Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!
If you are a sports fan, putting a major league baseball game on the radio provides relaxing background sound. If you are a reporter, the chatter, whoops and squawks from a police radio scanner provide the same comforting feeling that you are plugged in.
As an intern, many decades ago, I marveled at how the Honolulu Star-Bulletin veterans would be pounding away on their manual typewriters with the cop/fire radio on in the background, only to cease the clatter to say something like, “Waikiki says they are leading out, I’ll make a call” — meaning the Waikiki fire station was pulling its fire hoses off the truck as they arrive at the scene of a blaze and a news story could be starting.
Listening to the police radio takes a bit of skill, as the police and fire codes are often not repeated and several reports can come in at the same time. Reporters and photographers across Honolulu are listening to police radios day and night. It is a tool of the trade — and it appears to be disappearing.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Peter Boylan last week reported that the city is finishing up switching to a digital emergency radio system that will preclude the public listening to police, fire and emergency service transmissions. Part of the scope of the plans was to keep the public — that would include the news media — from listening to the transmissions.
“Honolulu police interim Chief Rade K. Vanic said ‘at some point’ HPD radio communications will not be available, but the department is working on a system, maybe a database, where the public and press will find the information shared between police dispatchers and officers responding to calls for services,” it was reported.
Boylan said “starting around 2011, citing the need to keep criminals from listening in and to adhere to the U.S. Department of Justice mandates to protect witness, victim and suspect information, hundreds of police departments and first responders around the country started encrypting their frequencies.”
Along with losing police radio transmissions, reporters and the public have lost out on another one-time staple of “covering the cops” — that is, going to the police station and reading the actual police log where officers wrote in the circumstances, names and dates of those arrested.
“The book contained names, addresses of everyone who was arrested. This was at the old Beretania Street station … but at that time, you could identify yourself … and gain access to the police station, look at the book, talk to the watch commander and hang out in the press office,” recalls Gerald Kato, University of Hawaii School of Communications associate professor and former newspaper and television reporter. “I guess it was a different time. You could walk around HPD, even work your way up to the chief’s office without any problems. Most cops were accessible, if not friendly.”
“It seems the more openness that the public wants, the more insular HPD becomes, ” Kato said in an interview.
If actually rubbing elbows with the police is becoming a thing of the past, an HPD spokeswoman said the arrest/booking log has been online for several years and is updated daily at www.honolulupd.org/information/arrest-logs/.
The gaps in the system happen when some police reports are delayed or not included in the logs. No amount of web pages, however, replaces reporters talking face-to-face with police officers who are empowered to say specifically what happened, when it happened, to whom it happened to, and why. That’s what openness means.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
