ITEMS IN EVIDENCE, ASSESSING URGENCY, AND POLICE RADIO ENCRYPTION - 073

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau. Items in Evidence, Assessing Urgency, and Police Radio Encryption. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Happy new year. Happy 2020 welcome to episode number 73 of the Writer's Detective Bureau. The podcast still dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. And this week I'm answering your questions about whether a search warrant is needed to seize evidence from another police agencies' evidence room, assessing urgency and the realities of police radios being encrypted. But first I need to thank my gold shield patrons, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com. C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com. Larry Keeton, Vicki Tharp at vickitharp.com. Chrysann, Larry Darter, Natalie Barelli of nataliebarelli.com and Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com for their support and also a huge thank you as always to my coffee club patrons. You can find links to all of the writers supporting this episode in the show notes at writersdetective.com/73 and to learn about setting up your own Patreon account for your author business, or to support the show for as little as $2 per month, visit writersdetective.com/patreon P. A. T. R. E. O. N.

As I'm recording this Australia is fighting enormous brush fires right now. As a longtime resident and first responder in Southern California, I know firsthand how devastating these wildfires can be and the size of the burn in Australia is unprecedented, far beyond anything I've seen in California. So please join me in donating directly to the front lines where help is needed most. I've listed several agencies you can donate to, whether it's a specific fire service supporting animal rescue efforts or the relief efforts through Red Cross or Salvation Army. All of those links are in the show notes at writersdetective.com/73 and if you can't donate money right now, you can help spread the word through your own social media channels. I know I have listeners and even some patrons in new South Wales, so please know that we're thinking about you all and we're doing our best to help you guys.

This week's first question comes from Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com. Hey Adam, good to hear you're feeling better. Thank you very much. The sickness over the holiday was not fun. I have a followup question on the current podcast. If police department A needs to obtain evidence that police department B has in their possession, do they need a warrant or is it sufficient that department B already had a warrant to collect it? What process and paperwork would be needed? Would it be different if the two departments are in different States? What if the feds are one of the departments and the local PD is the other? Thanks for the question, Craig.

In the United States search warrants are, as we've talked about many times, the way government is able to legally search a location based upon the framework laid out in the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution, which says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."

So the relationship the fourth amendment is talking about is the one between the people and the government. So from a constitutional standpoint, the government has already legally seized the evidence. Since your scenario you mentioned that the police department B had a search warrant when they seized the evidence. So no, a second search warrant would not be needed as we're not talking about trying to seize evidence from a private person. As for the paperwork, there would certainly be a chain of custody form to sign, which is an official record of who had the evidence and when. And then of course there would also be various reports in both agencies, normal cases that would document the transfer from one agency to the other, and there'd be an explanation in the report as to why this was a logical or needed thing to do. All those T's would be crossed and I's dotted because defense attorneys will and rightly so, scrutinize anything that might remotely appear to be evidence tampering.

So what happens if police department B refuses to release the evidence to police department A or the FBI or whomever? Well, rather than a search warrant, the police department or the FBI could petition their court for an order, a court order signed by a judge, compelling police department B to release the evidence. It'd be very similar to a search warrant. If police department A is in a different state than police department B and department B is still refusing to release the evidence I'm reasonably sure that police department A would have to petition a court in the state that has standing over department B. So a court in department B state or a federal court. And I'm not entirely positive on that, but I believe that is what would happen. Just like if I was trying to get a search warrant in another state, I would have to find a local police agency or a detective to help me get a search warrant authored in the state where I'm trying to serve it.

So if I am investigating a homicide and I'm in California and I need to write a search warrant for a home in New York, I would team up with a detective or a prosecutor in New York and my information would be relayed to a sworn officer in the state of New York and they would swear out the warrant using my information. Because I'm not a sworn police officer in the state of New York, but for me to serve a warrant in that jurisdiction it has to be issued within that jurisdiction. Hopefully that makes sense. So would any of this happen in real life? It's not too likely, but I'm sure you could see how seizing important evidence and locking it away in a vault to prevent it from further scrutiny like DNA testing or whatever could be a clever way to hide evidence from another investigating agency. Again, realistic or happen very often? No, but it might be a fun storyline to explore. Thanks for the question Craig.

Chris Moody of chrisamoody.com writes, you're on your way to pick up someone you finally had enough proof, had committed a crime. A block away from where you were supposed to pick them up a call comes in on the radio that a 747 is crashed into the Wilshire Grand Center. Do you pick up the perp or do you potentially let them get away and go help out at the crash? This is the criminal justice version of triage, a matter of assessing urgency. So Chris, it really depends. Are we talking about a murderer or a car thief? If I know I can scoop this guy up later and he isn't an imminent threat to the community, I will head to the plane crash. If this is a serial killer, I'm not letting that guy breathe free air one moment longer than I have to, especially if I don't have the gear I need to be effective at the airplane crash site with me.

In your question you allude to the guy getting away, but if I know where this guy is going to be and I'm on my way there, there's a pretty good chance I'd be able to find him again. Once, a suspect has been identified the hardest part is over. Sure, we still have to piece together the investigation, but a who done it is far harder to close than one with an identified suspect. In this day and age it's a lot harder to hide from the police once we know who you are, especially if you decide to stay in the country.

