King County police and fire agencies prepare to encrypt their radios

Starting next year, public safety agencies across King County will “enhance” the encryption of their radio communications, blocking outside listeners from tuning into sensitive broadcasts.

What that will look like is up to each agency.

The county’s two largest law enforcement agencies — and all of the county’s fire departments — will continue to broadcast initial dispatch calls for service in the open, for anyone with a scanner or computer to tune into, according to interviews, news releases and officials at the Puget Sound Emergency Radio Network.

Other police departments in the county will decide independently whether to encrypt all or part of their broadcast dispatches.

“It will be up to the individual agencies” on whether to encrypt their communications, said Mike Webb, the executive director of PSERN, which coordinates and oversees the operation of a nearly $300 million digital radio system that was completed in 2023.

News media routinely monitor police and fire broadcasts to keep track of breaking news and dispatch reporters and photographers to the scenes of violent crime, serious crashes and fires.

However, in Seattle, tactical channels and broadcasts that contain personal information of victims or suspects or might reveal information that could endanger first responders will be encrypted and unavailable to the public.

“It is our value of transparency that is keeping the standard dispatch channels open,” Seattle police spokesperson Sgt. Patrick Michaud said in a statement. The primary reason the department is encrypting any of its channels is that “we have a requirement to protect your information,” he added.

Police radio transmissions, he said, can routinely contain “a person’s most crucial personal information,” which Michaud said shouldn’t be “transmitted over unencrypted channels.

“This change is an attempt to protect that vital information so that we are not the reason someone becomes the victim of an additional crime.”

At the same time, some are concerned encryption limits information from a public agency that should be answerable and transparent to the people it serves.

Keith Shipman, the president and CEO of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters, a trade group composed of television and radio stations across the state, said his organization “is always concerned when access to public information is impaired and our ability to do our job as journalists is impeded.”

WSAB worried when law enforcement agencies in Snohomish County last month encrypted virtually all of law enforcement’s radio transmissions.

That decision prompted members of both print and broadcast media to hire a First Amendment attorney to write a letter questioning the decision. Shipman said the agencies were responsive and sat down and hammered out a compromise: access to a shared data stream containing dispatch information that is delayed “by a few minutes.”

Both King and Snohomish County agencies said one reason to encrypt first-responder communications is to prevent criminals or others with bad intention from knowing what police and fire officials are doing as they do it.

In an announcement posted on social media, Seattle police said encryption allows for “operational integrity and improves the safety of officers and the communities they serve.”

“When channels remain open, they can be accessed by all individuals, including some who may be actively engaging in criminal activity or behavior,” the post said, stating that there are “several local and national incidents where suspects have used scanners to evade arrest or disrupt police operations in real-time.”

Sgt. Michaud cited a highly publicized incident in 2020 when Seattle police officers broadcast false information about the arrival of a group of right-wing Proud Boys during the Black Lives Matter protests, a ruse that caused alarm among protesters listening to scanners, causing some to arm and barricade themselves at night on Capitol Hill. Several officers were later reprimanded.

It’s not clear whether encryption would have prevented that false broadcast, but Michaud said the incident “does demonstrate that radio traffic is being listened to and used to determine future actions.”

Seattle Fire Department spokesperson Kristin Hanson said that agency will “leave our main dispatch channels unencrypted, which means the public will still be able to hear when we are dispatched and where to.”

She said the department’s online Seattle Fire Department Live and its Real-Time 911 sites — which map out and detail the Fire Department’s emergency calls and dispatched responses — will not be impacted.

Encryption is made possible by the new digital communication system, which was funded by a property tax levy approved through a countywide initiative passed in 2015. It replaced an analog dispatch system that had been in place since 1990.

Webb, the PSERN executive director, said it can be upgraded and is expected to provide county public safety agencies with state-of-the-art digital dispatch abilities for at least 20 years, with an annual operating cost of about $10 million, paid by its members.

The system will allow interagency communications when called for. In the past, there were as many as 170 radio communications systems operated by law enforcement in King County.