Building a crime map with police scanner audio
This artical was originally published in the seventh edition of Unredacted Magazine by Michael Bazzell: https://inteltechniques.com/issues/007.pdf
In the third edition of Unredacted Magazine Michael Bazzell discussed the utility of police scanners monitoring neighborhood activity. I believe he also mentioned their utility for OSINT investigations on a podcast episode sometime around 2021. It gave me the idea at the time to start transcribing police scanner audio with one of Google Text To Speech APIs. I was trying to see if I could build a historical transcript database and cross-reference incidents with my university’s campus crime logs and mug shots from the county jail. I gave up on the project because speech-to-text was too expensive in 2021.
I had enough free time this summer to finish the project, https://copcrawler.com. It’s a police scanner transcript full text and semantic search engine. The audio archives are scraped from broadcastify.com, and I’m transcribing them with Whisper on a couple of old laptops. A concerning amount of police departments still share phone numbers, driver’s license numbers, addresses, license plates, vehicle descriptions, crossroads, and a bunch of other uniquely identifiable information on unencrypted radio.
