Anyone else ever listen to these?
http://www.apbnews.com/
click on the “live police scanners” link right below the logo.
I love it! I’m listening to one out of Dallas right now. I don’t know why I love it, I just do. I enjoy decifering the lingo and imagining what’s going on. Am I sick?
Zette
Yep, Zette, my SO and I have two of them. They’re almost constantly on. You hear some really fascinating (and sometimes helpful) stuff.
This is not a pronouncement for or against private citizens listening to police scanners, but just a recent experience that has been on my mind.
Last Saturday Mr. Scarlett and I drove past our small town’s fire station on our way to the hardware store. All the doors were open and the trucks were gone. We wondered where the fire was.
Just after we walked into the hardware store, the police scanner that the clerk had on was reporting on an accident (my thoughts in brackets): “Head-on collision, sedan vs.semi [oh my God this can’t be good] . . . one victim fatally injured [damn it all]. . . we’ve got another person in a C-spine in transport . . . ETA at the hospital eight minutes . . .”
Now I know that tragedies happen every day and people die every day, but it was just rather upsetting to be getting the play-by-play on the event, minutes after it happened. As we walked back to our car on that sunny day, I couldn’t help thinking of the poor person not far away who was freshly and violently dead. About twenty minutes later, as we headed to our favorite coffeeshop, I thought of the person or people who were probably getting very bad news right about now. I was driving, and let me tell you that I watched the oncoming traffic very carefully.
I felt slightly unsettled for the rest of the day.
Excellent point, Scarlett. I guess I’m a little desensitized to that stuff. I worked in a hospital (pharmacy) that was a trauma center, and we had a scanner on all the time, preparing for bad emergencies.
I guess I got used to it.
I like listening to the big city ones because it’s just interesting to me (in a spying sort of way)
Zette
My mom had 3 going 24/7. She had one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one in the living room (which she would sometimes turn down if you asked nicely). these were on ALLLLLLLL the time.
She, of course, would get on my case if I walked out of my bedroom without shutting the light off, even tho’ I was GOING to go RIGHT BACK IN dammit and the amountofelectricity used…
oh. sorry. flashback.
No, I personally hate the things.
One of my journalism classes requires me to spend about 20 hours a week working in our newsroom, so police scanners have kind of turned into background noise for me. I think most of the reporters hanging around see the scanner as an instant lead machine rather than a minute-by-minute account of what could very well be a human tragedy. It would probably be very difficult for most of us to go out and cover something like the car accident Scarlett heard about if we didn’t adopt this attitude, but sometimes I think the constant exposure to the damn thing keeps us so detatched that we don’t do our jobs as well as we should.
I used to be a copy editor at a newspaper, and this would never happen where I worked – the reporters always turned off the scanners near them because they were bothered by the noise. :rolleyes:
I still remember the time I heard a report about a serious car accident with a signal 7 (code for a dead person). I was the one who had to call the photographer and let him know about it. We felt horrible for the rest of the day.