Access to one of the tools media outlets use to get timely information from police is being taken from Regina newsrooms.

Newsrooms monitor police scanners to keep up with what the Regina Police Service is responding to; car crashes and shootings for example. On August 6, media will lose access to the secure police radio channel that allowed them to monitor those communications.

In the beginning of 2018, all municipal police services in Saskatchewan became subject to The Local Authority Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The Regina Police Service says it is in contravention of the legislation by allowing media access to its secure radio channel. It says it values the relationship between police and newsrooms, but the service has to follow the legislation.

“We rely on the media to help us with street closures, helping when we need people to avoid a certain area,” RPS Chief Evan Bray said. "I’m not happy if we are doing something that is going to restrict that flow of information or inhibit the media to help us out. At the same time I have to be very aware that we handle very sensitive information.”

The change has already happened in Saskatoon, The issue is the disclosure of private information in radio transmissions.

"Personal information about me is the disclosure,” Information and Privacy Commissioner Ron Kruzeniski said. “You may have ethical standards that you do nothing with it but you've still heard it, it's been disclosed so the problem is the transmission not what the hearer of information does with it."

"In this case if the police are responsible in communicating what is happening with policing that raises questions of whether there's going to be an implicit biases of the information that's being provided,” Sean Sinclair, legal counsel for local newsrooms, said. “To the public, right now we have an independent third party, the media providing information to the public but now it's all going to be vetted through the police service itself."

Sociology experts say that despite legislation, the public should be worried about newsrooms losing access to information.

"In a democracy the press plays a very important role. It does this job or critique of looking at problems and trying to solve them,” Scott Thompson, an Assistant Professor of Sociology said. “Removing that access makes it so less people are working on that problem, less able to come up with a solution."

A local assignment editor says newsrooms will need the public more than ever to let them know what's going on in their communities.

"We're monitoring it all day long,” Nelson Bird, Assignment Editor at CTV Regina said. “Sometimes we hear things that I will assign a reporter to go and get the visuals if it’s an accident or a crash, we can be there pretty quick if we need to be."