I need help for police radios and scanners. I need to know where they are for NYC driving, but I don’t want to buy $800-900 radars. I tried apps, websites, and walkie-talkies, but I can’t quite get it. Is there a way to intercept the radios and also see where police are near me?
AI-generated summary
What you get: Low-cost methods to monitor NYC emergency radio traffic and map local police activity without buying expensive radar units.
Start here:
- SDRTrunk — decode P25 digital radio systems using an inexpensive $30 USB tuner dongle.
- OpenMHz — listen to public safety radio audio streams directly by borough.
Also useful:
- Citizen and Waze — view crowdsourced incident reports and active police spots on a map.
- NYC OpenData — review free incident dispatch CSV data to analyze activity trends by block and hour.
Watch out:
- Operating a radio scanner inside a vehicle in New York is a misdemeanor without an amateur radio license.
@deeeyuehdbvgf1igeuws — two different systems, and $30 of hardware only solves one of them. Hearing them is cheap. Seeing where they are is not a scanner at all.
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Hearing them for $30 instead of $800
NYC runs a P25 trunked system, which is why a walkie-talkie never worked: there is no single channel to sit on.
- SDRTrunk ★2,210, pushed today — decode the whole system from a $30 SDR dongle. It follows talkgroups between boroughs, shows every call, and plays audio on your laptop
- trunk-recorder ★1,153 · GPL — the one that runs unattended: every call recorded as its own MP3 with the talkgroup, time and duration in a CSV. Point it at the system, come back to a searchable archive of the day
- OP25 ★489 — the Linux version, with the finest control over what you follow
- RadioReference — the database behind every scanner ever sold: NYC’s exact talkgroups, sites and frequencies, free to read
- OpenMHz — no hardware at all: NYC-area police and fire streams in a browser, run by hobbyists, with a searchable archive
- Broadcastify — the same plus every official feed in the country
Where the units are, which is a different problem
Nobody publishes live police GPS. What you get is the calls they are being sent to, which is the dispatcher’s view of the city.
- Citizen — a live incident feed, scanner-fed, that alerts you when something happens near you. The closest thing to a radar that actually exists
- PulsePoint — official fire and EMS dispatches on a live map, plus the “CPR needed nearby” alert that has genuinely saved lives
- NOTIFY NYC — the city’s own emergency alert system, free, from the Office of Emergency Management. Nobody installs it and it is the most accurate feed of the four
- Waze and Google Maps — crowd-sourced police reports, and the only source that knows about a trap set ten minutes ago
The one nobody knows: the city publishes its own dispatch data
New York releases incident data as open data, for free:
- Fire Incident Dispatch Data — every dispatch with time, borough, incident type and response times. Filter it to your own street
- NYPD Complaint Data — reported incidents by precinct and hour
Two CSVs and a filter, and you know which blocks and which hours actually have activity. An $800 radar can only see what is in front of you right now. 
A scanner in the car is a misdemeanour. On foot it is public.
Listening to an open public-safety channel is legal. New York’s own rule is about using a scanner in a vehicle: it is a misdemeanour to install or use one there unless you hold an amateur radio licence. A laptop with an SDR in your car is a different situation from the same laptop on your desk.
At home, or on foot, every feed above is simply public. If you want mobile listening, the amateur licence is a weekend of study and about $35, and it removes the problem entirely.
Tune OpenMHz to your borough, open Citizen next to it, and pull the dispatch CSV for your own street. One gives you the voice, one gives you the map, and the data tells you when to bother. 
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