The Berkeley Police Department moved its radio communications to encrypted channels on Thursday a little over a week after a controversial vote by the Berkeley City Council to allow the change.
The removal of public access to police broadcasts was made to comply with a change in state law and a directive from the California Department of Justice to protect personal identifying information of victims.
The department launched a real-time call log with a 10-minute delay to coincide with the change.
The log displays calls for police service for the previous 48 hours and includes a description of the type of crime or request for service being reported, a level of priority from 1-9, the call date and time, how the call was received, whether it is in-progress or not, and the block address. It also gives each call a unique identifying incident number.
An informational tab on the site notes that the type of call might not accurately reflect what police officers end up responding to as they arrive on scene and the situation develops. The incident type listed in the log is entered by dispatchers when the call is received and will not update in real time if officers discover the incident is something else.
The call log was a compromise agreed upon to provide an alternative to live broadcasts for media that report on breaking news, police accountability advocates, and residents who took advantage of the broadcasts to get faster information about evacuations, crimes in progress, and other public safety news impacting them or their neighborhood.
Police Chief Jennifer Louis and Berkeley City Councilmembers said the change was also needed to align with other law enforcement agencies in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, all of which have already encrypted their communications.
Louis said in a presentation to the City Council on Oct. 28 that criminals who take advantage of the publicly accessible broadcasts to help them commit crimes could target Berkeley if it was the only jurisdiction in the area without encryption and said it would protect the safety of police officers.
She also said encryption will allow Berkeley to keep sharing its radio system with other agencies in those two counties.
Some critics of the decision pointed to the Palo Alto Police Department’s reversal of a move to restrict public access to radio traffic a few years ago.
The Palo Alto Police Department encrypted its radio communication in 2021 but switched back to publicly available broadcasts in 2022, citing improvements in technology that would allow officers to switch more easily between encrypted channels when personal identifying information was being broadcast.
Louis said the Berkeley Police Department did not have enough communications staffing to move back and forth between encrypted and unencrypted channels.