If you ever watch the American networks or cable newscasts, you’ve likely seen the credit: “Audio from Broadcastify.” It’s a web based service that carries police, fire, ambulance, aviation and railroad radio feeds from the source. And it’s used by newsrooms across the U.S. whenever there’s an emergency, like a police shooting, a murder, a terrible fire, a plane crash or in the case of Wednesday’s incident in Flint, Michigan, a terror attack.
 
It’s how most stations these days get that dramatic audio of a cop screaming, “Shots fired! Shots Fired!” into his radio. And it sets the scene for a newscast like nothing else can.  
 
It’s an amazing service for newsrooms but of course in Canada, cops and others have been moving away from allowing scanner traffic to be heard and now many transmissions are either scrambled or locked down so no one has access to them. Which has meant real problems for assignment desks, which used to monitor these calls day and night, so they’d know when something was going on and send a camera to spray the scene.
 
I can understand why some of these radio bursts need to be kept secret, like in the case of say, a task force doing a gang raid. But overall, it’s too bad Canada has decided to go in the other direction and silence these transmissions here. As usual, those on the north side of the border are shut out by officials who’d much rather the public doesn’t get to hear what they’re up to.
 
You can check out Broadcastify’s live scanners from across the U.S. here.