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The Facebook Scanner Pages Did it Better
07/05/2026
This is a post to the Buffalo subreddit (r/Buffalo) I just made.
Corporate media is advocating tuning out regular people, but listening to Buffalo last night shows why they are being dangerously selfish
There are bills in New York State legislation pending delivery and possible signature by the governor that will guarantee access to encrypted police radio traffic (not currently a problem in Buffalo for most agencies, but since it is a trend, will be whenever the radio system upgrades) by what the bills attempt to define as professional newsgatherers. Without such a bill, public safety agencies would likely encrypt their radio traffic 100 percent (not just actually sensitive channels). Big media is making a play to preserve *their* access and by extension save their diminishing relevance in life-and-death struggle against your friendly neighborhood Facebook page or whatever.
But -- look at last night. The city was in absolute chaos. An as-of-yet innumerable number of shootings and related chaos that these Facebook scanner news and information pages like Cheektowaga Scanner, Amherst Scanner, Buffalo 716 Street News, etc. all kept citizens updated in real-time and with far more coverage than the so-called professional newsgatherers as the New York State government would describe them, did.
I am using last night as part of the campaign to raise everyone's awareness about these bills, A11199A and S10079 and refute their premise. I for one am not even saying don't let them pass because I also happen to believe that anyone having access to encrypted radio traffic is better than no-one, but the fight now or later needs to be to keep this access PUBLIC, period. As it is these bills are selfishly written by big for-profit media on the lie that "big media does it better with your best interest at heart", when, last night we see by the dedication and spread of random people on the ground like you and me, did it BETTER.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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The Buffalo Police Union Has a Path to Clear Itself
07/04/2026
The Buffalo News published what BuffScan best construes as a "text leak" wherein someone with access to the Buffalo Police Union's text channel wrote:
“Officers working the Trump rally be aware of people with extreme TDS as they pose a threat to people trying to peacefully assemble and voice their right to free speech,” the police union told members. “This current city administration values the libtard ways more the (sic) celebrating this great nations (sic) 250th birthday.”
That's not cool.
If the Buffalo Police Union really stands behind the text that somehow made its way out under its communication auspice, they have truly devolved in only a way that an under-resourced low morale "police" organization does.
Say no more about convincing people that BPD has low morale and that nobody wants to be a police officer, as the union often does. That text is now the union's proof.
And that text is well example of the reason.
That being said, the actual Buffalo news article doesn't identify the actual author and can't be certain of who it is. It was just a text that went out. It could just be one foaming member, no doubt reflective of many in the department to be sure, but still not unlike a varied voice blathering out that you might find in a Facebook post comment.
The Buffalo Police Union still has that shred of a stand to clear itself with. They need to come out hard against this. Otherwise, yes, the state of policing in Buffalo is exactly as bad as they tell everyone. Hands down.
Linkage
- Buffalo police union warns members about protesters with 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' - [The Buffalo News]
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Michigan Street Bridge Restoration Efforts
07/03/2026
BuffScan thought this might be of interest to the community. This audio of Buffalo's City Public Engineering radio traffic from July 1 - 2 illustrates the efforts of workers to restore lift functionality of the Michigan Street, which had become effectively locked or seized in the record breaking heat of that time. The recording isn't all encompassing as the crisis continued at the time of the audio compilation.
The crisis rears its ugly head just as Buffalo heads into the July 4th weekend. In general in any case, the bridge being out of service creates a bottleneck for maritime traffic, vehicles, and pedestrians attempting to connect with downtown Buffalo.
Linkage
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The MSM Media's Transparent 'El Lector' Act
07/01/2026
Here we are again.
There are two bills, A11199A and S10079, open in New York State now designed to concentrate access to encrypted public safety radio transmissions to whomever the state designates as legitimate newsgatherers. They are a re-worked A3516 which was vetoed by Governor Kathy Hochul last December.
The travesty of these and of previous efforts in New York State is how narrow and blatant they are at protecting the principle of information commodification to the direct benefit of just a few corporations involved in the framework of profit-driven news gathering.
Motions to preserve a free view into a benevolent public safety apparatus should absolutely exist; there is a legit effort to do something about keeping public safety operations in the clear, and a legit hope of and value to codifying through law said access.
But, these and the previous bills, completely fuck it up.
Guaranteed transparency should be fought for the public. Not just a few well-resourced wealthy mainstream media corporations so aware of the stakes with respect to their own survival against social media, they can't even bring themselves to posture as advocates for a truly free press, as anyone would expect them to. If you were hoping for some James Stewart-esqe personality within the TEGNA, Sinclair, or FOX corporations to emerge on the floor of a congress, horse-shoed by corrupt legislative fat cats who sneer and chuckle among each other while he pleads in a croaking tired voice for the trust in each and every American to listen in on police calls -- you can forget it.
Corporate media does not believe in a free press; it believes in a shaped press with "free press characteristics." Ones you can still talk about under 4th of July fireworks but favor their side of the ensuing lopsided circle.
Establishing the free press distinction between themselves and anyone else without the bucks to afford liability insurance, which is someone's clever "moo hah hah" in coming up with this as a defining criteria for "newsgatherer" in these bills, is corporate media's play to assume the role of a sole trusted "El Lector" who reads the daily news to a half dozen rows of factory workers who are expected to keep their heads down and producing.
Extraordinary sanctimonious principles do not make for-profit media exceptional. Money does. And money is exactly what NY State Assembly Bill A11199A and Senate Bill S10079 are all about. Advocating for the siloing of information will make their insights and access, their newsgathering farming, both special and super enriching.
