A while back I started following a Facebook page for the people who monitor the scanners in Genesee County, MI. Not sure of the reason, but I've been following it for a while. Probably started to keep tabs on the crime in the area where my mother still resides. Anyway, the other day she was telling me about something and I went to the scanner page to see if they had more info. Nope. So I searched for related pages and found the one for Flint, MI. I followed it.
It's an educational experience, lemme tell ya. Not that it's telling me anything I didn't already suspect. Crime in Flint is rampant and as out of control as it was in the '80s.
I looked for a similar page here, but no. I guess we're too rural or something. I searched Greene County, MO - which is Springfield. Springfield is crimey enough that it's now a regular contributor to Live PD. Hell, when I still watched the local news, it seemed crimey enough for me to think it was trying to compete against Flint for most crime-ridden smallish city in the US. :shrug: But no scanner page. It would've been interesting to see.
Anyway, whoever contributes to these scanner pages on FB apparently listens to the local police scanner and then types up whatever it is they hear. (Sometimes with horribly atrocious spelling errors, but I guess that can't be helped.) For instance, Friday night there was a person with a gun in the lobby of a hospital located in the downtown Flint area. There was also 'unknown trouble' at a local strip club, two calls to area bars, numerous domestic disturbances, several overdoses, lots of 'shots fired', and a fight involving 25+ people. Makes me want to kidnap Mom and move her somewhere safe - if such a place even exists anymore. (For the record, she does not live in Flint. Just a suburb of it. Which is bad enough, lemme tell ya.)
Personally, I don't have a scanner. Like I said, rural. It would have to have a really huge range to get me any kind of anything interesting. I might maybe catch an accident call on the highway near here, but I can read about those in the paper later. It might've been interesting to listen to when we had those two murders we've had near here.
Still, I'm finding it all interesting. And who knows, I might find some story ideas in there somewhere. ;o)
Edited to add: Sometimes reading the scanners pages leads to trouble when the scanner doesn't give complete information and you read about an event near someone you know, but you can't figure out if it's them or someone else until it gets later in the morning so you can contact them. It's Mondaying all over me this morning. (It was not the person I know and love, but I had twenty interesting minutes trying to figure that out. 20 minutes, 3 cigarettes, a concerned email (too early to call and said person would be en route to work anyway), and a cup of coffee later I found an article with witness statements that told me for sure it wasn't my person. Ugh.)
Do you listen to the scanner or follow any scanner pages on FB?
Interesting. Didn't realize there were scanner pages on FB...may have to check those out. My son is an EMT while studying biology at college. He sees all sorts of crazy things.
ReplyDeleteI think I found the first one when I was using Google to find out some information, and I was like 'cool'. Yay for your son being an EMT. That's not an easy job. Thank him for doing it.
DeleteWe used to have a scanner going 24/7 but I was involved in 1st Responder stuffs. Then things happened over a period of short time--I "retired," the big scanner in the bedroom "died", and new vehicle didn't have a place to put a scanner. I have an app on my smart phone where I can check in but there's usually so much extraneous traffic that I can't zero in on the channel I want to listen to because there IS an incident. Some day, we might get a base scanner again because I do miss knowing the inside scoop. LOL
ReplyDeleteYou know me and my hate affair with FB so...no. LOL