Radio encryption and what the public can still see

Not long ago, anyone with a scanner could hear a police department at work. That is ending across New Jersey. Matching this site's agencies against the encrypted-agency database at PoliceRadioEncryption.com, at least 95 departments in our data encrypt their radio communications, 88 of them across all operations.^[1] The real number is higher, because some encrypting agencies could not be matched by name and were left out.

This site takes a position on that, and it is worth stating plainly rather than smuggling in.

Encryption is a transparency signal

When a department encrypts its radio traffic, it removes a real-time, unmediated view of how it polices. Reporters lose it. Neighbors lose it. Oversight groups lose it. What is left is what the department chooses to report after the fact, which is most of what this site is built from.

That is why encryption belongs on these pages. A department's internal affairs numbers and its discipline record tell you what surfaced through official channels. Whether you can also hear it happen in real time tells you something about how much the public is trusted to watch. Several of the state's larger departments encrypt fully, including Jersey City, Camden, and Trenton, each of which also carries dozens of major discipline records from 2020 to 2025.^[2]

The line this site will not cross

Here is the discipline. The encryption argument is analysis, and it is labeled as analysis everywhere it appears. This site will not tell you that encrypting departments have worse discipline records, because that is not something the data here establishes, and dressing a correlation up as a finding would be exactly the move this project exists to avoid.

What the site does instead is put the two facts next to each other and let you hold them at once. A department encrypts. A department has a discipline record. Both are sourced, both are dated, and the reading you take from the pair is yours.

How the match works

Encryption status comes from PoliceRadioEncryption.com, matched to this site's departments by municipality, county, and agency type, and only where the match is unambiguous.^[1] Agencies whose names could not be matched, or that map to more than one department, are left unflagged rather than guessed. Every flagged department links to its entry there, with the encryption type and the date the status was recorded. The full list is on the encrypted departments page.