Central New York Dispatch Briefing, Tuesday, August 18, 2026

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Central New York emergency dispatchers put 1,669 calls over the air on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, according to the running log CNY Signal keeps of every transmission it captures from public safety radio across Onondaga County and the counties around it. That is 25 percent below the median of 2,225 calls a day this log has recorded over the past 28 days.

Syracuse accounted for the largest single share of the located calls with 593, and General traffic was the most common category on the day at 889 calls. 1,196 of the 1,669 logged transmissions carried a town or city label, and the rest were regional channels or calls where dispatchers never named a place on the air.

By the numbers

Where the calls came from

These are the 15 communities that appeared most often in the day's radio traffic. The share column is measured against the 1,196 calls that carried a place name, not against the full day, so the column adds up to the located calls rather than to everything logged.

The last column is adjusted for how busy the whole day was. A community is only called busier or quieter than usual if it moved against the day around it, so a day when every antenna heard more traffic does not read as every town having a bad day. Expected volume is that community's recent daily average scaled by 0.75, the ratio of this day's total to the recent median.

What kind of calls they were

Priority grading for the day broke down as 87 graded critical, 395 graded high, 720 graded medium and 467 graded low. The grade is assigned automatically from the language of the dispatch, so it reflects how the call was toned out, not how it ended.

The calls that repeat

Ranked by how often the same kind of call went out. Routine radio housekeeping such as channel checks and dispatch tones is excluded from this table, though it is still counted in the day total above.

How the day ran, hour by hour

Radio volume peaked at 9 p.m. with 144 calls and bottomed out at 7 a.m. with 25. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 235 calls between them, 14.1 percent of the day, against 1,434 across the other eighteen hours.

Calls per hour, midnight at the left through 11 p.m. at the right. Hover or tap a bar for its count.

Calls that stood out

A cross section of the highest priority calls of the day, one per call type so the list is not twelve of the same thing. Each links to the transcript record for that dispatch.

• Cardiac Arrest Response 12:16 a.m., Syracuse, EMS, graded critical
• Medical Emergency 2:28 a.m., Syracuse, EMS, graded critical
• Structure Fire Reported 3:00 a.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Fire Reported in town 3:02 a.m., town, Fire, graded critical
• Cardiac Arrest 3:59 a.m., Brewerton, EMS, graded critical
• Stabbing Reported 7:33 a.m., Syracuse, Police, graded critical
• Working Fire 8:07 a.m., Jefferson, Fire, graded critical
• Working Vehicle Fire 8:19 a.m., Jefferson, Fire, graded critical
• Rescue Response 10:29 a.m., Syracuse, General, graded critical
• Vehicle crash with Entrapment 10:29 a.m., Syracuse, General, graded critical
• Fire Alarm Reported 10:44 a.m., Salina, Fire, graded critical
• Medical Emergency, Delta Response 11:00 a.m., Clay, EMS, graded critical

How this day compared

Busier than the day around them: Van Buren, 15 calls against the 8 a day this size would normally bring, Skaneateles, 10 calls against the 7 a day this size would normally bring and Oneida, 10 calls against the 5 a day this size would normally bring. Quieter than the day around them: Cicero, 21 calls against the 38 a day this size would normally bring, East Syracuse, 4 calls against the 7 a day this size would normally bring and Bridgeport, 1 calls against the 7 a day this size would normally bring.

Only communities averaging at least five calls a day are compared, because a town that normally sees one call can double its own volume without anything happening. The baseline is drawn from 24 usable days inside the past 28.

How this page is built

CNY Signal runs software defined radio receivers on public safety frequencies across Central New York. Transmissions are recorded, transcribed by an automatic speech recognition model, classified by service and priority, and matched to a community when dispatchers name one on the air. Everything on this page is counted from that log for the calendar day named in the headline. Nothing here is estimated.

One caveat governs every comparison on this page. The number of receivers and the frequencies they cover have changed as this network was built out, so a day with more logged calls than last month is partly a day the antennas could hear more. That is why the totals here are always described against what this log has recorded and never against emergency activity in the abstract, and why the community and category comparisons are scaled to the size of the day rather than quoted raw. What those columns measure is whether a place moved against the day around it, which coverage changes do not affect.

Two further limits are worth stating plainly. First, scanner traffic is not an official incident count. Agencies do not tone out every call over the air, encrypted channels are not captured, and a single incident can generate a dozen transmissions, which is why distinct incidents are reported separately from calls logged. Second, automatic transcription makes mistakes, particularly with street names and unit numbers, so a call type here reflects what the transcription understood, not a verified record. Anything that looks wrong can be reported through the corrections page and it will be checked against the audio.

Comparisons on this page exclude 4 of the past 28 days, where receiver or ingest downtime meant the log captured less than half a normal day. Leaving those days in would make the following day look like a spike when nothing had changed on the street.

Keep reading

• Dispatch briefing for August 17, 2026
• Every daily dispatch briefing
• Search the full incident history
• CNY Signal newsroom reporting
• Live activity in Syracuse