And this week's last question comes from Charles F. Coats who asked this question in the Facebook group. Are police radios digitally encrypted now? At one time people could buy police scanners at Radio Shack, but supposedly that was illegal in some States. I would expect multichannel encryption to be essential to keeping criminals from knowing what the police are doing or where they are. Multichannel in case some radio sets were stolen or compromised. My reply in the Facebook group was, it depends on the agency and the frequency. Most agencies still operate in plain old VHF or UHF frequencies. You can hear most of them now via free apps on your smartphone, like 5-0 Radio. That said, some agencies have transitioned to encrypted frequencies and or use frequencies in the 700 megahertz to 800 megahertz range. To expand on my answer, there are so many facets to public safety radios that I don't want to delve into the technical side of things too much here because I promise I would make you fall asleep.

I do most of the radio programming on our police helicopters. So I've learned far more about VHF, UHF, VHF, low, 700 and 800mhz bands, trunking encryption boards, PL tones, digital PL tones. And that's just learning the very, very basics of what things are. So right now you're either yawning or you're nodding your head because you're really into this stuff. So to split the difference and get back to what matters most to you. And as I mentioned in my Facebook reply to Charles, I suggest checking out the free smartphone app 5-0 Radio. I actually use this app quite a bit. So I opted to pay for the pro version to get rid of the ads and get a few more frequencies. But if you're just going to check it out, just get the free version.

Regardless of whether you're using the free or pro version, with 5-0 Radio you can listen in on various radio frequencies from around the world like police, fire, aviation and amateur radio frequencies. These streams come from local scanner hobbyists, streaming them from their radio scanner in their local area to the internet in real time. And as Charles mentioned you can still buy radio scanners in most States. Scanners are now digital. And I actually remember spending summers with my grandmother in Tennessee and listening to my great aunts radio scanner that relied upon different plugin crystals for the different radio frequencies. So you'd buy those crystals at Radio Shack too, but times have definitely changed.

Scanners are relatively cheap to get started with and it's pretty common for cops to actually own one or two. Some police cars will have them mounted in their consoles as well, which can help with situational awareness while working on patrol. So even if you don't have the ability to talk on another police agencies' or fire agencies' radio frequency, you may be able to hear their frequency if you have a scanner equipped in your car. Where I work, our patrol cars have radio scanners. I think they're Uniden brand in our consoles, mainly so we can hear the California highway patrol and the various fire and paramedic frequencies that we historically didn't have the ability to talk to on our police radios.

We have fixed some of that, but we still can't talk to CHP because they are on the VHF low band, but we can hear them on our scanner. If this sounds like something you're interested in learning a lot more about, I recommend checking out the Scanner School podcast hosted by Phil Lichtenberger. He is a wealth of radio scanner knowledge and is a great starting place for learning about the radio scanner hobby. Again, Phil's podcast is called Scanner School. As for widespread encryption you'd be surprised just how many police agencies still have their frequencies wide open for listening.

You'll hear me say it time and again on this podcast. It's not about the money, it's about the money. Radio systems are incredibly expensive and to switch from say a standard UHF or VHF system that has been in place for probably half a century already, we're talking in the tens of millions of dollars for a relatively small area. So to put this in perspective, the Motorola APX portable radio that I carry retails for between $7,000 and $8,000 US. That's just the radio on my belt, what a lot of people would call a walkie talkie and that's not the one in the car or the base station in our front office.

And then of course there's the dispatch center, the antenna sites and repeater sites throughout the jurisdiction that provides the coverage and then the entire infrastructure needs to be replaced whenever you switch bands like going to the more modern 700 or 800mhz trunking systems. It is possible to encrypt UHF or VHF frequencies, but you need to get federal approval from the FCC and I think you also have to get approval from the DHS to operate an encrypted radio frequency in the United States.

And again, having actually worked in a surveillance unit that had an encrypted radio frequency assigned to it, I can tell you that it can be expensive to implement just the encryption from a hardware standpoint. Now, not in the millions of dollars category, but it certainly isn't cheap. And we can't forget the cost of FCC licensing any new frequencies as well. So is it really costly? No. Is it a month, if not years long headache? Absolutely. So there's an opportunity cost there as well. So reality is that most police agencies in the US use the same systems they had in the 1970s because upgrading is a big and expensive headache. And those that can make these changes aren't the ones actually using the radios every single day. Thanks for the question, Charles.

Thank you so much for kicking off the new year here with me. Make sure your questions don't go unanswered. Go to writersdetective.com/podcast to fill out the form and get your questions answered right here on the podcast. And for those of you in Australia dealing with the fires right now, please be safe and heed any evacuation orders. And for those of you fortunate enough not to be facing fire dangers right now, please consider donating to one of the agencies that are helping with the fires, or at least spreading the word. You can find links to donate on the show notes page at writersdetective.com/73. Thanks again for listening. Happy new year. Have a great week and write well.

PIA is the VPN service that I recommend for
encrypting your internet traffic and anonymizing your location.
- Adam
Writer's Detective Bureau

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