Grant County law enforcement dispatch goes silent to the public

911 law enforcement dispatch in Grant County is going silent to the public.

The Multi-Agency Communications Center, known at MACC, has encrypted all its frequencies to block people from listening to radio traffic on scanners or through smartphone apps.

The agency’s Jackie Jones says the primary reason for the move is to protect law enforcement personnel, but she says both the fire and EMS dispatch will remain open to the public.

“It’s getting more and more difficult for law enforcement to do their job when sometimes people can listen and anticipate what they [police] are doing, and intervene or do things that could put them in danger.”

Jones also says the agency faced numerous technical hurdles before going silent.

“Some of our agencies that we interface with, such as the state patrol and so on, we had to make it so that they could also access our radio system so that that didn’t change once we made the changeover,” says Jones.

Jones believes several other counties went silent before Grant.  MACC began preparing its radios to go silent late last year.

The public will now have to get recordings of law enforcement dispatch calls through an open records request.