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The most accurate information may be gleaned from police scanners. News cameras may give you pictures of the amount of police officers at the scene, but they ca
by a_p 13y ago
The most accurate information may be gleaned from police scanners. News cameras may give you pictures of the amount of police officers at the scene, but they cannot get close enough to give you video of what's actually happening. The irony is that of those three sources of information (Web site, radio, news camera), the best source of "real time" information is the oldest. Yes, it's true that the scanner is being broadcast over the internet, but you could listen to the police scanner with amateur radio equipment decades ago.
EDIT: I find that it is much easier to listen to the police scanner than a news station, because the SNR ratio is much higher. When there is a break in the action, news reporters fill the air time with speculation or repeat the same old information. On the police scanner, when they have no new information, they are silent.
Having said that, I still find it cool to hear an officer ask the dispatcher (on the radio) to tell an overhead helicopter to point a searchlight at a certain location, and moments later see on television a helicopter flying overhead with its searchlight on.
- kellishaver 13y agoMaybe it's the fact that I spent my youth growing up around HAM radio and then did several years of EMS dispatching, but I much prefer listening to the scanner than the news. It can be chaotic at times, garbled at others, but if you're used to sorting it out, it's the best way to get accurate information.
- flexd 13y agoThere are a lot of people listening. I think perhaps the best way of learning information now is to follow the info posted in #bostonbombing on Freenode, they are live-updating what they hear on the scanners + a lot of other sources.
- mindcrime 13y agoFormer firefighter and 911 dispatcher here: I agree completely. It takes a while to get a feel for it, but if you want to know what's going on in real-time, listening to the emergency comms is the way to go. Unfortunately, in some jurisdictions that's hard or impossible to do, as they use digital systems with trunking that made it hard to monitor with a scanner and/or use encryption. Need I say that I think encrypting this stuff is a bad idea? Even if it may, on rare occasion, benefit a "bad guy" to listen to the police channels, weighed against the need for government transparency, I think the need to keep the comms open for everybody wins out.
- smackfu 13y agoOnly problem here is that people take the police scanner as gospel, even though the police may be as confused as anyone else. And because it's not a news source, no one feels the need to explicitly correct things that are wrong.
- hga 13y agoAbsolutely, it's full of the fog of war. But I'd rather try to interpret that myself than get it filtered through the traditional media in quasi-real time (vs. the much more reliable reporting that happens, say, a couple days after everything is over).
- ra 13y agoThe scanner feeds on tunein and broadcastify seem to have been cut? That's consistent with reports that the perp was last seen using a laptop and SWAT were surrounding his location. Also the press have been asked to stop tweeting what they hear on their scanners. Anyone know a working live scanner feed? UPDATE: "MA State PD and Boston Police have requested via social media to not post search locations for the Boston bombing suspects - the Boston PD feed is temporarily offline due to this request.", http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/mid/13/?rl=rr http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/mid/13/?rl=rr