BUFFSCAN
Wonder What it Takes
04/14/2024
Another LVT solar powered portable surveillance system went online this past week in my neighborhood, and, more precisely on the very same block involved in last week's stolen car takedown drama. That incident seems unlikely to have prompted this deployment given the randomness of that event but I still wonder what it takes to get one. I am very curious about these contraptions and in general about BPD's pole cameras dotted throughout the city proper.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Why People Gotta Log In to View My X Stuff?
02/24/2024
Update 2/27/24 - This issue has prompted me to complete a full jump to @Threads. From now on BuffScan microblogging can be reviewed and subscribed to at @BuffaloScan. Note the variation in spelling ("BuffaloScan", not "BuffScan").
I recently discovered that my X content isn't accessible unless you log into X. I have two X accounts and this problem applies to both of them.
Neither account is set to privatize my content, either.
It's obviously a bug but there doesn't seem to be a clear path to reporting it, particularly if you're not a paying user of X. They do have a help and support center but all of the boilerplate forms one would submit don't apply to this particular situation.
As a bug, I suspect it's tied to X's activity over last summer when they did in fact try to force people to log in in order to view people's feeds. They rolled that back pretty quick, but maybe something about my accounts got left behind.
I'm basically de-platformed on X -- at least to the extent that I can't microblog to the random world at large. Ironically, I have no problem taking my borderline mental illness rants to Threads for my personal account or new projects, but BuffaloScan on X has almost 500 subscribers that I'd like to keep my reach with. And, while I am enamored by Threads, despite whatever issues X has with its stability (as a service, and the particular man running it), I still think X the most evolved and feature reach microblogging tool on the market, if using one is important. I'd like to have it as an option while I continue to weigh which service I intend to ultimately run with if either.
Otherwise, I guess X is making the decision for me.
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Get Ready: Blizzard Probably No Bluster
01/13/2024
It's way overdue but Buffalo's luck seems to have run out. We're due to be hit with what is loosely being described as a major snow storm of major snow storms, yet, (probably) not so bad as that Christmas 2023 blizzard.
The storm is supposed to be dangerous and dramatic by all indications notwithstanding and Buffalo and Erie County, and the media, are not taking chances this time by beating those drums.
Already there are casualties of sorts -- Just a few minutes ago of this writing Governor Hochul announced the postponement of tomorrow's Buffalo versus Steelers game which everyone was looking forward to.
For MSM storm coverage I am recommending WBEN's livestream.
As for BuffScan efforts, I've temporarily reconfigured the BuffScan online scanner feed to include an overlay of my neighborhood being livestreamed until Sunday or Monday, depending on things go. Visitors can get a sense of conditions in real-time while also listening to the scanner.
The leading image above demonstrates that you can cast the livestream to a secondary TV in your home, as an aesthetic "information tip." Do that from your phone or computer.
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The Slowest Roll Out Ever: The BuffScan Subreddit
01/01/2024
Quite some time ago I posted some dramatic BuffScan content to r/Buffalo/ on Reddit. Because I had done so more than a few times, another Reddit user suggested creating a new subreddit to host that sort of content.
That actually seemed like a good idea - no offense was taken since I sort of view /r/Buffalo to be like a free-form "Good Morning America" for Buffalo to some degree -- not a place where people necessarily seek direct contact with the sort of drama I sometimes post. So I did it.
Behold /r/BuffScan/.
But that was actually about two years ago and although I had gone through with the basic creation of the group, I didn't develop or advertise it much.
Now with some holiday time off, I finally did and am -- at least to the extent that I wrote out a group description and some pretty basic rules.
I encourage anyone who has collected content to make at least a secondary post in the subreddit outside their primary platform of choice. I myself will post some legacy stuff in addition to moving forward, just to prime the machine. As well, I'll post public links to content that others make available online of the same genre.
I am not sure this new subreddit is really needed in the grand scheme of things in the first place, but down the road, if it seems necessary, I'd like to accept candidates to administer the group. Those who are already in the habit of collecting ground coverage seem like a good potential resource for that.
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BuffScan Sucks, But That's Why It's Brilliant
12/16/2023
I kind of had an epiphany about BuffScan.
Blogs or any social media effort by a single individual, even if maximized to an impressive level in trying, will never equal the capabilities of large production media companies.
The reasons for that are fairly obvious. Individuals typically need to pay attention to their families, health, jobs, and just plain old day to day survival -- not to the crafting of a dependable commercial-grade information or even editorial resource that such a blog like this one, may imply itself as.
