Listening to cops on FM.

[colly0410]

I remember listening to the police on around 100 MHz years ago, I used to get exited if a chase was coming near my QTH. I remember during the miners strike in 1984 the pickets were picketing the nearby NCB area workshops (Bestwood) & they were listening to the cops, they'd come in the pub I worked in & listen in to see what was going on. Not anymore as Radio 1 is there around 100 MHz...

[Doodlebug]

Wasn't it illegal to do that?

[ppppenguin]

Of course it was illegal. Was anyone ever caught, let alone prosecuted?

[Refugee]

I would be inclined to say "supposed to be illegal".
We used to listen at school.

[Alistair D]

Yep used to do that too back in the 60s too.

I was under the impression that it wasn't illegal to listen in. It was illegal to act on anything heard.  

Al

[Terry]

No, it is definitely illegal. The licence gave you permission to receive authorised broadcast transmissions from anywhere but the police, etc, transmissions were not authorised as broadcasting stations and to listen to them was, therefore, illegal, as you didn't have and couldn't get a licence to receive them.

Listening to pirate stations is similarly illegal because those transmissions aren't authorised for any purpose at all. I can't visualise the government of the day prosecuting everybody who listened to Radio Caroline, et al, though!

Even though the wireless licence has been abolished, the law, as defined by the Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1948 still stands although possibly modified by later laws*.

As a junior schoolboy I walked past an empty police car one summer afternoon. The windows were open slightly and I could clearly hear the radio inside as a list of vehicle registration numbers was read out! I often wondered if I was committing an offence simply by hearing it!

* It is surprising how long some of these old acts of parliament still have authority when you would expect them to have been superseded years ago.

In the early 70s I was having a bit of a battle over early running buses - when the last bus, in particular, runs well early it can be very irritating! This was pre-internet of course, so I paid a visit to the local reference library to see what I could find out. The current act at that time was The Transport Act, 1970. Eventually I found this:

Conduct of passengers, drivers and conductors on Public Service Vehicles.

The minister may make regulation concerning the conduct of passengers, drivers and conductors on Public Service Vehicles.

Not quite what I'd hoped for but there was a reference to a useful footnote which said that regulations made under the Road Transport Act, 1934 (!) still stood as if they had been made under the new act. So, back to the bookshelves!

A search of the RTA 1934 revealed:

146. Conduct of drivers and conductors on Public Service Vehicles.

The minister may make regulation concerning the conduct of drivers and conductors on Public Service Vehicles when acting as such as defined by section one hundred and forty four of the act.

Sect. 144 is concerned only with licencing, so not much further forward except that this book also included all the Statutory Instruments and Regulation made under the various acts which led me to Statutory Instrument No. 619 of 1934. I went through the list which didn't really cover what I was looking for and, in any case, complaints under the act couldn't be made by anybody below the rank of police officer so, at that point, I gave up!

[Kalee20]

I'm sure it was not illegal to listen, only to act.

In the 1970's I recall a policeman giving a talk at school on police radio equipment, and this subject came up. He said (and obviously this was only a policeman's working knowledge of the law), that if we heard something was on - such as a nearby car chase - and ran out to see the fun, that would be illegal. But to hear it on the radio and do nothing, no offence had been committed.

I believe that this was argued as a defence for radar speed trap detectors some years ago - after many years of summonses and fines, a test case arose where a motorist decided to plead not guilty under the laws at the time, and defended his case on the grounds that his receiver was not equipped to decode the transmission, only to detect that a transmission was taking place; secondly that he believed that the speed trap transmitted no message anyway so he couldn't decode anything even if he wanted to; and thirdly that as soon as he realised that he was receiving signals from police equipment, he switched off his detector (and presumably watched his speed!). He was acquitted. And so a specific law had to be enacted to make the speed trap detectors illegal.

[pamphonica]

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/p...anners.pdf

Jeremy

[Terry]

The speed trap thing is interesting as it isn't illegal for your Satnav to tell you where all the fixed cameras are and mine even warns me of the areas where mobile traps are used.

In France, however, it is now illegal and I note that my Garmin seems to have them switched off by default but then springs into action again when I cross the Belgian border.

Unlike the prominent Gatso and Truevelo detectors which are reasonably visible even in countries  that don't paint them yellow, the French were always devious!

Before the Satnav warnings were made illegal there was one on the E40 running up the coast from Calais that was almost invisible - you could only identify it when travelling on the other carriageway if the light was reflected by the camera lens. It was in the central reservation and looked like a little wooden box covered in brown sacking!

A couple of years ago I was travelling south on the E40 towards Dunkerque when everything dropped to a crawl. I was in the inside lane and happened to glance in my mirror as we crawled past the entrance of an off-slip with one of those French pass-either-side bollards that look like an upturned green dustbin and was surprised to find I was looking directly into the lens of the camera hidden inside the bollard with a hole cut out in the back!

[colly0410]

Remember back in the summer of 1976 that the local woods caught fire, fire control & police indent vans were parked outside my parents house. The boss cops & fire brigade gaffers were partaking of Dads homebrew & their transmissions kept breaking through on the TV, they were using it to spy on the unsuspecting bods in the vans. The cops all drove after Dads lethal homebrew..