By Mary Owen
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — A man sitting on a milk crate smoking marijuana. A couple fighting. A car crash. A robbery. A fight.
The Chicago Police Department is called to deal with all of it and most of it gets little mention in the local news. But for hundreds of scanner enthusiasts, much of the drama can be followed from the comfort of their home on a device that can be purchased at any electronics store -- and it’s all legal.
Anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can listen to Chicago Police Department scanner traffic on their Apple device, from anywhere in the world. It’s a technological upgrade to a decades-old hobby.
Evan Miller, a 25-year-old University of Chicago doctoral student, created the iPhone/iPod application, which was released Sept. 27. It sells for $4.99 on iTunes and is the only application that allows users to exclusively tap into the Police Department’s 13 neighborhood dispatch zones, said Miller and other scanner experts.
Another application streams scanner traffic in numerous cities, including Chicago. However, that application offers only two citywide frequencies.
“It can make for an action-packed listening experience,” said Miller, a former software developer. “It’s a great way to get a sense of how things are working in the city.”
Miller hatched the idea for the iPhone application earlier this year when he worked as a research assistant for “Freakonomics” author Steve Levitt. He studied crime trends and reviewed police reports, which he said were typically filled with only basic information such as who, what, where and when.
Wanting to know more, Miller bought a $200 police scanner off the Internet. He spent several hours programming 13 Chicago Police Department dispatch frequencies into the machine to construct a geographic map of the dispatch zones so he could know from what neighborhood calls were coming.
“It seemed really annoying to me that I needed to do all this to do a really basic thing,” Miller said.
That’s when he decided to further democratize scanner traffic.
The Hyde Park resident paid $99 to join Apple’s Developer Program, wrote an application and within two weeks the application was approved. Miller gets 70 percent of proceeds from each sale and said 70 people have already purchased it.
The application comes with a map of Chicago that lights up the zone from where the dispatch originates. The stream jumps from channel to channel when there is more than two seconds of dead air ensuring maximum excitement, Miller said. Some users who left comments on the iTunes Web site complained that it’s not possible to control channels, but Miller said he would need several more scanners and computer equipment to do so.
Listening to scanner traffic is legal in Chicago, but there is a code among scanners. The Web site for the Chicago Area Radio Monitoring Association reads: “We do not allow members to interfere with any public safety event or agency and will assist law enforcement in investigating any such problems.”
When dealing with sensitive or private information, the Chicago Police Department and many law-enforcement agencies use encrypted radio frequencies and private cell phones. But it is against the law to listen to such frequencies or broadcast them over the Internet even if they are not encrypted, say scanners.
“This iPhone application essentially functions like an off-the-shelf scanner,” said Roderick Drew, a Chicago Police Department spokesman. “Sensitive information is not picked up by these devices.”
But last month, a New York man was arrested after he allegedly used information from a police scanner to send Twitter messages about police efforts to control and apprehend rowdy protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.
“That is a rather disturbing case,” said Lindsay Blanton III, president of RadioReference.com, a scanner forum that also has 1,300 streaming frequencies -- the largest online database. “It reflects very badly on our hobby.”
Last year, Blanton delayed Minneapolis police scanner traffic for 30 minutes during the Republican National Convention at the request of the FBI and Minnesota law enforcement who were concerned that the streams would be used to target officers.
While most law enforcement agencies have embraced the intersection of old-fashioned scanning and new technology, with some agencies broadcasting their own feed on Blanton’s Web site, the Los Angeles Fire Department takes a different view.
“We firmly believe any re-broadcast of LAFD radio signals without formal permission to be a violation of Federal Law,” reads the Web site of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
But in Chicago the interest continues to grow. A year ago, Steve K -- who declined to give his full name, citing privacy reasons -- started chicagoscanner.com by connecting his scanner to his computer to stream audio on the city’s two citywide police frequencies. He said the site gets between 7,000 and 10,000 hits a month.
“The whole thing caught on like gangbusters,” he said. “People who are ex-officers and firefighters love it. They are living in Arizona or whatever and they still like to know what’s going on in Chicago.”
Copyright 2009 Chicago Tribune