And that line of thinking always bothered and de-spirited me.
Until now. I realized this week that I wasn't thinking holistically enough about the entire form and purpose of blogging, and in particular, as it relates to the freedom to know, inquire, and report on, dramatic events as encountered by regular people like you and I.
It fell on me like a ton of bricks: I'm not supposed to know it all. I'm not supposed to be the sole aggregator. For the very sake of the very cause and purpose I am promoting and developing at BuffScan, I'm not even supposed to be particularly outstanding or consistent.
What I'm supposed to be is merely this: Charged.
All of us engaged in the necessary free-form collection and distribution of news and drama outside profit control, political control, and so on, need only be charged to conduct these activities.
Charged means you won't run a media empire built on your voice and efforts. Charged means you will instead activate when you are absolutely in the most capable position to do so. And when you do, that kernel of perspective that you contribute as the result, is the actual hive representing in its totality an information stream supported and maintained by others operating in exactly the same capacity.
Here is an example where this holistic principle played out successfully without me even realizing it until all of this introspection.
The X post depicted above was the result of me being tipped off by the police scanner of a stabbing within my so-designated "response zone" -- an imaginary radius around me where I feel somewhat obligated to the cause to attempt media collection of public safety events, in the event I become cognizant of them.
Today that cognizance is typically through a police scanner. But, as that is becoming a less and less viable source, I am envisioning a day when it becomes the result of being dispatched by a civilian public radio network utilizing local spotters (remember the ultimate goal is to replace police scanning). And that's important to mention here because in the case of the X posting above, that's sort of what happened.
The shooting even that X post above relates to was also mentioned in a separate X post by Tonawanda Fire. I am not sure of the linkage of events necessarily but imagine that everything came together in this fashion for sake of argument: Tonowanda Fire intercepted the call and broadcast it out via their own X feed. Another member of the "live response community" -- me specifically here -- was charged and in position, technologically and with respect to proximity, to respond, collect the media, and to distribute.
Appreciate the bigger picture of that seemingly mundane exchange. Two members of the live-response community acted together spontaneously to fulfill a complete media picture for society while neither one of us actually is or is even capable of being any one person's reliable "notification and news network" for similar events on any ongoing basis. Both myself and Tonowanda Fire Alert were charged and "at the ready" and while there is no promise of consistent content via either of our forums (me BuffaloScan, and Tonowanda Fire, X) that content was captured and circulated.
In that light, no, BuffScan or any blog or effort of its ilk, is not diminished. Truth be told, it is a patently clear example of why individual platforms in the form of blogs and openly personally produced web pages should never have acquiesced to large commercial ones. We're all supposed to have just kernels of perspective and we're all supposed to be the ones in just the right place at just the right time without killing ourselves to be omnipresent.
The takeaway for myself I feel is useful to anyone reading this. Build your blog. Adopt your own "response radius", and as I've said before, know how to record and distribute content as you are best able and safely able to do so. Don't worry about creating a second job or obligation for yourself in an already responsibility-saturated lifestyle. Your blog or your feed of choice will exist to activate around your kernel of capability and can even be structured as such. Already in this light, I can foresee some editorial and functional changes that I need to implement at BuffScan.
You subscribe or follow or "check in" on BuffScan for what I can produce when I can produce it. But, wholistically, you do the same for scores of others doing exactly the same thing. An exponentially as this movement grows that dynamic becomes the media force and the "replacement" to traditional police scanning.
Think about it. You'll get it. And when you do, charge!
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Dammit Loudlabsnyc - NO!
11/24/2023
As people - finally - wake up to the reality of public safety radio encryption, they inevitably begin processing a solution that can sometimes look like a policy compromise.
One of the most likely to emerge in any discussion of, is the idea of giving the "credentialed media" access to freshly encrypted systems through some program that maybe involves something like programming radios for media access (that the media houses purchase).
This was something like the policy I once prompted in the mid-90s the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department in Florida to institute. With the crucial distinction being that they would do it for any public person (who purchased such a radio). The policy wouldn't be limited to just perceived members of the media.
It's important to me that such a distinction is never made. The battle is getting public safety offices to keep access to their radio traffic for everyone, not simply those composed enough to come off as a "valid media" operation.
