CNY Recap
Back to live boardCentral New York Dispatch Briefing, Sunday, March 22, 2026
Central New York emergency dispatchers put 10,716 calls over the air on Sunday, March 22, 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.
Onondaga County accounted for the largest single share of the located calls with 5,277, and Police traffic was the most common category on the day at 6,322 calls. 10,296 of the 10,716 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 11 communities that appeared most often in the day's radio traffic. The share column is measured against the 10,296 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.
| Community | Calls | Share of located calls |
|---|---|---|
| Onondaga County | 5,277 | 51.3 percent |
| Madison | 2,242 | 21.8 percent |
| Syracuse | 1,870 | 18.2 percent |
| East Syracuse | 843 | 8.2 percent |
| Salina | 17 | 0.2 percent |
| DeWitt | 15 | 0.1 percent |
| Clay | 9 | 0.1 percent |
| Manlius | 8 | 0.1 percent |
| Onondaga | 7 | 0.1 percent |
| Fayetteville | 5 | 0.0 percent |
| LaFayette | 3 | 0.0 percent |
What kind of calls they were
| Category | Calls | Share of the day |
|---|---|---|
| Police | 6,322 | 59.0 percent |
| EMS | 2,456 | 22.9 percent |
| Fire | 1,837 | 17.1 percent |
| General | 94 | 0.9 percent |
| Service | 7 | 0.1 percent |
Priority grading for the day broke down as 1 graded critical, 4,299 graded high, 6,406 graded medium and 10 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 |
|---|---|
| Syracuse PD South-West traffic | 1,278 |
| Syracuse PD North-East traffic | 841 |
| Madison EMS Ops 1 traffic | 372 |
| OC Fire Tac 3 traffic | 129 |
| OC Fire Command traffic | 106 |
| Onondaga MWB 1 traffic | 92 |
| TLC Ambulance traffic | 71 |
| Syracuse Fire Ops 4 traffic | 45 |
| Domestic | 40 |
| Syracuse Fire Ops 3 traffic | 32 |
How the day ran, hour by hour
Radio volume peaked at 2 p.m. with 990 calls and bottomed out at 11 p.m. with 11. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 4,321 calls between them, 40.3 percent of the day, against 6,395 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.
- Stabbing
- Madison EMS Ops 1 traffic
- TLC Ambulance traffic
- Syracuse Fire Control 1 traffic
- OC Fire Command traffic
- OC Fire Tac 3 traffic
- Madison Rescue/Ambulance Ops traffic
- OC Fire Tac 2 traffic
- Syracuse Fire Ops 3 traffic
- Syracuse Fire Ops 4 traffic
- Assault
- Syracuse Fire Ops 2 traffic
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 28 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.
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How this recap was built
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