Chicago has one of the most robust police scanner communities in America. | Photo: Shutterstock Curious Coalitionsīuilt In happens to be headquartered in scanner country. Chicago has one of the most active scanner communities in the country. As the Broadcastify surge seems to illustrate, not everyone thinks that’s a good thing.Ī Chicago police car parked below the L tracks. Departments from Denver to Racine, Wisconsin, to Sioux City, Iowa, have all made the move to encryption, and the trend seems likely to continue as departments shift from analog to digital, according to experts. But even as scanner communities overall have seen their ranks steadily thin since their 1970s heyday, the moment pointed to a strong hunger for police radio information.īut in many communities, that information isn’t available to the public anymore, as local departments have moved their communications to encrypted police radio systems. It may have seemed an odd, if entirely logical, surge of old-school tech - hobbyist-associated scanner radio - midwifed through modern delivery systems. Scanner Radio, 5-0 and other similar apps front-end Broadcastify feeds, which the company licenses to developers through an API. Even those spikes in app downloads were, in a sense, also spikes in Broadcastify traffic. The shift was reflected in the App Store, too, which saw the likes of Scanner Radio - Fire and Police Scanner and 5-0 Radio Police Scanner scale the charts, with some surpassing even the likes of TikTok and Instagram. This presents an issue with public transparency, eliminating the ability for people to maintain real-time security within their own communities and reducing the already dwindling trust offered toward local police departments. As popularity in app-based police radio scanners ballooned in 2020, many departments began to encrypt their radio communications so only those within the department can receive messages.
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