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Central New York Dispatch Briefing, Saturday, October 31, 2026

| By CNY Signal Services | Standards | Corrections

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Central New York emergency dispatchers put 745 calls over the air on Saturday, October 31, 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 33 percent above the median of 560 calls a day this log has recorded over the past 28 days.

Syracuse accounted for the largest single share of the located calls with 272, and General traffic was the most common category on the day at 319 calls. 581 of the 745 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

745Calls loggedindividual radio transmissions captured and transcribed
703Distinct incidentsafter transmissions from the same call are grouped
76Communities namedtowns, villages and cities that appeared on the air
7 p.m.Busiest hour59 calls in that hour
4 a.m.Quietest hour1 calls in that hour
224Highest 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 581 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 1.33, the ratio of this day's total to the recent median.

Community Calls Share of located calls Against a normal day this size
Syracuse 272 46.8 percent 22 percent below
Clay 52 9.0 percent 64 percent above
Cicero 26 4.5 percent 31 percent above
DeWitt 25 4.3 percent 12 percent below
Manlius 22 3.8 percent 22 percent above
Salina 22 3.8 percent In line
Onondaga County 15 2.6 percent 25 percent above
Camillus 13 2.2 percent In line
Onondaga 10 1.7 percent 61 percent below
Geddes 8 1.4 percent 32 percent above
Bridgeport 7 1.2 percent 46 percent above
Oswego 5 0.9 percent 61 percent below
Oneida 5 0.9 percent In line
North Syracuse 5 0.9 percent 55 percent below
Van Buren 5 0.9 percent In line

What kind of calls they were

Category Calls Share of the day Against a normal day this size
General 319 42.8 percent 38 percent below
Police 184 24.7 percent 23 percent above
EMS 158 21.2 percent 41 percent below
Fire 83 11.1 percent 19 percent below
Service 1 0.1 percent Too few calls to compare

Priority grading for the day broke down as 16 graded critical, 208 graded high, 353 graded medium and 168 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
Medical Emergency 92
Medical Emergency Location 18
Disturbance Reported 16
Welfare Check 9
Traffic Stop 8
Suspicious Person Reported 8
Fire Reported 8
Motor Vehicle Stop 8
Incident Reported 8
Motor Vehicle Collision Injuries Presented 8

How the day ran, hour by hour

Radio volume peaked at 7 p.m. with 59 calls and bottomed out at 4 a.m. with 1. The six overnight hours from midnight to 6 a.m. carried 81 calls between them, 10.9 percent of the day, against 664 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: Clay, 52 calls against the 32 a day this size would normally bring. Quieter than the day around them: Onondaga, 10 calls against the 26 a day this size would normally bring, Oswego, 5 calls against the 13 a day this size would normally bring, North Syracuse, 5 calls against the 11 a day this size would normally bring, Liverpool, 3 calls against the 8 a day this size would normally bring and Fayetteville, 3 calls against the 8 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 18 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 10 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 2026-10-31
Totals 745 updates / 703 incidents
Top town Syracuse
Top service General

This story came from public records we pulled ourselves

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