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Central New York Dispatch Briefing, Wednesday, March 25, 2026

| By CNY Signal Services | Standards | Corrections | Updated

Bar chart of dispatch calls by hour for Wednesday, March 25, 2026: 22,593 calls logged, peaking at 4 p.m. with 2,249.
Calls per hour on Wednesday, March 25, 2026: 22,593 transmissions logged, peaking at 4 p.m. with 2,249 calls. Source: CNY Signal scanner log of public safety radio across Central New York.

Central New York emergency dispatchers put 22,593 calls over the air on Wednesday, March 25, 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 12,022, and Police traffic was the most common category on the day at 13,264 calls. 22,156 of the 22,593 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

22,593Calls loggedindividual radio transmissions captured and transcribed
488Distinct incidentsafter transmissions from the same call are grouped
14Communities namedtowns, villages and cities that appeared on the air
4 p.m.Busiest hour2,249 calls in that hour
11 p.m.Quietest hour8 calls in that hour
9,150Highest priority callsgraded critical or high by the classifier

Where the calls came from

These are the 14 communities that appeared most often in the day's radio traffic. The share column is measured against the 22,156 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.

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Community Calls Share of located calls
Onondaga County 12,022 54.3 percent
Syracuse 4,645 21.0 percent
Madison 3,696 16.7 percent
East Syracuse 1,665 7.5 percent
DeWitt 40 0.2 percent
Manlius 30 0.1 percent
Salina 25 0.1 percent
Clay 13 0.1 percent
Onondaga 6 0.0 percent
Fayetteville 5 0.0 percent
LaFayette 4 0.0 percent
Camillus 2 0.0 percent
Solvay 2 0.0 percent
Van Buren 1 0.0 percent

What kind of calls they were

Category Calls Share of the day
Police 13,264 58.7 percent
EMS 5,449 24.1 percent
Fire 3,684 16.3 percent
General 187 0.8 percent
Service 9 0.0 percent

Priority grading for the day broke down as 2 graded critical, 9,148 graded high, 13,423 graded medium and 20 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 2,988
Syracuse PD North-East traffic 1,660
Madison EMS Ops 1 traffic 631
OC Fire Tac 3 traffic 340
Onondaga MWB 1 traffic 188
Syracuse Fire Ops 3 traffic 167
OC Fire Command traffic 132
TLC Ambulance traffic 109
Syracuse PD Car-to-Car traffic 38
Domestic 37

How the day ran, hour by hour

Radio volume peaked at 4 p.m. with 2,249 calls and bottomed out at 11 p.m. with 8. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 4,806 calls between them, 21.3 percent of the day, against 17,787 across the other eighteen hours.

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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 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.

Keep reading

How this recap was built

Publishing source Dispatch Digest V1
Recap day 2026-03-25
Totals 22593 updates / 488 incidents
Top town Onondaga County
Top service Law

This story came from public records we pulled ourselves

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