Police Scanner Laws in Colorado (2026): Is It Legal?

The law in Colorado

No provision of the Colorado Revised Statutes addresses police scanners: nothing restricts owning one, using one at home, or carrying one in a vehicle. The statutes that govern electronic interception generally are C.R.S. §§ 18-9-303 to 18-9-305, which address wiretapping and eavesdropping on conversations rather than reception of public safety broadcasts. Section 18-9-305 is worth knowing for anyone reporting: it carries an explicit exception for a news agency, or its employees, using the accepted tools and equipment of that medium in the course of reporting or investigating a public and newsworthy event.

Enforcement reality

With no scanner-specific statute there are no scanner prosecutions to point to. Federal law still sets the outer limit: receiving unencrypted transmissions is lawful, decrypting encrypted traffic is not.

What you can monitor in Colorado

With a police scanner in Colorado, you can legally listen to any unencrypted public safety channel, including:

• Fire department dispatch and operations
• EMS and ambulance communications
• NOAA weather alerts and emergency broadcasts
• Unencrypted police channels (where available)

In practice, of the 1,859 talkgroups catalogued across Colorado in our database, 1,286 are recorded as being in the clear and 557 as encrypted.

The radio systems most often recorded in Colorado are State of Colorado DTRS, Front Range Communications Consortium (FRCC), Mobile Relay Associates LTR, Denver, Denver International Airport, Two Way Communications NXDN.

Before buying a scanner, check whether your local agencies in Colorado have encrypted their communications. If they have, your scanner won't be able to receive their transmissions regardless of legal status.

What's already encrypted in Colorado

Scanner use being legal in Colorado does not mean everything is listenable. Our database currently tracks 106 agencies in Colorado that encrypt at least some radio traffic, across 34 counties. Of those, 34 encrypt all monitored channels rather than only a few.

The encryption most commonly recorded in Colorado is P25 ADP (64 agencies), P25 AES-256 (33 agencies), and P25 AES (9 agencies).

20 of these 106 records have been verified against RadioReference system data; the remainder are unverified and may be out of date. Encryption status changes without notice — confirm the current status of any specific agency on RadioReference before relying on it.

Frequently asked questions