Central New York Dispatch Briefing, Sunday, September 20, 2026

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Central New York emergency dispatchers put 1,659 calls over the air on Sunday, September 20, 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 53 percent above the median of 1,087 calls a day this log has recorded over the past 28 days.

Syracuse accounted for the largest single share of the located calls with 620, and General traffic was the most common category on the day at 859 calls. 1,163 of the 1,659 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 1,163 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 1.53, 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 72 graded critical, 379 graded high, 782 graded medium and 426 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 11 a.m. with 114 calls and bottomed out at 12 a.m. with 36. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 323 calls between them, 19.5 percent of the day, against 1,336 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.

• Shots Fired Reported 1:21 a.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Potential Murder Reported 2:09 a.m., Syracuse, General, graded critical
• Cardiac Arrest 4:15 a.m., Syracuse, EMS, graded critical
• Medical Emergency, Delta Response 4:16 a.m., Salina, EMS, graded critical
• Third Alarm Fire 4:42 a.m., DeWitt, Fire, graded critical
• Medical Emergency 5:15 a.m., Solvay, EMS, graded critical
• Medical Emergency on Lamson Street 8:36 a.m., Syracuse, EMS, graded critical
• Cardiac Emergency 9:45 a.m., Syracuse, EMS, graded critical
• Fire Alarm 9:53 a.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Allergic Reaction, Delta Response 10:01 a.m., Clay, General, graded critical
• Fire 1:22 p.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical
• Structure Fire Reported 1:23 p.m., Syracuse, Fire, graded critical

How this day compared

Quieter than the day around them: Cicero, 25 calls against the 43 a day this size would normally bring, Camillus, 13 calls against the 31 a day this size would normally bring, Onondaga County, 10 calls against the 18 a day this size would normally bring, Liverpool, 8 calls against the 16 a day this size would normally bring and Oswego, 8 calls against the 14 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

• Dispatch briefing for September 19, 2026
• Every daily dispatch briefing
• Search the full incident history
• CNY Signal newsroom reporting
• Live activity in Syracuse