I don't regard profit-seeking media operations as somehow sanctimonious: They are profit-driven and now more than ever we see they are more functionally engineered to spread conflict via their established editorial components, than meaningful intellectual debate -- all while of course reporting on the building fire that validates their front. But the reality is, they aren't any different than you or I or any other business, except they are powerful, and often work together with politicians and law enforcement to develop and fuel useful narratives. Some we can appreciate, some we would be appalled to learn of.
Social media and more broadly the Internet and World Wide Web has nearly pushed local newspapers and TV news stations out of business, and they are lethally thirsty for a solution. Giving them exclusive access to public safety radio traffic gives them every reason to modify the debate to their pecuniary advantage.
This means that even when your local newspaper or TV station gives any ink or air to the encryption debate, it's only to blackmail themselves into being the eventual exception.
They aren't thinking about BuffScan, Tonowanda Fire Alert, WNY Fire Alerts, and so on -- none of the real people really interested in capturing and disseminating news, and whom which the MSM considers a form of competition that has been part and parcel of draining their power gradually over the past decade.
Loudlabsnyc is an Instagram account that remarked (as poorly exhibited above I regret) "that all we ask [of public safety], provide only credentialed press with access."
Well, I could not disagree more.
Loudlabsnyc is a particularly nuanced party in the issue. It operates as a company, but relies on social media and the web independently of printing presses or expensive TV transmitters. It is in effect, one of us, operationally speaking. Yet, it equates the power of the profit process, to the extent that it monetizes, with exceptinal legitimacy over something like BuffScan, that so far does not organize around that principle.
It is bad enough we have to hope that corporate media doesn't succeed in its blackmailing agenda and actually accelerate encryption, but that now we have to worry whether or not those in the pure digital community who know how to monetize, might do the same.
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Stabbing Incident at 240 West Ferry
09/23/2023
It's interesting that while I did have my phone active with the BuffScan live feed while commuting home yesterday, I didn't pay much attention to the call out for a stabbing. I did hear "stabbing", but I didn't hear or pay attention to the address of it. Had I, I might have known that I was driving head-first into a crime scene just a block or two from my house.
When I first encountered and posted media of the incident from the scene I had no idea what I was recording. I didn't associate the "stabbing" I had overheard with it (if I remembered it at all) largely, I imagine, because there was so much public safety response here, it seemed like something more dramatic than that.
In any case, yeah, I caught this post-stabbing ground footage of police and medical personnel managing the scene.
The address given in the radio call is technically the address of the Hope Refugee Drop-In Center but as there has been no MSM coverage or any police release yet to explain, I don't know if this is something that happened in the center itself, or was just some street brawl that occurred outside or around it.
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There's Something Wrong With the Idea Of RadioReference.com
09/10/2023
I don't have an organized rant around this yet, let alone a credibly developed essay. But I'm going to drop the egg anyway to put the seed for conversation out there.
Something about RadioReference.com is bad.
Not the enterprise itelf, not the value. It is perhaps the most well run and organized digital vendor I have ever seen in fact. I wish more sites we deal with that have nothing to do with police scanning were like it in its efficiency and community engagement.
Like most any eye finding their way to these words, I love RadioReference.com!
And yet. And maybe it's because I've got my eye on this view that the original web with a million different versions of the same thing by regular people fell apart, but shouldn't have, somehow I find it a problem that in 2023 it has evolved that there is now only one place online now that centrally (red flag!) acts as a repository for all things scanning.
It's really even worse than that. When I bought my SDS200 for example, the only practical way to use it was to interface it with a web service run by ... who? RadioReference.com. I buy a commercial police scanner that the primary river of information and programming support for is some random (and again, a superior random!) entrepreneur's website, that mysteriously seems to have developed relationships with everyone in the room to make that possible. It just doesn't feel right.
Auto Dealer: Okay, here are the keys to your new car. Now, there's a guy who runs a shop in Widgetville that will service it, provide you all the programming for its features, provide you the user manuals, as he does for all the other cars sold by everyone else. Trust us, he's a great guy! Enjoy your new car!
Hm.
All right, haters gonna hate. Throw the 'matoes at me. (Hopefully this is the one time I can appreciate my totally ignored blog).
I'll concede I have not scratched the surface in all the directions that might mean this is just a silly perspective and not to be concerned, but hey, I'm allowed to post an impression and let the market correct me in doing so.
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I Don't Think it Works That Way
08/28/2023
A Monday Perp Turkey. This video circulating in social media shows a woman accused in a Ring app post of criminal activity, outsmarting technology.
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Response Porn Exhibit 1
08/28/2023
BFD responding to anchored boat in distress from a point at 1 West Ferry. Distressed vessels frequently trigger response vehicle traffic down West Ferry Street. This time I happened to be in a position to record.
