Encrypted Police Radio Hinders Nashville Severe Weather

Will Minkoff (left) and David Drobny, standing on Snow Force 1.Photo: Eric England

During a severe weather event — a tornado, a thunderstorm, a blizzard — Will Minkoff of Nashville Severe Weather listens in to police radio channels in Nashville to gather information on the impact of the storm. By listening to the traffic coming from the dispatch channels for specific precincts around the city, he learns, for instance, if a power line is down or if a tree has fallen into a roadway. 

After taking some additional steps to see if the report is credible, Minkoff shares that information in a proprietary National Weather Service chatroom that includes other meteorologists and local media outlets. 

At least, that’s what he used to do before the Metro Nashville Police Department encrypted its radio channels. The recent change put an end to an old hobby for members of the public who enjoy listening in to police radio communications with a radio scanner. But it also means that people like Minkoff have lost a tool they used to play a part in keeping Nashvillians safe. 

Minkoff is one of the three married fathers and weather obsessives who took a hobby and turned it into a source of critical information for hundreds of thousands of Middle Tennesseans. Their @NashSevereWx Twitter account has more than 165,000 followers, and their operation is funded by community supporters and the sale of merchandise. They don’t make any money for themselves, and for years now they’ve been taking on college meteorology students as interns. In 2016, Nashville Severe Weather won the National Weather Association’s Walter J. Bennett Public Service Award (and they’ve won Best Twitter Account in the Scene’s Best of Nashville readers’ poll more than once).

The MNPD’s decision to encrypt radio communications was announced in February and enacted several months later. When the change was first announced, department spokesperson Don Aaron cited officer safety as the impetus.

 “A person planning to do harm to officers or the public needs only a smart phone with internet access to listen in pretty much real time to where officers are dispatched, what they are saying, and how they may be working to resolve a tactical situation,” Aaron told The Tennessean. 

At the same time, he acknowledged that there was no example of a situation in which an officer or civilian was harmed or killed because a suspect had been using a scanner to listen to police communications. 

Now that the radio traffic has gone dark for the public, Minkoff says he and his colleagues will have a harder time giving the NWS and their followers what they call “ground truth.” Depending on the location of a storm, radar may not be able to determine the conditions under a certain elevation. In that circumstance, reports from social media and police radio traffic collected by Minkoff can add useful information. 

“If we can use tools like scanners and social media to validate what [the National Weather Service] assume is happening on the radar, they’re going to be faster to push the button on a potentially life-saving warning,” Minkoff says. 

The weather service isn’t the only entity that benefits from that work. Local news stations and the Weather Channel also have access to the NWS chatroom and are able to draw from the information that Minkoff and Nashville Severe Weather share there too. 

Aaron points the Scene to the middle-ground feature the MNPD created after blocking the public from the department’s radio channels. The department’s website now includes an automated list of active dispatch calls, which are posted with a 10 or 15 minute delay. It’s a useful feature, Minkoff says, but one that doesn’t replace the live reports, which are crucial during an ongoing weather event. 

Minkoff says he’s reached out to the MNPD but notes that Nashville Severe Weather has a somewhat rocky relationship with Metro, stemming from their advocacy about the county’s outdated tornado sirens (which are now being upgraded).   

In the meantime, winter is coming.