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Central New York Dispatch Briefing, Thursday, August 27, 2026

| By CNY Signal Services | Standards | Corrections

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Central New York emergency dispatchers put 518 calls over the air on Thursday, August 27, 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 72 percent below the median of 1,853 calls a day this log has recorded over the past 28 days.

Syracuse accounted for the largest single share of the located calls with 191, and Police traffic was the most common category on the day at 272 calls. 453 of the 518 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.

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By the numbers

518Calls loggedindividual radio transmissions captured and transcribed
456Distinct incidentsafter transmissions from the same call are grouped
34Communities namedtowns, villages and cities that appeared on the air
10 a.m.Busiest hour59 calls in that hour
2 a.m.Quietest hour3 calls in that hour
168Highest priority callsgraded critical or high by the classifier

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 453 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 0.28, the ratio of this day's total to the recent median.

Community Calls Share of located calls Against a normal day this size
Syracuse 191 42.2 percent In line
Manlius 36 7.9 percent 197 percent above
DeWitt 34 7.5 percent 140 percent above
Clay 30 6.6 percent 75 percent above
Salina 24 5.3 percent 89 percent above
Cicero 22 4.9 percent 74 percent above
Camillus 18 4.0 percent 109 percent above
Geddes 17 3.8 percent 285 percent above
Onondaga 16 3.5 percent 33 percent above
North Syracuse 10 2.2 percent 87 percent above
Solvay 7 1.5 percent 78 percent above
Elbridge 4 0.9 percent Too few calls to compare
Fayetteville 4 0.9 percent 19 percent below
Minoa 4 0.9 percent Too few calls to compare
LaFayette 4 0.9 percent Too few calls to compare

What kind of calls they were

Category Calls Share of the day Against a normal day this size
Police 272 52.5 percent 271 percent above
Fire 86 16.6 percent 74 percent above
General 79 15.3 percent 73 percent below
EMS 76 14.7 percent 46 percent below
Service 5 1.0 percent Too few calls to compare

Priority grading for the day broke down as 6 graded critical, 162 graded high, 312 graded medium and 38 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.

Call type Times dispatched
Motor Vehicle Collision Injuries Presented 41
Motor Vehicle Collision Damage Only, J/O 29
Medical Emergency 24
Traffic Complaint 22
Alarm Fire 18
Vehicle Complaint 16
Animal Complaint 11
Wire(S) Down 11
Criminal Mischief 10
Alarm Burglary 10

How the day ran, hour by hour

Radio volume peaked at 10 a.m. with 59 calls and bottomed out at 2 a.m. with 3. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 86 calls between them, 16.6 percent of the day, against 432 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.

How this day compared

Busier than the day around them: Manlius, 36 calls against the 12 a day this size would normally bring, DeWitt, 34 calls against the 14 a day this size would normally bring, Clay, 30 calls against the 17 a day this size would normally bring, Salina, 24 calls against the 13 a day this size would normally bring and Cicero, 22 calls against the 13 a day this size would normally bring. Quieter than the day around them: Liverpool, 1 calls against the 5 a day this size would normally bring and Oswego, 1 calls against the 6 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 25 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 3 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

How this recap was built

Publishing source Dispatch Digest V1
Recap day 2026-08-27
Totals 518 updates / 456 incidents
Top town Syracuse
Top service Law

This story came from public records we pulled ourselves

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