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Weekly Retrospect - August 20, 2023
08/20/2023
Ground Footage
Note that links to the social media content of others may require an account, login, or both to access.
FBNY (Fire Buff New York) posted to their Instagram gallery of a fire that broke out at 43 Ludington Street on 8/19 (yesterday as of this posting). Their Instagram and gallery posting related to this event are available here. They include recorded video from the fire ground scene as well.
Caught on Video & Perp Turkeys
I'm calling her the Hair Bun Porch Pirate. Ring Neighbors app posters have been posting clips of what appears to be the same dogged woman sniping packages from porches. This video montage covers three incidents since July of this year and all appear to show what many Ring commentators say is the same woman. The incidents occurred between West Ferry and Allentown Streets, according to information included with each post. Assuming so, some of the commentators indicate she is already on police radar, though, clearly is "free and active" as of at least 8/17 -- which is when the clip the video starts out with was captured.
Arrested
Kenneth James was apprehended for the BB gun shooting death of Buffalo News worker Joseph Dash. Yep, you read that right: BB gun. The initial headlines, and you will notice that even the official BPD release included below, lagged a bit in describing the shooting as one done using a BB gun (I myself find that an important element worthy of distinction as it is highly unusual). Weird that someone died from such a thing but consider that between 1990 and 2000 according to one study 39 people were killed with one. A fact that James is learning the hard way. Online records show that James is being charged with manslaughter in the first degree and remains in jail.
Next, Juan Rivera is (probably) in big trouble. This being more in my specific "response zone", I was able to capture this very thin footage of police as they cornered off one end of Winter Street in the West Side neighborhood to process a major drug bust at a house there. Following the video is the official BPD news release providing all the details.
In checking up on things myself, however, I find that Rivera has since been released without bail following his arraignment on 8/14. You can follow Rivera's journey as case number CR-05106-23 via New York's Ecourts system. You'll have to captcha in your ass.
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My Decision is Rated X
07/29/2023
Hi everyone, BuffScan is not abandoning social media or specifically Twitter (now called X) after all.
You can read about my as-tortureous reasoning for rolling back that plan as you can the reasoning I had for trying to do so in the first place.
Although I can no longer embed Twitter feeds at this website, which was extremely handy, it is still the leading and inexpensive microblogging instrument for spot media distribution.
I also recently secured the BuffScan username on Instagram because down the road I think the Insta/Threads combination will be a better choice, though, let's face it, it is quickly becoming apparent that being "everywhere" like most professional social media managers already understand, is going to be ultimately important.
Given this pivot, my information about how to follow this blog has been updated.
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Getting Rid of Reach
07/10/2023
Following the implosion of Twitter in July 2023 I decided to activate a loosely devised strategy of eliminating "reach" as a driving component of BuffScan and all of my blogging projects.
Until then, Twitter had been viewed as the best social media platform to act as both a direct conduit to a critical mass audience and a bargain instant-publishing host that could effectively drop content onto the BuffScan blog through the service's ability to embed a timeline. The BuffScan Twitter feed was a superior mechanical compliment to a site like this without competing with it as the platform.
But with the shutting down of or the unexplained breaking down of Twitter's timeline embeds, I quit using Twitter for that purpose.
Fortunately, thanks to some personal engineering here on my personally-developed Battle Blog platform, and to the fediverse-oriented "Mastodon", I found ways to maintain "instant publishing" capabilities right from the firegrounds or crime scenes.
If there is a fire that I am in a position to report on, I have the means to put a picture of it up at this blog in seconds, right from my phone. Straight to the blog itself, or, if I prefer, straight to Mastodon thanks to its ability to allow timeline embeds -- the thing Twitter once did well but stopped. There's no loss of immediate publishing.
What can't be replaced however is reach. Which is to really say, I cannot rely on serendipitous exposure to thousands of people with each artifact of content that I produce. Exposure leads to discovery and content consumption, and in the best outcomes, leads to unsolicited shares and permanent subscribers.
For many bloggers and website producers reach has become the keystone objective and measure of their website's worth. Not achieving it, or not achieving it right away, has despirited many publishers into quitting the craft. Without an audience it is natural to ask what is the point.
But I am going to buck that line of thinking. First because of Twitter's demise, which proves you can't rely on social media in any form to become a defacto content machine for your production.
