Winner of the Student Writer Award Bronze Medal, Research Essay Category (1st-2nd Year). Although we are acquainted with the home police scanner as a vigilante crime-solving tool in movies and television, for the Wareham family whose patriarch John Douglas Wareham is a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the home scanner is used as a reassurance of safety, and a tool for planning out their daily lives. The Warehams purchased the scanner over twenty years ago and had kept it on and playing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the RCMP switched to an encrypted digital format for their communication in 2019. The scanner itself is the product of police shaping the broader medium of radio, originally a tool used by hobbyists that was later intended to connect and unite citizens, into a tool for organizing and deploying police officers. This research paper will focus on the ability of the Wareham family to shape the medium of the radio scanner into their daily lives, as well as the influence exerted onto them by the medium.
