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Redditors who listen to police scanners, what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?
- When we had the Waldo Canyon fires here in Colorado. A buddy of mine sent me a link to a scanner broadcast keyed in on the firefighters. They entered a house that was about to go up in flames and found a women dead in a bathtub, and then left because the house was about to go up.
It was really straightforward, like "yep, ladies dead lets go". What a hellish situation to be that calm in.
— AggressiveKey23
- Not crazy perhaps, just funny:
Constable to dispatcher: There’s a pot hole here, filled with muddy water. I don’t know if we should get someone down here to cover it up. Dispatcher: How deep is it? Constable: I don’t know, it’s impossible to see and I don’t really have anything to measure with. Dispatcher: You do have boots on, don’t you? Constable: Well, yeah... Two minutes of silence. Constable: It’s deep.
— HardPawns
- Not my story but my dad's:
When he was younger he listened to the cops getting a warning about a car accident and that there was a dead person. Some time later he hears another warning: "The dead person is alive".
— amidalis
- Once heard officers tracking down a 1999 Prius.
As you may know, the Prius wasn’t around back then.
They searched for close to an hour for this thing before dispatch said, “Wait...1999 Privea.”
— Joe4o2
- I worked in the same building as law enforcement and 911, so often overheard the crazy. Most memorable: cop: I'm out in (far edge of rural county) and I've got a huge bird running loose. 911: what do you mean huge bird? Cop: like an ostrich. 911: might be an emu. Cop: good. I can spell emu.
End of story, we have a farmer who started raising emus, one of which kept escaping.
Other animal related: Houdini is out. Cattle farm in another part of the county had a bull that regularly gets out and goes to the highway to watch the cars go by. He never goes into traffic, just stands there. He will walk back to his enclosure if you order him to. He's Houdini because there's never a breach in the fence, the gate's always closed, no idea how he gets out.
— Dbtynp
- Listening to the scanners in Chicago, sometime around 2005.
This cop gets on the radio and says he’s found an arm. Like, just the arm of someone in the street. He was pretty casual about it. Clarified by saying he wasn’t a doctor, and he’d need one to confirm, but he was pretty sure it was a human arm.
— Xerox748
- My niece getting pulled over for drag-racing. Her license plate was our last name with a 6 at the end.
— JeepSmash
- When I was doing EMT training, I used to listen to the scanner all the time on my commute to my regular job--you know, to sort of get used to the radio traffic.
So one day I stopped at a branch of my bank on the way to work to deposit a check or something. There was quite a line of people. I complete my business, get in the truck, and head off to work. Not even one minute after I pulled out on the road, the police channel came through with a robbery alarm--at the bank I had just left.
The robber had to have been in line right behind me.
— jondru
- Three teenagers were operating a golf cart up and down a long driveway when the driver went out into the two lane highway to make a U-turn and was hit by a speeding car, also full of teenagers.
Two were killed at the scene and a third was disabled for life. It was one of the most tragic accidents the town had ever seen and involved well known families. I could hear the emotion and panic in a couple of the cops' voices.
— russianout
- This isn't quite what you were looking for...because I was inside the police station itself, talking to some officers, when the police radio went off. So I was listening to police radio, but not via a scanner, but live.
Anyway they'd found a body floating in a pond. Two officers went off to investigate.
A few days later the story came out. A local company made bread. For more than a decade they'd been allowing local drivers, who had their own vans, to deliver the bread to different areas or "runs". The drivers added a surcharge for bread delivered, so the price was a little higher than the local shop, but you got your bread delivered every day. That's how they made money even though they were offering the company a free service. Then one day the company decided they were going to purchase their own vans and train their own drivers and deliver their own bread.
When this happened there was a near riot. A huge meeting was called to calm down a mob of angry drivers. Some drivers had been doing this for more than a decade. Some had paid money to buy a "bread van" so they could make deliveries. Some of the drivers were complaining they'd bought their "runs" ( areas where they delivered bread) from other drivers who had left, and that the company had to compensate them. The company spokesman said that they had not received any money from drivers, had not sold the "runs" and nobody was going to be receiving any compensation.
A couple of days later his body was found in the pond. I never heard if they found the murderers. Seems pretty sad.
— TheDevilsAdvokaat
- Not too long ago a couple buddies and me were smoking on the front porch listening to a high speed chase. It was a pretty gnarly one. No gun fire but the dude didn't give up easy and hit a lot of shit. It was happening right on our side of town so we were hearing the actual chase as well as the radio. We'd hear a loud bang and then they'd explain what he'd just run into.
Edit: Thank you guys for my most upvotes BY FAR💙
— Sinsational_V
- Listening to Storm Chasers during a tornado outbreak one night, the channel was essentially storm spotters relaying information for a few hours and slowly transitioning into search and rescue, things like:
"Watcher 3 , I checked [address] and everyone's accounted for, minor structural damage"
" Watcher 2 checking [address 2] , looks like they have structural damage...they're meeting me in the driveway ...all ok... "
Just stuff like that, it's a rural area and everyone that could was out helping. Then this came across
"Watcher 4, I'm checking [address]"
Other watcher- "thats your in-laws?"
Watcher 4 - " yes.....[silence for a minute] .... Structures gone,checking for residents....[silence then suddenly but calmly ] watcher 4 at [address] requesting fire and ambulance....[Other watcher's real name I assume] could you call my wife , please....just call [wife's name] and have her get in the truck and get up here as fast as possible....
— Mgtl
- [This](http://youarelistening.to) website lets you listen to police scanners from different cities, paired with ambient music from soundcloud.
— nidalmorra
- I used to work in San Bernardino and was at work on December 2nd 2015. One of my co workers was talking about a shooting that was still going on a couple of miles away. I didn't think anything of it (after all it is San Bernardino we're talking about here) until we recieved an order to evacuate the store and go on lockdown until we got the all clear from the police.
I immediately downloaded a police scanner app on my phone and started listening to what was going on. It was terrifying to hear the police calling out intersections that were closer and closer to the store where i worked. Then it became a nightmare when i heard that the cpos were lead to my neighborhood.
It turns out the terrorists were some of my neighbors. They lived maybe two blocks away
— Rockininfinity