NYPD Radios to Go Digital to Strengthen Security, Crime Reporters will Download App on Phones for Access
By: Yehudit Garmaise
“[We need to know] that the criminals don’t know that we are about to be on the scene,” said Commissioner Shea, who said he was grateful for the additional resources the NYPD just received to ensure that "greatest police department in the world has the greatest equipment in the world."
"It is very important on the communication side to make sure that the equipment that we have is state-of-the-art," said Commissioner Shea, who emphasized the importance for the police to have coded communication for investigating and preventing crimes.
Sergeant Joseph Redner, who works for the NYPD’s Chief of Department Rodney Harrison confirmed to BoroPark24 today that some of the $200 million in the city’s 2022 budget that Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council designated to upgrade the NYPD’s technology will be used for the digitization of the new police radios.
“I was told by the people who do our radios that they will be similar to how they are now, just digitized, and therefore harder to hack into than our current system is,” Sergeant Redner said. “We are switching to digital for security reasons. We don’t want protestors, terrorists, and criminals to jam it, tap into it, and do false radio transmissions.”
While police radios will essentially look and remain the same, when they are digitized, the NYPD Information Technology Bureau, which is responsible for the radios, will remotely enter codes that are accessible to the police.
Digitization will not just deter potential hackers, but the new system can help the department to deactivate any radios that are lost or stolen, and that subsequently get into the wrong hands.
When police radios get lost or stolen, which they sometimes do, Sergeant Redner explained, sometimes pranksters who find the old radios call in false crimes and injuries, which the NYPD has no way of knowing are fake, before rushing to them: wasting time and resources.
“With digitization, we can deactivate those old radios and change the frequency,” said Sergeant Redner, who explained that NYPD's Information Technology Bureau will remotely enter codes that are a string of numbers and letters that will authorize access to the police radios.
"The cops don't get the codes and wouldn't know what the code is," Sergeant Redner explained.
Members of the press, however, who have had access to police radios since the 1930s, are worried that when the NYPD has something to hide, it will use codes to filter or “sanitize” information that it does not want the press to hear and to publicize.
The press found out through communication on police radios, for instance, about the death of Eric Garner, who was murdered by police who put him in an unauthorized chokehold in Staten Island in 2014.
“The NYPD is just strengthening our security,” Sergeant Redner said, “but members of the press will have 100% access to police communication, just like they do now. Nothing will be filtered. All reporting will continue to take place in real-time.
“There is no part of this to make the media not have access or to not get certain information. Digitization is literally just to strengthen the security of our network.”
Although the NYPD is still developing its new digitized radios, most likely, Sergeant Redner said, instead of using the old police radios, which reporters have used to gather crime news for almost 100 years, soon, crime journalists will likely download a police scanner app, and then get a code that will provide the same unfiltered access to police communication that the NYPD does.
“All the kinks of digitizing the radios have not been worked out yet, however, an app for journalists is, most likely, the easiest way to do it," Sergeant Redner explained, "but this whole project is still three, maybe four years out from even being implemented.
“It is not happening any time soon.”
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