Police Scanner | Scanner Radio | Radio Scanners

More Than A Hobby - Could Scanning Save Your Life?

OK, so maybe that sounds a bit too dramatic, and maybe it is. However, I can envision a few scenarios where listening to a scanner might save a life.

Let me start with a personal experience I had a couple of years ago. Although, this was not really a life-threatening situation, it is easy to see how it could have been if the circumstances were just a little bit different.

It was the middle of winter, and since I live in an area of the country that receives plenty of snow in a typical winter, it is not unusual to see me out in my pickup truck plowing my almost 500-foot driveway after a storm.

One particular day I was down toward the end of my driveway plowing near the street. I noticed that a police cruiser had stopped in front of the house across the street and I presumed the officer was going to ask my neighbors to remove the car they had left parked on the side of the street in order to facilitate snow removal.

The officer exited from his vehicle and headed around toward the side of the neighbors house and behind some tall bushes and other obstacles where I could no longer see him. What the officer did not know was that the house on the property was still under construction and the family was living in a temporary trailer on the property while the house was being built. I presumed the officer would quickly discover that the house was unoccupied and would then locate my neighbors in the trailer.

I continued plowing and after a while I noticed that the officer had not returned to his cruiser after a considerable period of time. I had a scanner in my truck and had not heard anything from the officer at all. I actually considered getting out of my truck and going to investigate in case he had run into some kind of trouble, but as we do so often in cases like that, I figured that it was probably nothing, and he had made his way to the trailer without my notice and was having a long talk with the neighbors.

Suddenly I heard a very broken transmission on the scanner from the officer. It was not possible to understand exactly what he was saying due to the poor quality of the transmission, but it was clear that he was in some kind of distress. The dispatcher, unable to understand his transmission, but aware he needed help, started sending what seemed like every cop in the county to the rescue as well as the fire department and ambulance.

Apparently, the dispatcher was unable to understand most of the transmission but did manage to hear something about falling though the ice and being in the water.

Although I was very close to the officer, the local police use a repeater system to re-broadcast all their radio transmissions from a site high on a hilltop in a nearby town. Since I was only monitoring what is known as the repeater "output" frequency, and not the "input" frequency that the officer was actually transmitting on, I was reliant on the ability of the repeater to receive his signal and re-broadcast it on the frequency I was monitoring. In this particular instance, his location was making it very difficult for the repeater to receive a good signal from his radio.

I jumped out of my truck and I could hear someone yelling over toward the house under construction. It was hard to be sure, but it sounded like someone yelling for help. There was a pond well behind the neighbors house and off in a different direction from where I had last seen the officer headed, and I was wondering how he possibly could have managed to fall through the ice. I wondered why in the world he would be out walking on the ice over the pond at all!

I ran over toward the house and noticed one of my other neighbors out in his yard nearby. I yelled to my neighbor to let him know someone needed help as I continued over toward the source of the yelling.

As I made my way through the bushes and got closer to the house, I found the officer standing in a large ditch at least 6 feet deep, up to his waist in water. I could hear sirens in the distance as his fellow officers raced to assist him -- not knowing exactly what the problem was but knowing he needed help. His portable radio was just not able to provide a good enough signal from the ditch he was trapped in to provide all the details of his predicament.

With the help of my neighbor, we managed to reach down and pull the officer up out of the ditch -- soaked to the bone from the waist down, but otherwise unharmed. Due to the slanted sides of the ditch covered with snow and ice, he was not able to free himself from the water-filled hole without assistance and I suspected he was getting quite cold after standing in ice water for 10 or 15 minutes.

It is easy to see that this could have been a life-and-death situation had the water in the ditch been a few feet deeper than it was. Apparently the ditch had been there for quite some time and was for the installation of a septic system which had not yet been installed. The ice and snow had covered it over completely, making it nearly impossible to notice.

There are numerous other scenarios I can envision where a scanner might help save a life - perhaps even your own.

Consider a violent criminal loose on foot in your area who is being pursued by the police and is desperate to get away by any means necessry. A scanner would probably alert you to the situation and you could be sure your doors were all locked and your house was secure. This might prevent you from becoming the crook's next victim.

Imagine you had a scanner in your car (be careful, this is actually illegal in some areas!) and you were listening to it as you drove to the supermarket one day. You overhear on the scanner that a high-speed police pursuit is in progress and heading your way! You pull off into a parking lot and watch as the pursuit speeds past. Maybe nothing would have happened to you, but by pulling over into the parking lot, you knew that you were very unlikely to become involved in something that could be quite unpleasant.

I'm sure I can come up with a dozen other scenarios where a scanner might provide you with information that could help you avoid injury or death, but you get the picture.

Sure, the chances of your life being saved by listening to a scanner are pretty slim. But if you think about it, the chances of you being saved by the seat belts or airbags in your car are also pretty remote, since statistically, you are unlikely to be involved in a serious traffic accident. However, it must be worth including those safety features in just about every vehicle on the road these days, otherwise the auto manufacturers would not bother installing them.