Chasing Crime, but Foiled by Traffic

THE emergency dispatches came crackling out of the small speaker on the dashboard.

A missing 13-year-old in Harlem. Two “all-hands” building fires near the George Washington Bridge. A man — “with a red tie” — who seemed intent on leaping off that same bridge, and a “vicious raccoon” laying siege to a restaurant on Second Avenue.

It was the first Friday in February, midmorning, and we were driving in East Harlem, following the lead of a radio scanner used by police, fire and other emergency officials to communicate with dispatchers fielding 911 calls. Several police scanner apps have become available for smart phones recently, including Police Scanner 2 ($4.99), which has been downloaded nearly a million times, according to its creator. So it seemed an opportune time to take an old-fashioned scanner out for a spin.

I brought two camera-wielding colleagues along for a day-long chase of crime around the five boroughs, using the scanner as a guide to the city’s underbelly. We found it was easy to tap into an audio overview of the city’s emergency activity, but much more difficult to follow in real time, because of traffic, distance, and the challenge of catching addresses and sifting through jargon.

While the iPhone app allows users to tune into one frequency at a time, our electronic scanner has the advantage of rapidly fielding transmissions from hundreds of citywide and local emergency channels. On these airwaves, there is never a slow news day. It is a nonstop litany of fires, missing persons, gas leaks, car crashes, building collapses, shots fired, bridge jumpers and purse snatchings. Only a fraction of these wind up making the news: our goal was to check out the stuff that doesn’t.

We narrowly missed a club-wielding would-be car thief dodging a bullet in Brooklyn; teenagers sniffing aerosol cans in Elmhurst, Queens; and pit bulls off their leashes outside a Queens elementary school. A pimp in Times Square and a “homeless male being assaulted by a male black with a guitar” outside Penn Station.

Our journey started out at 9:30 a.m. in Midtown, and we set a borrowed Uniden Bearcat scanner to roam a multitude of channels, some serving individual precincts or borough commands. Over the citywide police channel, we immediately heard a report of a car accident in Rockaway leaving six passengers injured, “three critical, and three noncritical.” On the highway unit channel, we heard of an “eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman in an accident on the Bronx River Parkway.” A call came over at 10:03 a.m. that in a passenger-screening section of Kennedy International Airport, a woman was being held because she was deemed to be “an obvious threat.”

These all sounded promising, but they also seemed too far away to catch. Then at 10:05, there was a report of a man shot on Lexington Avenue near East 111th Street. We were close to Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, so we headed north with an ear out for more details from the dispatcher: The fleeing shooter was described as 23 years old with a brown leather jacket. Despite C.P.R., “the aided” was “not responding,” the dispatcher reported. But when we arrived at the location, there was no crime scene, no police, no witnesses. An officer nearby said the whole thing was a hoax, a crank caller pranking 911. She said these types of calls are not uncommon.

We resumed roaming, and around 11:30 a.m. a dispatcher announced “shots fired” on Boerum Place in Downtown Brooklyn. We moved quickly down F.D.R. Drive and over the Brooklyn Bridge to the scene, which was cordoned off with police tape and packed with detectives. A man trying to break into a light-blue 2009 BMW had been confronted by the owner, a probation officer. The would-be thief picked up a hefty wooden stick; the probation officer pulled out his gun, let off a warning shot and held the man to the ground with the gun in his back. By the time we got there, of course, both of them were gone, and even the coffee-cart guy was packing up and moving along.

For backup, we were also monitoring the Breaking News Network paging system, which has people monitoring scanners as we were and pumping out bulletins of seemingly newsworthy items to subscribers. As we canvassed the scene in Brooklyn, the B.N.N. pager was bleeping about a “mass casualty incident” at a school in Elmhurst, Queens: a fire department dispatcher had reported that eight students “inhaled an aerosol spray.”

We headed in that direction but, slowed by traffic, detoured to follow a report that pit bulls were running around off-leash outside the nearby Fresh Meadow School. The dogs remained at large, a crossing guard and a police officer said over the scanner. We ate deli sandwiches in the car while listening to reports from the 107th Precinct, which covers central Queens: Two males in a car accident, now fighting in the street; a dispute in a furniture store on 165th Street; a missing 13-year-old named Jennifer.

A citywide police dispatcher came on and described an emergency in Brooklyn involving “a male hanging from the roof by a rope.” We all groaned simultaneously, knowing the man would not still be hanging there by the time we trekked to another borough. Closer by, there was property stolen in — of all places — the visitors’ parking lot at Rikers Island. We headed over, but could not find the complainant.

Elsewhere in Queens, a caller from a pay phone at the Horace Harding Expressway and 99th Street reported a person bleeding on the ground. Still elsewhere, a passer-by reported a suspicious-looking Dodge van following a woman. In Jamaica, there was a family dispute at a Popeye’s restaurant.

It was rush hour, but we were going in the opposite direction — over the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge back into Manhattan, toward East 115th Street, where a dispatcher had mentioned a “suicidal E.D.P.” An “E.D.P.” — emotionally disturbed person — is one of the more frequently heard terms on the scanner. This one happened to be at a counseling office in the James Weldon Johnson public housing project. We beat the police cruiser and ambulance there by 10 minutes. Not to worry: One of the late-arriving officers told us the complaint was about a client who had long since calmed down.

We stopped to check out a crime in the Pathmark supermarket on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. Supermarket security and the police had collared a shoplifter. But he was already gone.

The calls were coming in faster now: Domestic dispute on East 128th Street; “child abuse” on West 125th; “hysterical mother” who lost her 2-year-old, on West 155th; a knifing on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Then: the “vicious raccoon” alert. We raced to a Peruvian restaurant named Ceviche. It had fresh seafood, a sophisticated atmosphere and a raccoon peeking out from a ceiling panel. The owner, Raphael Benavides, was up on a ladder, screwing the panel shut. Everything else seemed as usual. Mambo music played, and the only patron in the place, Wendy Van Amson, was enjoying appetizers and a margarita.

“I’m a New Yorker,” she said with a shrug.

From Ceviche, the next stop was a Park Avenue apartment building, at 95th Street, where four fire trucks had responded to a 911 call the doorman said was from a cranky resident who could not stand the smoky smell from a neighbor’s fireplace. The firefighters left, and so did we, down Park Avenue to 79th Street after a report of a domestic dispute.

“No way, José,” the doorman there said when we asked to knock on the apartment door.

By now, the cycle was growing familiar. The hope. The rush. The letdown. The scanner kept squawking: a stolen car chased by the police on the Belt Parkway; a woman in only underwear on East 112th Street despite the 37-degree weather; a commercial burglary on Fifth Avenue; a family dispute in the Amsterdam Houses; shots fired at Randall Avenue and 177th Street; and at 9:19 p.m., a man “promoting prostitution” on Seventh Avenue and 43rd Street. We passed on them all.

We heard that in Harlem, a man was dragging a woman down Seventh Avenue by the hair, and that a man shot on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx was taken to Jacobi Medical Center. At 10:46 p.m., about 13 hours after we started our scanner-guided odyssey, there was a “call for help” from a woman on upper Riverside Drive. The woman had, apparently, first called for help on her Facebook page — an emergency for our time.

But the location came through garbled, so we punched the “scan” button and rolled on.