Starting Thursday, Minneapolis Police Department scanner traffic will be off limits to the public. This is no small move, particularly in the city where George Floyd was killed by former police officer Derek Chauvin nearly five years ago — a case that initially became international news due to witness video that went viral after MPD sent out an inaccurate news release. There’s still a significant need for transparency around policing in the city, said Public Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette, adding that the decision to encrypt city scanners was not taken lightly. Ultimately, city officials determined encryption is necessary to comply with state and federal law and protect sensitive information from being publicly broadcast, Barnette said. In lieu of the scanner traffic, the city has launched a new incidents dashboard that updates every half hour. “This is a case where we know as best practices to be encrypted,” Barnette said. “Citizens now with the dashboard actually get to see more calls than they could hear over the radio before.” So what led to the decision to encrypt the scanner and launch the dashboard? Changes to federal statute affect scanners Information that should be protected includes a victim’s name, age and address, license plate numbers and drivers license information, Minneapolis 911 Director Joni Hodne said. While guidelines around this kind of information have always been applied to documents such as a redacted police report, before encryption this kind of information was still aired on open channels. Minneapolis isn’t the only city needing to deal with changes to federal law, Hodne added. For example, Hennepin County EMS encrypted in January. In 2019, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office became the first agency in the state to encrypt its scanners. And Hodne predicts there is more channel encryption to come in agencies across the country. The Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy is updated often. This policy provides guidance to any agency that has access to or acts in support of criminal justice services and information. Its most recent 2024 update included requirements for data encryption around dissemination of information. “We have been given a directive that there is a certain amount of information that can no longer go out over public airways,” Hodne said. “It’s always been protected information. We’ve always had to be very careful when people are in our dispatch center to not let people see screens or see this information when it’s coming through, but we’ve always aired it to officers who are on scene. We can no longer air that information.” There is not a hard deadline on new guidance around encryption, Hodne clarified, “but they are moving forward with this quickly, and you’re going to see this happening at more and more dispatch centers coming up in the future.” Currently, Hodne said dispatch centers have been told they won’t be penalized yet for not complying with recent statute changes but that institutions also have to be actively moving toward compliance. Some smaller agencies can remain in compliance with the statute by increasing their use of these encrypted channels while maintaining an unencrypted feed. MPD has used encrypted channels in the past for high-profile cases, Hodne noted. However, the Minneapolis 911 dispatch center takes over 600,000 calls per year, dispatching a first responder to about 450,000 calls. This volume of calls is too high to coordinate switching between different channels under the new legal guidelines, she said. Dashboard in place of scanners Changes in guidance around encryption technology are a result of overall changes in technology and the internet that have made access to scanner traffic easy. People can simply tune into apps or websites like Broadcastify to listen to unencrypted scanner traffic in real time. Scanner traffic pages have popped up on social media pages across the country. In Minneapolis, for example, Crime Watch Minneapolis has become a popular page. The page did not respond to a request for comment on this story, but did post about Tuesday’s triple homicide that was not largely spoken about on the public scanner as the department has been phasing in its encrypted channel. “MPD Chief O’Hara is concealing public info through encryption, so details are few at this point,” the crime page posted on X. There is a notable difference between how a citizen posting to social media would approach dissemination of information compared to how a trained journalist operates. This is something Hodne and Minneapolis Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette concur on. As the city began considering police scanner encryption in the summer of last year, Barnette met with news media outlets across the city to ask about how scanner encryption would impact news coverage. One alternative pitched to Barnette was to allow legacy media access to an encryption switch so that media outlets could still listen to scanner traffic. That alternative was ultimately shot down. Instead of an encryption key, the city built out a comprehensive dashboard of incidents that updates every half hour, Barnette said. “This, at the end of the day, gives everyone access, not just the media,” he said. “When you look at an encryption key, the encryption key really gives you a select group of people that can have it… Going to this dashboard gives everyone equal access. So you can be sitting in your living room and be able to access the dashboard.” Issues of media access On the behalf of a group of local media sources, media law attorney Leita Walker (who includes MinnPost among her media clients) wrote a letter in August to Barnette emphasizing the importance of continued media access to real-time scanner traffic as the city considered encryption, particularly in Minneapolis. “In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, citizens here remain skeptical of police news releases and, rightly, rely on responsible journalism to verify ‘official’ versions of events through details gleaned not only from police reports and sources but also scanner traffic and crime-scene observations,” wrote Walker, a lawyer with the Minneapolis firm Ballard Spahr. The first MPD news release following Floyd’s murder claimed Floyd died of a “medical incident” during an arrest. It did not mention Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Widely circulated video shot by then-teenager Darnella Frazier revealed what really happened. In an interview with MinnPost a week before the full launch of MPD encryption, Walker said she appreciated how Barnette worked to speak with media outlets during the city’s transition but is disappointed that outlets have still lost access and were not granted an encryption switch. “It helps journalists hold law enforcement accountable, because then they can go to the scene themselves while it’s happening,” Walker said. “(Journalists) can talk to witnesses while they’re on site, and they don’t have to then trust the press release, right?”