Reston residents and reporters can no longer listen to police radio traffic in real time. The Fairfax County Police Department encrypted all eight of its primary dispatch channels on Monday, making transmissions unintelligible to public scanners and online streaming services like OpenMHz.

The Reston District Station's channel is among those now locked behind encryption that requires a police-issued radio or cryptographic key to access.

FCPD confirmed the chmange to FFXnow, stating the eight channels became encrypted "at the same time as Fairfax City." The City of Fairfax Police Department had announced its own encryption on Friday.

Why the change

During a March Board of Supervisors briefing, FCPD leaders said they planned to encrypt the main dispatch channels used to communicate with officers responding to crimes and other incidents. Officers described the rationale as limiting disclosure of sensitive information and preventing "someone's worst day from being used for entertainment."

The City of Fairfax Police Department said encryption protects information routinely shared over radio, including names, home addresses, dates of birth, medical details and information about victims and people in crisis.

What's still accessible

Fairfax County Fire and Rescue frequencies remain unencrypted. A Fire and Rescue spokesperson told FFXnow the department does "not have any plans in the future to encrypt our primary radio channels."

An automated dispatch system that sends preliminary information based on 911 calls also remains unaffected. Residents can sign up for emergency notifications at fairfaxcounty.gov/alerts.

FCPD publishes incident data through downloadable spreadsheets at fcpod.org/pages/crime-data, though those include dates, addresses and event types with few details distinguishing routine calls from unusual cases. The department discontinued its weekly incident recap in 2022.

Transparency concerns

Larry Calhoun, an independent public safety reporter who covers the D.C. region under the name "News From the Concrete," pushed back on the move.

"I do believe that encryption absolutely hurts transparency from the police agencies to the public," Calhoun told FFXnow. He argued that if officer safety is the concern, agencies could delay dispatches rather than seal them entirely.

Calhoun's concern has a recent precedent. The Virginia State Police, which has fully encrypted its radio traffic, did not publicly report a road-rage shooting on I-395 in the Springfield area in June 2025 until a month after it occurred. One driver was hospitalized.