Going dark: Police agencies in South Dakota's largest cities encrypting emergency response radio traffic

New transmissions systems bring option to move all police, fire, ambulance communications offline for Rapid City, Sioux Falls, Pennington County and Minnehaha County

Emergency response radio signals in South Dakota’s two largest counties are going encrypted.

And that means the days of listening to scanner traffic between 911 dispatchers, police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians are over in Sioux Falls, Rapid City and across both Minnehaha County and Pennington County.

Sioux Falls Police Chief J…