NYC Mayor Eric Adams Says That If Police Radio Transmissions Aren’t Encrypted, The Terrorists Will Win

The NYPD has a problem with encryption, as do some of its preferred prosecutors. Back in 2010, Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence told NBC news reporters that the city was filled with terrorists willing to leverage everything from “rocks, bottles, and accelerants” to wage war on New York — something aided by these speculative persons’ ability to utilize device encryption to cover their digital tracks.

This message was reiterated (repeatedly!) by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who spent most of his years in office decrying the encryption options being offered to members of the general public, which Vance claimed was pushing the city towards yet another criminal apocalypse.

But as soon as the NYPD felt it could benefit from encryption, it decided to do so. While still operating under the theory that civilian encryption options only aid and abet criminals, the NYPD began moving towards encrypting its own communications, under the theory that unencrypted communications made officers less safe and secure.

No one involved in this shift towards encrypted NYPD communications has ever bothered to recognize the cognitive dissonance that says protecting private people’s communications is a net loss for society while protecting cop communications is a net gain.

The fact is securing communications increases the safety of everyone utilizing this option. But the NYPD has had little positive to say about device or communication encryption options utilized by regular people.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams has proven himself to be just as strong an ally of the NYPD as his predecessors. The city’s residents seem more interested in NYPD reform, but Adams isn’t the man to do it. Instead, he’s clearly demonstrated he will elevate the NYPD’s concerns above the people the department serves. And he’s willing to go totally old school to do it, raising the specter of terrorism and suggesting his city is home to tons of terrorists willing to exploit their access to PD radio transmissions.

First highlighted on X/Twitter by NY Times reporter Dana Rubenstein, the details of Mayor Adams’ recent press conference are more fully fleshed out by Bob Hennelly of NY-focused site Work-Bites.

In an answer to a question from Work-Bites, Adams, a former NYPD captain, said scrambling to obstruct the public’s monitoring of the radio traffic was necessary to prevent crafty criminals from being able to track and anticipate police deployments.

“Public safety is number one, and I know that for members of the media it’s easier to get the information as they report crimes that are taking place in progress — but bad guys are doing it [monitoring the radio] also. They are being aware when police officers are responding — they are being aware of the routes police officers are doing. There are bad people out there.”

Adams went on to observe that the city had “been fortunate” to not get hit with another major terrorist event but that he was concerned the open police radio traffic could be accessed by “sleeper cells” that were “sophisticated.”

The mayor has planted his rhetorical flag somewhere between the Cold War and the War on Terror in hopes of silencing opposition to this move to encrypted communications — an effort that not only would prevent “sleeper cells” from eavesdropping, but prevent journalists and transparency activists from getting first-hand reports of police activity. This puts everyone in the city at the mercy of the NYPD’s PR wing, allowing the department to craft narratives that can’t be refuted by communications between dispatchers and officers.

Even if you think it’s acceptable to cut the public out of the loop because you think the way Mayor Adams thinks, it seems especially dangerous to sideline another set of public servants/first responders simply because the NYPD would rather prevent the proles from eavesdropping.

The same mayor who justified police radio encryption with the phrase “public safety is number one” is supporting a move that doesn’t actually elevate public safety to the number one position. Here are the comments given to Work-Bites by the president of the fire department’s labor union, Lt. Vincent Variale:

Variale […] told Work-Bites, it’s not like it used to be “when you could listen to all the police channels and know specifically where the danger was — like if there was a shooting going on and you could actually start responding while also avoiding getting caught in the middle of it.”

A classic example, Variale said, is you have a shooting and “EMS rolls up to the scene and they have no clue the shooter is still there — or that the police are running after the shooter in the very same direction of where one of our crews is located.”

“We dropped the ball here,” Variale added, “and put the cart before the horse. They should have worked out access for us and all the other professionals — as well as for all the volunteer EMS units that we rely on from Day One of this rollout.”

This move ensures that only one part of the first responder network will be (supposedly) secure from the nefarious actions of criminals with police scanners and/or “sleeper cells” just waiting for the right call signal to switch from “sleeping” to “awake.”

The unarmed members of the city’s first respondents are now expected to work their way through the fog of war without the benefit of police communications. They may decide to “run towards the sound of gunfire” only to find their backs riddled with friendly-fire bullet holes or performing the bullet-catching duty the NYPD is supposed to perform because they’re unaware of ongoing threats and/or their location.

No matter how the mayor or the NYPD spin this, the primary motivation for encrypting police communications is to cut the public out of the loop. It’s just another layer of opacity meant to separate public servants and the public, ensuring the more powerful entity (the NYPD) still has the power to shape narratives without being undercut by their own words or actions. If that means placing other first responders in harm’s way, so be it. It’s a sacrifice the NYPD is willing to make, and one the city’s mayor is willing to support by invoking the unproven and unverifiable existence of terrorists lying in wait to raze New York City to the ground.