Jeff Sandell, creator of police scanner monitoring site, dies of cancer at 39 | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Sandell, creator of police scanner monitoring site, dies of cancer at 39

startribune.com

92 pointsdanso19 comments

I have no idea if Mr. Sandell was a programmer or otherwise bonafide web dev, but I think what he created is a nice example of what someone with tech skills can do with public information to improve the civic space. His website, mnpoliceclips.com, isn't going to win any web dev awards, but just goes to show you how far basic web dev -- and effort -- can get you. Seems like has a lot of fans on FB too: https://www.facebook.com/PoliceClips/

Agreed. I'd encourage HN readers to participate in events like this one: https://www.codeforamerica.org/events/national-day-2016

this! I don't know him or his motivations : but the concept of using one's time and skills in technology for social justice / watch dog activities is appealing. Seems this could play an important part of our checks and balances as journalism goes through its transformation.

(reminder to self: get that ham license)

Interesting read, http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php?topic=17576.0;wa...

Police scanner laws seem really antiquated.

Would a smartphone with a police scanner app (or even just TuneIn) count?

Encryption is the correct solution anyway.

We're conflating scanners and amateur radio here - so I'm just trying to pull that apart a bit:

The cool thing about amateur radio IMO isn't that it might give one the ability to intercept communications (even though the topic here is scanners (rx only)), but rather give one the ability to legally use a whole bunch of spectrum (tx & rx). Combine this with other technology - phones, software etc and it becomes a very powerful tool for civilian innovation.

>Encryption is the correct solution anyway.

I wouldn't say solution. Realtime visibility of police activity is critical to understanding what's happening in a city and holding one of its most important institutions accountable.

Police operating in secret is a deeply scary thing.

Granted, there are other mechanisms, like daily activity logs that can be inspected at the police station.

The difference between Soviet-style "disappearing" people and arresting them is putting the fact of their arrest in a place where a newspaper will find it. This stuff matters.

As the recent shootings in Dallas show, having police comm happen on public airspace is crucial in crisis situations. Even with traffic unencrypted there was huge confusion...imagine some "which fucking frequency are you using and why is Officer Smith not fucking using it?" mixed into the clusterfuck, exacerbated by encryption protocol differences between multiple agencies -- Dallas PD, DART, FBI, ATF, county sheriff, Texas highway patrol, college campus police, nevermind fire and ambulance.

Having to deal with multiple frequencies and protocols is a fucking nightmare on an emergency scene. God forbid you have multiple agencies from various counties and states, plus something federal mixed in. It's really a bad experience and messages do get lost.

Source: former firefighter and 911 dispatcher.

I'm sort of on the fence. Previously I would have completely agreed - police comms chatter should be public information.

I live in a small country, and I set up a police scanner recently (a bit more effort than the US scanners, as we use TETRA digital radio, so there aren't many people listening). I had fun for a couple of nights listening to the stream.

Then I realised that most police work is dealing with really sad human drama. Listening to that stuff is draining, and honestly a lot of it is none of my business.

One of the early recordings I got was talking about an asylum seeker who was threatening to kill himself. The officer was clearly worried about him, and was talking to dispatch about how he'd previously talked to this guy when he doused himself in gasoline in the red cross office and tried to put himself on fire. The person was named and his social identity number was read out through the radio. I really felt bad after listening to that, like I was trying to get kicks from others misery.

I don't listen to the recordings anymore. But I still record, in case something big and interesting comes up (think police shooting - having a record of police radio could potentially clear things up). Still, I think it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if they paid for the TETRA encryption license.

OTOH, I think it's important for the public to have a low-friction channel to day-to-day police work, the kind of things that police do 99% of the time when they aren't in the news for something extraordinary (I use extraordinary in a neutral sense, for both heroic and scandalous incidents). Much of it is quite mundane and often depressing, but it's part of civil society, and it sheds light on why police work is sometimes the way it is.

Of course, there's always the danger that some entrepreneur will try to monetize this public information by appealing to pruriency [0], but I think we should cross that bridge when we get there, rather than preemptively shutting down a valuable channel that has more benefits (for now) being open than closed.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28mug.html?_r=0

>Much of it is quite mundane and often depressing, but it's part of civil society

Thanks, I think it's part of civil society nails what I was trying to say.

His father, Michael, died in 2002, also from colon cancer.

This is the most sad part of the story. For cancer that is relatively treatable if caught early enough, please see this as a cautionary tale and be extra diligent in getting checked out for diseases that may be hereditary.

That's the problem with many cancers though: there are no symptoms until it's very late. And biomarkers fail to show clear signs for detection in most cases as well. He was 39, even if you have cancer in your family history, it's still relatively unlikely you would get it THAT young. Apart from certain types of cancer, the biggest factor for developing cancer is Age.

The problem with that logic is that nobody knows the speed with which cancer multiplies.

Even if you got checks down to three months (which no insurance would cover), it would still be like finding a fetus growing inside your colon but too bad it already pierced into other organs because there is no room for fetuses to grow there

The fetus analogy practical because many women don't figure out that are pregnant in the first trimester.

I'd never thought of cancer like that before. You're pregnant with a fetus which is constantly reproducing, trying to make a fetus army in your organs.

The process of pregancy is, in many respects rather like a parasitic infection. The foetus is very good at dampening the mother's defences to it.

This is most likely a form of hereditary colon cancer e.g. Lynch syndrome. It is caused by a germline (inherited) mutation in one of the genes that repair random mutations associated with replication (e.g. the MLH1). Because colon cells divide very fast colon cancer is typically the first one to form.

I looked forward to "North Side Current Events" every morning. He'll be missed.

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