And second, because specifically not relying on "instant audiences" and "instant reach" as a blog producer, I am challenged to push more interesting content that make the publication stick on encounter.
Maybe a more eloquent way of putting it is that I want to fail because I am boring; too understaffed to produce meaningful content; perhaps talentless as a writer and editor, or quite more likely, all of the above.
I don't want to fail because I didn't copy/paste enough to a dozen social media channels, all while losing my publishing independence in the process.
My newfound strategy, after all, is what we did before social media. We relied on word of email (forwarding and listservs if you remember any of that), and most crucially, interlinking between individual producers. Your blog linked to my blog, and my blog linked to yours. And people sitting down at PCs with their cups of coffee and a desire to explore, clicked from one place to another, bookmarking whatever they thought fancied a future visit.
That's how a website or blog got its traction for "realzies" and I am blowing the dust off that old playbook to make it happen again.
Had it not been for Twitter's meltdown I'd have gone along with being buried by the reality that nobody "surfs the web" anymore. Nobody is interlinking between their web personas.
To get right down to it, nobody is linking at all. Hyperlinking has gradually morphed into a scary proposition that only hackers try to bait you with. Me sending someone a link to my latest blog entry via e-mail would only likely terrify a recipient into deleting the message straight away.
I think Death of Hyperlink, The Aftermath by Hossein Derakshsan spells out this reality well enough, and is a worthy read.
There's def going to have to be some unwinding of the past decade to make this work. But I'll take that chance. After what happened to Twitter, we know now that we can't rely on big tech to be the revolution in our little Information Age.
We the the real people with a thirst to communicate and explore have been that revolution the entire time. Twitter's crumble just snapped us -- well me -- back into the game.
I'll be following up with the new ways that you can follow this and my other blogs.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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No, BuffScan is Not Posting the Video Leak
06/24/2023
I and by extension BuffScan occupy a unique place in the spectrum of police/public relationship quality. On one hand, I can be seen as an agitator-nuisance, what with all this "open broadcasting" and glorification of public safety drama bullshit (objective characterization I mean, to me, it's not "BS"). In other words a troublemaker sure to bite his way to someone's retaliation or to get himself killed somehow. The obit on myself were it to involve my activities, would not surprise me in the least.
But on the other hand I am an open non-sexual "police groupie" type. I love law enforcement, its structure, its institutions, its entire point in a viable working healthy society. Progressive and ardent BLM supporters (the foaming aggressive ones at least) would take me as a bootlicker.
Now of course I would not go that far, but if anyone erroneously felt that way, I get it. I try to post only positive things here whenever it's a police thing that I have to talk about, which I won't deny.
For example, there was a Ring-style camera video posted online about two weeks ago -- somewhere -- showing a local area police officer in full uniform, gun and all, who stows behind a building for a quick pee.
The video camera captured it all in at least 1080...P.
I have that video saved, but I sure as hell ain't posting it. And I go out of my way to mention this to demonstrate some kind of institutional compassion. For one, the situation deserves it. The officer was probably on a detail (I suspect but don't know related to the art festival. Def something like that in any case), and just had to go, period. I am sure that it was a breach of desperation and seeing the video posted with its at-last-count 2.2K views, had to be the most embarrassing thing ever for the officer.
And second, related to that empathy, I've done the same thing under far less noble circumstances. Thanks to a night of heavy drinking and a decision to "walk it" home, there is now a building on Delaware Avenue with the residue of my diabetically over-sweetened urine, sprinkled in place by me making the bladder gladder when I had nine blocks to the bathroom. I know that my desperate situation and ultimate handling of it exists in some commercial building's security video archive, and I would hate to see that posted.
It's noteworthy too that the local MSM media feels the same way, evidently. Though it has been a few weeks now, it has not, despite its higher than average view count for the forum it exists in, to the best of my knowledge at least, been seized upon and raised to the level of ever-profitable "gotcha" journalism, which it easily could be.
I felt the need to explain why the local website of pure public safety openness and the self-admitted embracer of drama and gasolining-on, might not immediately bee-line to post this video, particularly when nobody else has. In this website's early days let this be a notable example and acknowledgment that even I have my limits when it comes to respecting individuals in this sort of very specific situation.
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Dragged Into Court
05/30/2023
A visitor to the BuffScan livestreaming YouTube channel asked if I could include towns outside Buffalo City proper in the current channel lineup of the scanner. I assume that this is a direct result of the officer dragging incident that occurred in the town of Tonawanda on Sunday. Once I became aware via the various Twitter accounts reporting on this matter, I turned to my own scanner feed to better understand what was happening. Lo and behold though, I don't actually include Tonawanda police.
