.
“We don’t have a lot of information going out there right now,” admitted Visalia Police Captain Dan Ford.
“We would love to update the website and get as much information out there without compromising officer safety or revealing personal information,” said Ford. “But with the current state of technology it’s the best we can do right now.”
There’s been a blackout of information since the switch to encryption, say both Visalia Stringer and Watchdog.
“I have not yet gone out to anything that was communicated over the website,” said the person behind the Watchdog page.
Other agencies in the area, such as the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department, area fire departments, and other cities, are still unencrypted. Only the Visalia and Dinuba police departments are currently encrypted.
Visalia officials claim that state mandates left them with no other choice, and that moving to an encrypted platform has increased officer safety and public safety.
Visalia Stringer and other media outlets say the public is now less safe: community members cannot network in finding stolen items, know about criminals or gunmen on the loose, and media agencies can’t warn the public to avoid active crime scenes or traffic accident sites.
Visalia Police reach out to community
Ford gave a presentation about the department’s decision to encrypt on April 2 during Visalia’s Citizen Advisory Committee.
Ford said that the switch to full encryption was necessary because of a state mandate issued by the Department of Justice in October of 2020.
The mandate states that “Personally Identifiable Information (PII) must be limited to authorized personnel; and the transmission of such information must be encrypted.”
However, state officials didn’t mandate full radio encryption, and Ford acknowledged that the department had other options.
He said there were three: one was to dedicate one of their three channels to PII and allow the other two to be open for listeners, while another was to have officers use cell phones to communicate private information to the dispatchers. The final option would have been for officers to communicate PII to dispatch over their police car computer.
Ford said that Visalia dispatchers, working in crews of four per shift, handle 300,000 calls a year. He explained the danger of burnout and the difficulty in keeping a full crew employed because of the strict qualifications for the job.
“They have a tremendous burden on them and that was a factor in the VPD’s decision to go fully encrypted,” he said.
Ford and Salazar were also concerned about officers’ safety while switching channels to communicate PII and not being able to hear what was going on the main channel. He said an officer could be shot and because they were not on the main channel would be asking for help but no one could hear them.
“Many, many other Chiefs of Police throughout the state made the same decision that running one channel for PII was not feasible,” said Ford.
Concerning officers using the computer in their patrol cars to communicate with dispatch, Ford said that solution works for the highway patrol, but not for lone officers responding to accidents, crimes or emergencies who need radio communication.
Jim Reeves, a CAC member and former dispatcher said, “my mindset is that one channel should be in the clear and the other two channels used for PII.”
Reeves said that personal information had been successfully kept off the public airwaves for years anyway.
“When we shifted at the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department from running everything on Channel 1 and 2 to then Channel 3, it was a learning curve and impacted dispatch but those things were worked out and it was better for dispatch to have units switched,” he said.
Was the Visalia City Council informed?
VPD saw their opportunity to replace old radios and get updated encryption hardware with the America Rescue Plan Act funds distributed during Covid.
Ford said that the new radios and encryption system cost a little more than $1.8 million but “none of this impacted the city’s general fund.”
Ford said, “It was use it or lose it – so we used it.”
According to the National League of Cities website the ARPA funds used to buy the encryption hardware was eligible to be used for practically any expenditure a department needed during COVID.
Ford said, “The city administrators were all informed and the city council informed. They approved the purchase in December of 2022 of the encryption equipment.”
Reeves asked, “Did you let them know that the plan was to go fully encrypted?”
“We had very specific information in their staff report,” said Ford.
The staff report of which Ford is referring was tucked inside the agenda packet at the December 19, 2022 city council meeting. And the document was not written by the VPD but was written by Motorola Solutions, the company that supplied the radios and encryption hardware.
It was a long and tedious 42 page report but did say, “The console operator can choose whether or not to encrypt their transmissions on a particular trunked resource.”
Nowhere in the report did it say that VPD intended to go fully encrypted.
During the December 19 meeting, the VPD did not give the city council a presentation, there was no public discussion, nor did the city council give their opinions on the subject. Rather, the decision to buy the encryption equipment was discreetly placed into the consent calendar less than a week before Christmas and voted on in a block in less than 20 seconds with seven other nonrelated items.
Listed as item 4 on the consent agenda it stated,
“Authorize the City Manager to enter into a purchase agreement with Motorola in the amount of $1,844,614 to replace radios and to perform software upgrades for Police, Fire, Code Enforcement, Animal Control, and Parks with encryption capabilities pursuant to State and Federal mandates; and appropriate an additional $427,614 which includes $20,000 for services required by Tulare County Information Technology Department. Motorola contract price made available through The Houston-Galveston Area Council (HGAC) RA05-21, a Cooperative Purchasing Program.”
Motorola’s offer was only good until December 22, 2022, three days after the city council meeting.
But Ford did not imply that the city council was involved in the department’s decision to fully encrypt.
“It was an operational decision that needed to be made in the best interests of our staff looking at it from a police department’s perspective,” Ford said.
When Ford joined the VPD he was also an aficionado of police scanning and often listened to the radio in his free time. So he knows how the Visalia Stringer, Visalia Watchdog and other people who listen to scanner traffic feel about radio silence.
“We knew this was not going to be a popular decision when we did it, which is why it’s been about 3 -5 years since we had everything approved and the technology in place,” said Ford. “I’ve had conversations with these groups over the last year so it wasn’t a secret.”
Visalia Stringer posted on Facebook after a meeting with the VPD March 3, “Rumors of encryption have circulated for years, so the confirmation came as no surprise. However, the specific type of encryption and its implications for public transparency were unexpected. Once implemented, scanner traffic will no longer be accessible to the media or the public.”
Reeves had the last word after Ford’s presentation, “From a public relations stand point, having everything encrypted an having web pages that are right now flaky – they are next to useless – just gives an attitude that the police department is saying ‘We will tell you what we want you to know when we want you to know it.’”
“And that does not do any of us any good.”