

The apps don't even turn your phone into a true scanner.
#Download police scanner license#
The problem, police and legal experts say, is that if you have it with you - in other words, if it's a mobile police scanner - then you can use it the way Matthew Hale is accused of: to aid in the commission of some other crime.Īt least five states - Indiana among them, along with Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota and New York - make it illegal to use a mobile police scanner without a license from the Federal Communications Commission (i.e., a ham license) or permission from local law enforcement. Where things get sticky is when you take it out of your home. It is legal to own a police scanner radio on that, pretty much everyone agrees. (An earlier version of this post misspelled Benjamin Wright's name.) "As you look across the United States, we have 50 different states, and every state has different laws on things like obstruction of justice," said Benjamin Wright, a legal scholar in data security and forensics technology at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md., which teaches law enforcement and other security personnel the ins and outs of technology. Should you scrub that scanner app from your phone? It depends. The law, it turns out, is quite literally all over the map on whether it's legal to use scanner apps on smartphones.
