Studying Police Radio

Studying Police Radio Posted 11/10/2026 This post is a non-academic summary of my recent study of police radio with a team of wonderful scholars at Northeastern and the University of Vermont. I presented this work at the International Conference on Computational Social Science in July, and it’s ready to share with the world. In the United States, most police departments communicate using handheld and car-mounted radios typically called police radio. Historically these were analog radios that transmitted in the clear, so anyone with the right equipment (often called a police scanner) could listen in to law enforcement broadcasts. While some departments have switched to encrypted digital radios, many remain observable by the public. In the U.S., listening to police radio is typically entirely legal: there many are restrictions on broadcasting using radios, and some restrictions on using information from police radio to commit a crime or having a car-mounted police scanner to follow law…

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