Whether or not that incident prompted the question, I thought I'd explain in longer-than-needs-to-be-I am-sure format why I don't carry all the surrounding township or village police departments.
It really just boils down to poor reception. My scanner sits on a desk here on West Ferry Avenue with nothing but its little original silver-stick antenna jutting out the back, and it just doesn't pull in all those little police departments well enough to not become a quality issue for the feed itself. Sometimes the channels open with activity but the amplitude is very low, and this sounds terrible -- like little breaks in the stream where people are supposed to be talking but where you either can't hear them at all or just very little.
And the other reason has to do with the SDS200 scanner that I use being a bit of a slow poke when it comes to scanning. The SDS200 is a great digital scanner, but it scans "slow" such that adding more and more endpoints to do so for, dramatically slows each scan cycle. Ergo, I have to be very selective about what I add to the lineup or risk fragmenting continuity of individual conversations. As much as possible, I keep the lineup focused strictly on Buffalo, with begrudged exceptions such as the awful-sounding AMR which I seriously considering taking out of the lineup (I'll take opinions on that one if anyone has one).
Mr. Bravado
Speaking of that officer dragging incident, the local media is reporting that victim officer David Piatek is still in intensive care but coming along well, now in stable condition at the hospital. And just as importantly, that a one Dareious Akbar has been arrested as the alleged driver or just signficantly involved well enough in putting Officer Piatek there, and is being charged.
A simple search on Facebook reveals a number of local accounts with "Dareious Akbar", all of which could be him but of course can't be conclusively said to be. Most of the accounts certainly depict pictures of someone who looks like the man they hauled into court today. And most of them contain posts and comments in "mush-speak" literary expression as well as pictures and media of thug life bravado.
You have to hand it to these kids, or as in this case, young adults; they may come off with much bravado today, and stick to such bravado for many years even as they arc and maintain a trajectory downward, but let's check up on this idiot in 20 years.
If he's not permanently caged by then, shot dead by police, shot dead by a street cohort, or shot dead by his own hand, we won't be surprised to find him that toothless asshole jangling a stolen grocery cart of plastic bottles down the middle of Main Street rambling about how rotten his life or whatever.
I joke, but with today's digital technology, we could actually do this sort of protracted monitoring and updating of this guy's remaining dirt bag life.
I dunno, let me think about it.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Buffalo Police Investigate BuffScan Property
05/24/2023
So this happened this afternoon. As best as I can deduce from the BuffScan feed playback, officers were searching the neighborhood for a gun suspect which brought at least one officer to the very porch of BuffScan Operational Headquarters.
The actual incident that prompted the search appears to have taken place several blocks south and it is unclear if the search ultimately resulted in a takedown - which would have been awesome.
But, the radio chatter suggested that police were associating the suspect with a 4 door blue Acura. After I made this video footage a Ring Neighborhood app post, one commentator said they spotted one leaving the neighborhood fast.
De-tects, you might find this one interesting if you're still looking for the suspect.
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AMR Shrug Sighting 1
05/20/2023
The point of this post is twofold. First, I need to test my custom "Instagram" feature for Battle Blog, the publishing engine BuffScan presents through. And second, I need to establish the tempo of posting media of public safety activity as spotted that on the face of it is mundane and seemingly pointless. More on the whys of that as my posting rolls on.
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Buffalo Police Social Media Interactionists Wanted
05/19/2023
Ever since it's been possible for people to circulate Ring Doorbell-style video clips of low level criminal actors stealing packages and committing vandalism and the like, I've wondered, do police roam those posts and take notes? Is there any demonstrative curiosity prompting them to scroll through those postings?
The answer is probably yes. Though I would guess it is just to tie some happestance of some bottom-feeder criminal to a larger crime actually worth spending resources on.
But do they interact with the public while they are doing this? Are they assuring in an official social media comment-injected post, "Hey, we're here, we're watching, we're interested, and thank you for posting this!"
That's where the answer is probably not. Or at least that I've ever seen insfofar as Buffalo city postings.
Well, here's an example out of Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania where I routinely monitor the Ring Neighbors app of my old neighborhood there, because I'm just nuts. It shows off exactly what I'm talking about. People post their vids of porch pirates and what-not, and a detective caters to the public imagination that police care and are in the obvious place checking evidence where evidence is most contributed.
