Scanners have been around forever and while I haven’t seen one in a long time they sure were useful for the curious when you’d hear sirens roaring near your neighborhood.
Is there anything that has replaced them on the internet yet?
The other night we heard several loud booms followed a few minutes later by police/fire sirens going crazy. It would have been nice to be able to log onto some local police scanner live blog if such a thing exsisted.
Has anything replaced the outdated police scanner?
Scanners aren’t really obsolete. I have one and there is lots of activity on it. For the purpose you describe, a scanner would still be fastest way to get the most up to date information. You can buy a decent one for less than $100. I just have a basic handheld Radio Shack model. The internet is useful for finding scanner frequencies to listen for. You can listen to some radio frequencies via the internet such as Air Traffic Control and some big city police frequencies but I doubt your local departments on the internet.
One of our local TV stations has a link to an online scanner, and our fire dept has an online page where you can view an incident in realtime, with the address, # of trucks, etc. I can often pull it up while the sirens are still in earshot.
It really depends upon the area you live in. In my area there is a daily report available on line from the regional dispatch center. It includes a press log. This isn’t generally advertised but it is open to the public, if you find out where to look.
Here is the boring goings on in my area from yesterday:
If you poke around enough on the web sites of your city, county, law enforcement, 911 dispatch center, sites you may stumble across the same thing in your area. Or just ask your local newspaper where they get the incident reports they publish.
The newpapers aren’t taking to a real person to get this everyday, they have access, and you can too, once you find the site.
Here you go. I tried it and it definitely sounds like a police frequency, though I don’t know the Twin Cities area and so can’t verify the location is what they say it is.
Sorry for the double post (missed the window), but here’s the scanner feed for Chicago. Definitely a Chicago police frequency, but I don’t know what the lag is.
BorgHunter beat me to it. I have an app on my Android phone that uses radioreference.com and I listen to it all the time. There are iPhone scanner apps too which probably use the same source. It’s the legit feed, just lagged a few seconds or maybe a minute I believe. I’ve heard the Chicago police state the time when they take or close a call and it’s pretty close to the actual time but I can’t remember how close right now.
Seattle’s Internet/Text based scanner has been really interesting since I discovered it. It is really fascinating to see what responder units are called due to severity. Gas leaks are really impressive!