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Show HN: I made a website for searching police scanner transcripts (copcrawler.com)

5 points by notjoemartinez ↗ HN
Hey everyone,

copcrawler.com is a website that lets you search through transcribed police scanner audio from broadcastify.com. I'm currently using faster-whisper with the tiny.en model to transcribe audio from about 14 departments on some old laptops. The transcript quality is relatively low however it's good enough to find common police scanner keywords like 'shots fired' or 'burglary'. I've also implemented RAG for a of couple departments which you can try out with the chat bot mode.

5 comments

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BandButcher
bookmarked! sweet app

are you doing this real time or in a batch mode/daily scrape?

personally it would be useful to maybe subscribe to key words and get notifications for specific cities

notjoemartinez
> are you doing this real time or in a batch mode/daily scrape?

I'm transcribing the previous day starting 1AM every day, which is about as much as my old MacBook I have can handle. I'm in the process of applying for the Broadcastify Calls API which should give me access to real time feeds but it will be a challenge to get the compute needed to handle real time transcriptions.

> personally it would be useful to maybe subscribe to key words and get notifications for specific cities

This is a feature I have planned. It will come with a major disclaimer about whisper transcript hallucinations.

Edit: spelling

matteason
> I'm in the process of applying for the Broadcastify Calls API which should give me access to real time feeds

I'd be really interested to hear how you get on with this - I've been wanting to add these kinds of feeds to https://ambiph.one but it looks like they're not issuing new licenses for the feeds and the Calls API looks like it's write-only from the docs?

pogue
That's a very cool idea. I checked out my city, but I wasn't really sure what to search for & even if I did I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at when I see it.

But here are 2 suggestions I thought of:

• Have the ability to check the visitors location, or give them a map, and let them search for results in that area. So, if I wanted to search for "shots fired" or "car break in" or whatever in my zip code, I could do that & get a general idea of where the cop is when they're on the radio. Or if not the exact location, what precinct they're in and where they go to for calls.

• Since police use a ton of lingo and codes the general public is not aware of, it might be helpful to actually translate that. Like, a 187 = a murder. That kind of thing.