I think it would be great to develop the work flow and assign a social media ambassador to "patrol" these types of feeds and forums with the aim of creating a logically expected presence.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Fist Bumping QSL.NET - Whoever That Guy Is
04/29/2023
A note about the following post: Police scanning must be replaced by something else. In this cross-post from my personal blog though, I nonetheless call attention to tribute content from my Calling All Citizens or Openness campaign, both of which I conducted through the late 90s to the mid-2000s. To explain my feelings today on that effort, while encryption is a key trigger in the motivation for building up a human network of public safety media documenters to replace police scanning, it is not exclusively the reason. I hope public safety agencies will find it in their policies to go back to open-air communication, or to stay that way if they have not yet closed, but honestly -- from the philosopher of "Calling All Citizens" and "Openness" -- it's no longer important that they do. There's a better answer that doesn't require public safety participation in this level of transparency.
For maybe 20 years now the site operator of QSL.NET has kept my "Calling All Citizens" and "Openness" campaign alive.
Or at least the ghost of it.
Occasionally when doing modern day searches on artifacts of my campaign I am inevitably led back to his early style website.
The website operator has preserved key content of the old openness.org website (the domain of which I sold to Intel a few years ago - because $$$). The operator has done this outside the somewhat constrained overhead of its other archive as might be found on the wayback machine.
I would add that he seems to have done so perfectly. He seems to have filtered out a lot of my own nonsense of the day and targeted just the meat and potatoes of the matter.
Beyond all that content, the QSL's author appears to have a superior sense of and commitment to indexing. The main landing page contains scores of links to many now-dead, but just as many still-alive, websites and blogs all related to public safety communication and other websites of the period, some of which are devoted to the merits of keeping police and fire calls in the clear.
I don't know if he continues to add and curate his index today but his adherence to the principle of a flat noise-free web that simply provides information and indeed spreads it is just another point of admiration. Even if done accidentally in this era of the commercialized web it's a sobering illustration of the open web's authentic utility.
The website's creator keeps his actual name off the site almost entirely. The one reference to it (which I will not spell out here to respect his apparent sensitivity to being stamped online) is in the form of a picture of a certification he received with his name on it. Aside from that it seems he wants a healthy porch between himself and the rest of the world.
It's long overdue and frankly, not by much in terms of dollars. But whoever you are good sir, thank you for allowing my donation tip.
Tap-Off Points
- The QSL website itself
- The preserved thesis or "manifesto" page of sorts for the Openness campaign
- Openness blog content from 2003 - 2004
- The Openness Yahoo Group archive from 2000 - 2005
- QSL's own commentary (I believe) regarding public safety encryption
- My earlier blog post about the old Openness website
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Something Unbelievable Happens In This Video
04/23/2023
Couple of interesting facets to this incident that occurred near the intersection of Grant and West Ferry. But the really big one will be spotted only by the sharpest eyes. Watch the video closely.
I became cognizant of this incident, which was just a block or two outside my BuffScan residential response zone, by sirens running past my apartment. One siren had the gun of an engine that told me it was a) the police, and b) it was something serious enough to merit charging to the scene.
And believe it or not, despite the excitement of the obvious crisis -- somewhere nearby -- my first instinct was not to crawl out of bed to investigate. I could tell it wasn't "just out front" and as fate had it, I was suffering from the lingering effect of what felt like the flu. I was too comfy under the covers and while I knew I was missing something "just close enough" maybe, I wasn't getting up to see what.
That was for the first siren, and I believe for the second. But after the third, and then, when I managed myself up to look out the window, I saw two other police cars racing sans lights and sirens in the same direction, I knew, well shoot, physical health be damned, I had to figure out what was up.
Whatever the heck it was, I couldn't legitimately be "Mister BuffScan" if the world was coming down a few blocks away and I didn't at least try to go and document it. So, mumbling and grumbling I found my sneakers and got going.
I also fired up the YouTube BuffScan feed to get some insight as to what I might be foolishly driving myself into, but only in time to hear this one line: "Cars slow it down, slow it down for Grant and West Ferry."
Well at least I knew where this thing was. Just a few blocks up. In the back of my mind I had hoped it would be farther away so that I could just wave it off as "too far" and get myself back into bed. But with that veracious a response, and so close, well, as I've said already, I couldn't not go check it out.
So off I go in my car. As I turn out of the driveway I immediately spot the conflagration of police and fire trucks directly ahead of me. It wouldn't be a far drive, and while I was at it, I could pick up some toilet paper after I was done recording whatever was going on. I suspected the flu after all, people, and I needed a resupply.