The thousands of personal freelance newsgatherers? The thousands of Facebook community and scanner pages likely many of you and readers rely on more today (as a fact, not hypothesis) - Well guess what: Fuck'em.
Oh sure: All these forms of newsgatherers certainly have a right to exist and to emote, but once a bill like those under consideration pass on to law, only in the shadow of mainstream media's voice. Mainstream media will be the only ones with the story, acquired cheaply, first.
Ultimately BuffScan does not oppose a signing of these bills into law; it just does not support it. To outright oppose after all means not supporting a chink at the armor of public safety push-to-talk radio encryption, which would be the only good thing about it. BuffScan's suspicion is, as it mentioned elsewhere in its channels, that the logistics of providing selective access will prove so burdensome and costly, most public safety agencies will at the end of the day keep relevant push-to-talk traffic public as a way to meet compliance. In such a case, the outright selfishness of corporate media's play here could be overlooked if not laughably ironic.
Or put another way, if any law should be signed it should be one that dismisses the concept of a gold mine's stake in the ethereal passing of valuable airwave chatter, and fairly acknowledges the reality that, tasteful or not, everyone is a "newsgatherer" contributing to a level hive of the everyday narrative.
Police tape. Yes, simple flimsy police tape, seems like an incredibly cheap way to regulate against the dreaded exaggerated idea of the random un-washed masses showing up to critical incident events based on some overheard police call, should that be anyone's genuine concern. Police tape has been super effective for decades upon decades. About as much time as has been the open air broadcasting and access to public safety radio that people used to routinely tune into on their AM home radio sets.
Press organizations should they want to be involved, and legislators, should pursue a law that simply keeps certain push-to-talk public safety communication truly and absolutely public.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Incident Involving Scooter
06/29/2026
As mentioned in other BuffScan channels this incident unfolded at West Ferry and Niagara on the evening of June 28, 2026. The call went over the air as a "pedestrian struck" though it was unclear if the victim of that was still on scene at the moment of this documentation. A witness told BuffScan she thought that the actual perpetrator had fled.
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Changes to BuffScan Publishing
06/29/2026
Not that anyone should be surprised at yet another change-up as I am constantly tinkering, but as one may know from my announcement in today's BuffScan Daily Drama Showcase I am moving the single stream impulse publishing component of BuffScan from X to BlueSky in a migration effort that begins this week.
What that means for the publishing schema of the BuffScan digital title is that now it looks like this:
- BuffScan on the Web - This is very important to BuffScan whether it evolves as a routinely updated and engaging component similar to a blog. Or it stays static and acts more like an online repository showcasing longer form content. The center of any digital entity should be a WWW presence and as a matter of cause I do my best to maintain that order, even at the expense of audience size and growth. I have mixed spells of wane and surge in this regard but long term my vision is to make this HTML website BuffScan's home base to a world wide web that is gradually waking back up as others agree with me. I would like to eventually eradicate all need for anything else on this list.
- BuffScan on Facebook - The BuffScan Facebook Page is merely a circulation and re-amplification platform just like X or BlueSky. BuffScan's WWW page acts as home base and its Facebook page and other social media channels are considered reflectors. Were it possible, the ideal scenario would be to have a presence on ALL popular social media platforms of an era to reflect, circulate, and re-amplify content. However, as a small digital press shop the resources simply do not exist for that. Facebook's unique talent is that it is a very polished and capable publishing platform in its own right, with Meta touting it as a sort of more plugged-in web publishing solution -- on top of the actual web. If I did not care about free access, control, and digital sovereignty, it would probably be this chief editor's exclusive "blogging/publishing" platform of choice. People without my philosophical quirks but the same instinct to publish and circulate, exist exclusively on Facebook quite comfortably.
- BuffScan on BlueSky - ...and as of today we can add "and once on X" for that matter. BlueSky is what I refer to as the impulse publishing platform component of BuffScan. Like Twitter and X once did, it provides a simple way to blast content fast to the world that is easily accessible on a platform where people can subscribe. Unlike the later Twitter and the current X, on BlueSky people can receive chronological feed posts of their subscriptions, and due to the company's corporate structure as one for public benefit, and its inert philosophy, it will always be this way. Today's X by contrast is striving to be a closed paywall platform that (like Facebook) also interferes with a regular user's absorption via algorithms that result in click bait and unfair if not capricious discoverability of user content contributions; the latter matter which is supposed to be the value point of any system relying on a network effect in the first place.
- BuffScan on YouTube - BuffScan maintains its YouTube Channel as a video hosting solution. Hosting video files directly on one's webserver to any meaningful degree (efforts to experiment with that aside) requires too much infrastructure and isn't the most efficient way to do it. YouTube solves that problem particularly since it allowed embeds into websites. YouTube is not a social network per se although where video is the primary content output, it nonetheless maintains a social ecosystem that can be depending on how you define that. It is an effective broadcast monetizing solution. That being said, your BuffScan Editor-in-Chief believes that one day the free hosting of billions of videos will eventually become unsustainable and that everyone counting on YouTube doing that as a cheap solution for exactly that will have to one day pay up or give up on the video components of their digital press output period. This is already true for producers who don't want their content intermixed with advertising, which is currently the method they "pay" for all the free hosting today.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Audio: Chaos at Niagara and Maryland Streets
06/15/2026
Buffalo police responded to the report of a stabbing in the area of Niagara and Maryland Streets Monday night June 15 at approximately 8 PM. This is recorded radio traffic from that incident shedding light on the chaos.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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