About Bloomington Scanner

This site listens to the unencrypted Monroe County public-safety radio (the Indiana SAFE-T system), turns each transmission into text with speech-recognition software, and highlights the codes, places and units mentioned, so residents can see what's going on around them.

What you should know

Transcripts are made by a computer. Radio audio is noisy and clipped; words, numbers and street names are often wrong. Don't treat anything here as confirmed.
It isn't official. We're not affiliated with any police, fire, EMS or government agency. In an emergency, call 911.
Codes are shown with Indiana State Police meanings; local agencies may use them differently.

AI disclosure

This site was made with AI. Its software was written with the help of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, under human direction and review.
Calls are transcribed by AI. Each recording is turned into text by OpenAI's Whisper speech-recognition model (the medium.en model), running on our own computer. No audio or transcripts are sent to any AI company.
What isn't AI: highlighting codes, places and units, removing personal details, and placing calls on the map are done by ordinary rule-based software that matches words and numbers. It's predictable, but it can only work with the words the transcription got right.
What that means for you: AI transcription mishears names, streets and numbers, and can occasionally produce words nobody said. Listen to the audio where it's available, and check anything important with local news or official sources.

Privacy: what we remove

Names, dates of birth, and license plates read out during records checks are hidden.
House numbers become blocks ("400 block of East Kirkwood Avenue"), and maps show a hexagon (about half a mile across in town, a mile outside it, where homes are farther apart) whose center is deliberately shifted, never an exact address.
Audio of records checks isn't played publicly, and other audio has spoken personal details silenced when we can find them.
Short, badly garbled transmissions are left out.
Some radio channels aren't shown publicly at all.

Stars and suggested fixes

Anyone can star a call (see Most starred) or suggest a better transcript. Suggestions are only published after staff check them against the audio. To stop abuse we record the IP address with each star and suggestion and delete it after 90 days. Stars from people without an account are remembered with a random cookie that identifies nothing about you.

Developing situations

During a serious incident, rather than broadcasting confused chatter, we hold back recordings from the scene, put the rest of the feed on a 15-minute delay, and show an alert with a map of areas to avoid. Once things have been quiet for a while (about 120 minutes) the related recordings are posted, tagged with the situation.

Why we limit some information, and why this can feel too cautious: see our ethics.

Sources

Talkgroup names: RadioReference and Broadcastify listings.
Codes: Indiana State Police tables via police-codes.com.
For the actual news, see local news.