On the evening of March 20, 2026, three separate shooting incidents were dispatched across Onondaga County in less than four hours. CNY Signal captured every one of them the moment they hit the radio. Not a single Syracuse news outlet reported all three that night.
A Friday evening in Syracuse. The first warm-ish weekend of the year approaching. And between 6:24 p.m. and 10:13 p.m., emergency dispatchers sent units to three different shooting scenes spread across the city and suburbs.
That kind of pattern, multiple gun violence incidents escalating across a county in a single evening, is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost when each incident is covered in isolation, hours after the fact. It is also exactly the kind of thing a real-time monitoring platform is built to surface.
Incident 1: N. Townsend Street, 6:24 PM
The first call came in at 6:24 p.m. ET. Syracuse Police were dispatched to the area of North Townsend Street and East Laurel Street, near the Butternut Street corridor on the city’s North Side.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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CNY Signal’s scanner pipeline captured the dispatch the moment it went out over P25 radio. The system decoded the transmission, identified it as a shooting-related call and logged the incident with a timestamp, location and responding agency.
The North Side of Syracuse has seen its share of gun violence, but a Friday evening shooting at 6:24 p.m., still daylight, sets a tone for what would become a long night for first responders.
Incident 2: Milburn Drive, 10:02 PM
Three and a half hours later, the second call dropped. At 10:02 p.m. ET, Syracuse Police and Syracuse Fire Department units were dispatched to Milburn Drive, near the intersection of Valley Drive and Cortland Place on the city’s South Side.
The dual-agency dispatch, police and fire, indicated the severity of the call. Syracuse Fire’s involvement typically means EMS is needed on scene for victims requiring medical transport.
CNY Signal’s pipeline captured this dispatch in real time, the same way it captured the first. Two shootings, two different parts of the city, both logged and timestamped within seconds of the dispatch going out.
Incident 3: Ponderosa Drive, 10:13 PM
Eleven minutes later, a third shooting call was dispatched, but this one was not in the city of Syracuse. At 10:13 p.m. ET, the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office and TLC Ambulance were dispatched to Ponderosa Drive in the Town of Onondaga, a suburban community south of the city.
A shooting in the Town of Onondaga is rare. The Sheriff’s Office response, combined with TLC Ambulance rather than a city-based EMS unit, confirmed this was a separate incident in a different jurisdiction entirely.
CNY Signal captured it instantly. Three shootings. Three jurisdictions. Four hours. All logged in real time.
The Timeline
- 6:24 PM ET, CNY Signal detects shooting dispatch: N. Townsend St & E. Laurel/Butternut, Syracuse. Responding: Syracuse Police Department.
- 10:02 PM ET, CNY Signal detects shooting dispatch: Milburn Dr & Valley Dr/Cortland Pl, Syracuse. Responding: Syracuse PD + Syracuse Fire Department.
- 10:13 PM ET, CNY Signal detects shooting dispatch: Ponderosa Dr, Town of Onondaga. Responding: Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office + TLC Ambulance.
- March 21, morning, No consolidated reporting found from any Syracuse television station or newspaper covering all three incidents as a pattern.
The Pattern No One Else Saw
This is the part that matters most. Three shootings in four hours across Onondaga County is not just three separate incidents. It is a pattern, an escalation in gun violence concentrated in a single Friday evening that should raise questions about what is driving it and what the public safety response should be.
But traditional news coverage does not work that way. If a television station picks up one of these incidents, it is reported as a standalone story, “Shooting on North Townsend Street” or “Shots Fired in Town of Onondaga.” The connection between the three, the escalation from North Side to South Side to suburbs, the compressed timeline, none of that gets surfaced because no single newsroom is monitoring every dispatch channel in real time and connecting the dots.
CNY Signal is.
The platform’s scanner pipeline does not just capture individual incidents. It captures the rhythm of a night. When three shooting dispatches come through in under four hours, the system surfaces that pattern automatically, giving the community a picture of what is actually happening across the county, not just what one reporter happened to pick up on.
Why Speed Matters
Consider the timeline again. The first shooting was dispatched at 6:24 p.m. The third at 10:13 p.m. If you are a resident of the Town of Onondaga and the first two shootings were reported in real time, you have context for what is happening in the county that evening. You might make different decisions about where you go or how late you stay out.
Without real-time reporting, you learn about all three the next morning, if at all. By then, the information is historical rather than actionable.
CNY Signal’s value is not just speed. It is situational awareness. The platform gives the community a running picture of public safety activity as it happens, not as newsrooms get around to it.
The Infrastructure Behind It
Every one of these detections was made by the same pipeline: an RTL-SDR software-defined radio receiver capturing P25 digital transmissions from Onondaga County’s public safety radio system. Those transmissions are decoded and run through faster-whisper, an AI transcription engine that converts radio audio to text in near-real time.
The system monitors multiple channels simultaneously, Syracuse PD, Syracuse Fire, Onondaga County Sheriff, suburban police departments, EMS agencies. When a significant call is dispatched on any channel, it is captured, timestamped and published. That is how CNY Signal caught three shootings across three different agencies in a single evening without missing a beat.
No human was sitting at a desk monitoring a scanner for four hours. The system did it automatically.
What This Proves
March 20 was not the worst night for gun violence Syracuse has ever seen. But it was the kind of night that demonstrates exactly why a real-time, AI-powered monitoring platform is not a luxury, it is a necessity for any community that wants to understand what is happening on its streets.
Three shootings. Three jurisdictions. Four hours. One platform caught them all.
That is CNY Signal.
CNY Signal monitors P25 police, fire and EMS radio across Onondaga County 24/7 using RTL-SDR hardware and AI-powered transcription. Follow @cnaborhood on X for real-time alerts.
Sources:
- CNY Signal scanner pipeline data, March 20, 2026
- Onondaga County P25 radio transmissions, decoded via faster-whisper AI
- Dispatch timestamps: Syracuse PD, Syracuse Fire, Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office
