Central New York Dispatch Briefing, Wednesday, August 12, 2026

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Central New York emergency dispatchers put 857 calls over the air on Wednesday, August 12, 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 62 percent below the median of 2,237 calls a day this log has recorded over the past 28 days.

Syracuse accounted for the largest single share of the located calls with 288, and General traffic was the most common category on the day at 466 calls. 611 of the 857 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 611 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 0.38, 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 32 graded critical, 201 graded high, 389 graded medium and 235 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 12 p.m. with 136 calls and bottomed out at 2 a.m. with 2. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 48 calls between them, 5.6 percent of the day, against 809 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.

• Working Structure Fire 8:15 a.m., Fayetteville, Fire, graded critical
• Fire Alarm 8:42 a.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Motor Vehicle Collision Damage Only, J/O 9:56 a.m., Syracuse, Police, graded critical
• Medical Emergency 11:48 a.m., Clay, EMS, graded critical
• Structure Fire Reported 11:52 a.m., Fayetteville, Fire, graded critical
• Medical Emergency, Delta Response 12:33 p.m., Syracuse, EMS, graded critical
• Child Locked 12:38 p.m., Granby, General, graded critical
• Shooting Reported 1:39 p.m., Syracuse, Police, graded critical
• Drowning Response 2:00 p.m., Van Buren, General, graded critical
• Working Fire Reported 4:44 p.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Fire Reported 4:45 p.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Fire Response 4:45 p.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical

How this day compared

Busier than the day around them: Manlius, 27 calls against the 19 a day this size would normally bring and Fayetteville, 15 calls against the 8 a day this size would normally bring. Quieter than the day around them: Geddes, 3 calls against the 7 a day this size would normally bring and Solvay, 3 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 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 11, 2026
• Every daily dispatch briefing
• Search the full incident history
• CNY Signal newsroom reporting
• Live activity in Syracuse