Independent public safety media
Not affiliated with any police department, fire service or government agency. Just people covering what happens in their own towns, carefully.
A network, not a feed
Police Scanner Network started in 2021 as a single local page and grew into a network of 24 pages across the United States and Canada. It is headquartered in Cedarburg, Wisconsin and operates independently — no agency owns it, funds it, or has any say in what it publishes.
Each page covers one market. That matters, because public safety reporting is useless when it is generic. People do not want to know that there was a crash somewhere; they want to know whether the road they are about to drive down is closed, whether the school their kid is in went into lockdown, and whether the person arrested in their neighborhood was actually charged. A page that covers one place can answer those questions. A national feed cannot.
Nothing runs on scanner traffic alone
Radio traffic is a starting point, not a source. It is fragmentary, it is often wrong in the first few minutes, and the people talking on it are working from incomplete information themselves. Treating it as publishable fact is how misinformation spreads during exactly the moments when people can least afford it.
So before anything is published it has to be confirmed against something on the record: an agency press release or public log, a court filing or docket entry, an official clearinghouse alert, or reporting from a named news outlet that we can point to. Posts carry a visible note about what was verified and against what. If a detail cannot be confirmed, it does not run — even when that means being slower than a page that will publish anything.
What we will not publish
Names before charges
A person who has been arrested has not been charged, and a person who has been charged has not been convicted. We do not publish names until there is a charge on the record, and we say plainly which stage a case is at.
Home addresses
We do not publish the home address of a private individual, a suspect, a victim or a witness. Block-level location is as specific as coverage gets.
Anything that interferes with a response
Tactical positions, staging locations, or details that would help someone evade or endanger responders during an active incident. Those wait until it is over.
Unverified claims about named people
Allegations that exist only as rumor, a screenshot, or a comment thread. If we cannot source it, we do not repeat it.
We follow up when we get it wrong
Early reports about incidents are wrong often enough that a page which never issues a correction is not being careful — it is just not checking. When a charge is dropped, a suspect is cleared, a death toll changes or an initial account turns out to be mistaken, the update runs as its own post, not as a quiet edit. Our full editorial and corrections policy sets out how that works and how to ask for one.
On encryption
A growing number of agencies have encrypted their radio traffic entirely, which removes public access to communications that were open for decades. Several markets in this network are affected. We think that trade-off deserves more public debate than it has had — the safety arguments for encryption are real, and so is the loss of public oversight. Where a market has gone dark, we say so on that page and build coverage from records and reporting instead.
How this is funded
PSN is funded by platform content monetization, reader subscriptions, and advertising. Advertisers have no influence over coverage, and paid placements are labeled as paid. No agency, union, campaign or political organization funds any part of this network.
Questions about how we work?
Corrections, coverage questions, partnership enquiries and press requests all go to the same inbox and get a real answer.