What Happened to the Police Scanner? It Was Never About Burglars

The police scanner sat on kitchen counters for decades, mapped by Gene Hughes's Police Call book, first printed in 1964 as a sixteen-page manual. Its high point was Uniden's Bearcat BC235XLT TrunkTracker of January 1997, at a suggested $429.95. You circled your county's frequencies in ballpoint, backed the squelch off a hair and learned the ten-codes before anyone else in the house. When cities went trunked, the TrunkTracker read the control channel and chased one talkgroup across a dozen hopping channels. Then came P25, the open digital standard, and scanners decoded that too. It was never about burglars. Washington's police chief blamed listeners with smartphones in 2011, but the big wave came after October 12, 2020, when a two-page California bulletin on personal data told agencies to encrypt or keep names off the air. On P25 radios, encryption was a setting. By 2022, roughly 120 California agencies had gone dark, and the screen just read ENC. 73. #hamradio #policescanner #scanner #p25 #vintageradio #electronicshistory