Staten Island school shooting shows the true danger of NYPD radio encryption (Opinion)

There was a shooting at a high school on Staten Island on Thursday.

And without a reader's tip, Advance/SILive.com may never have known about it.

This means that you, the public, may never have heard of it.

Can you imagine that?

The shooting occurred in a park across from McKee High School in St. George. A 17-year-old was wounded in the leg. At least five shots were fired during the incident.

The shooting occurred a day after a student had a gun confiscated as he entered nearby Curtis High School. Police believe the incident may be related to gang violence.

In these days when school shootings continue to rock the country and youth violence is a major problem on Staten Island, it is dangerous for a community to not have access to police radio.

And you can blame Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD.

Police radio traffic has been encrypted on Staten Island and other parts of the city. Soon, police radio traffic will be blocked in all five boroughs.

Adams said this is being done to prevent the crooks from listening in on NYPD transmissions and staying one step ahead of the police.

This means that news reporters, radio hobbyists and ordinary citizens can no longer hear police radio messages. We are all in the dark.

We don't know when a police-involved incident will occur on Staten Island, and that means we can't update you on what's happening.

And it means there's a tremendous lack of transparency when it comes to the NYPD. Now they're the only ones who have the official version of an incident. That's not a safe path for a society. There has to be accountability.

This means parents may not learn about an incident at their child's school, such as a shooting, in a timely manner, or they may not learn as many details as they could have.

For nearly 150 years, Staten Islanders have turned to Advance and now SILive.com for information about what was happening in the borough, often when they couldn't find information anywhere else.

But we can't do that job the way we used to because we don't know in real time when incidents – even ones as serious as a school shooting – are happening.

It wasn't always like this.

In October 2022, a student was injured by gunfire outside Tottenville High School. The NYPD was searching for five people suspected of being involved in the chaos.

Advance/SILive.com was quick to respond to the incident. We notified Tottenville students and parents. We were live on Facebook that day and later.

We were there for the residents of Staten Island, that is our mission. But now that we can no longer monitor traffic on the NYPD radios, it is more difficult to accomplish that mission.

One wonders how helpless we will all feel if mobile phones are banned in schools.

It should concern every resident of Staten Island.

The city's Department of Education said information was quickly passed on to parents following Thursday's shooting.

That's good to hear.

But we all want to have as much information at our fingertips as possible, especially when our children may be in danger. That's where Advance/SILive.com comes in.

We receive information from many sources and share it in real time. We also provide a forum where ordinary people can share information with us.

This type of work is invaluable in times of crisis, be it a school shooting, a natural disaster or another emergency.

It makes everyone feel connected. And it can actually help people feel safer.

But we need to know that something is going on. And that is difficult because we have no information from the police radio stations.

This makes reporting more difficult.

It makes it difficult to hold those in power accountable.

It reduces our security for everyone.