I did park my car in a near empty parking lot across the street, hopped out, and in no time was that weirdo filming the scene; some footage of which you see above.
The scene I had injected myself into was a block-length's line of police vehicles, some with overheads on, some not. Most dramatically as you see in the video, one of them had been driven on to the sidewalk as if having just about driven into the building ahead of it.
A group of firemen and police were "working on" someone seemingly at the hood of the BPD cruiser and immediately I feared the worst. Had a BPD vehicle physically mowed someone down? Was there a shootout that meant an officer had to keep his attention on a gun instead of the steering wheel? The layout wasn't good so I mentally prepared myself for whatever gruesome thing those people were hovering over.
In short order I heard the bellowing cries of a man and knew right away someone hadn't been killed, irregardless of whatever happened. Thank god. The cries came from what I took to be a brown-skinned man lying on the ground, still in a bit of a physical tussel. He was shouting arbitrary sentences at the people trying desperately to tend to him.
I settled on what most of the others standing around me did, which was that someone enduring a mental health crisis, or drug consumption, was having a breakdown and acting out. He was probably confronted by the police somehow and then challenged them which of course did not end well. At this writing, the actual story is still unknown, but when speculating, it's fair to start with the simple theories first.
But in looking at the video, all of that is really beside the point. A block's worth of police, an untold gaggle of police officers remunerating everything among themselves; citizens standing around aghast, a screaming perp-victim on the ground who was bounded quickly and loaded into an ambulance (and I might add much to his apparent objection), and a weirdo - heh - filming it all.
And yet, what you see in the video is this: Absolutely nothing.
And by that I mean, save for my filming, save for the inside knowledge of the public safety system and a few direct witnesses, to the wider knowledge of the world at large, nothing happened. This was a non-event that evaporated of police cars and witnesses relatively quickly afterwards.
Don't take that the wrong way. Yes, the information exists. Police have it, AMR has it, the fire department has it, and even the witnesses with their individual memories and renditions, have it. And certainly with great effort, the story of what happened could be "mined away" from the people who hold it. Maybe it would flow freely from them on the simplest of query. Maybe it would take a fight, if for some reason it mattered to have one. Maybe a resource-strapped for-profit media house would actually step up and blotter it as perhaps a lit up city block of public safety vehicles should be logically incentivizing enough to do.
But then again, maybe not.
Information is caprciously over-controlled. Maybe there is fear of wrong-doing and mismanagement; or maybe, as the saying goes: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who knows. But if public safety feels something is too routine, or the for-profit media is too lean to cover it, whatever dark thing we think can happen in a world where human curiosity is squelched, might-could.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Ambulance Crash is Example of Traversion Encounter
04/20/2023
Just after 7:00 PM I overheard a radio call for an accident involving an ambulance at Humboldt and Main and decided to document public safety response, thereby logging my first traversion encounter as BuffScan Node #1.
A traversion encounter is one we can define as becoming cognizent of a documentable incident during a BuffScan Noder's normal travels (in my case, during my home commute).
Although this particular event was detected over the police scanner, I would expect that in a post-radio-scanning-world, traversion encounters would be more direct and by nature, random. A BuffScan Node member must be ready with their camera or media hardware, and related documentation plan at all times for this type of encounter.
Audio Call of Driver
Although the ambulance driver reports an injured colleague, we can take from lack of any mainstream news mention this morning that, at least hopefully, the injuries were not serious. Granted my scan of mainstream news headlines here has been pretty cursory and perhaps it is too early after the matter.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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Police Radio is Going Out Of Service
04/15/2023
If you are one of the people who circulate among the social media or internet circles that a site like this might come to your attention through, it's fair to guess that you have some relationship to a police scanner.
You're the classical police scanning hobbyist, such as myself; work in public safety, or maybe work with the media.
Whatever the case, you're the type of person that needs to hear and know the following: Police scanners are going away. Police scanning is evaporating.
I am unfurling a vision of something to replace it that is much more exciting, engaging, and useful. And to the extent that it involves radios and structured radio communication, will by its very nature, actually save a variation of public safety monitoring despite all the foils of encryption and policy derision against chaotic transparency. In the world that I write out here, there will be something to tune in to and even to participate in directly -- if that world actualizes.
I need an opening entry, and something as plain and blunt as this one is really the gist, the point, and the start of a beautiful story.
You can read about the mission of this blog here.
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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