About DispatchDB
From pager tones hitting the airwaves to a fully classified incident on your screen — in under 60 seconds. No other service does this.
The Origin
DispatchDB grew out of Jefferson County Fire Wire — a personal project by Ethan Patchen to keep his community in Jefferson County, New York informed about local fire dispatch activity.
It started simply: automated Facebook posts with the responding department's name and a link to the dispatch audio. No fancy player, no analysis — just a raw audio link and a browser. But it worked, and people wanted it. Fire Wire became a trusted source of breaking emergency information for the region.
How It Works
When a dispatcher keys up the radio and sends out tones, a chain reaction starts. DispatchDB captures the audio, transcribes it, classifies the incident, identifies the responding agencies, geocodes the location, and links related dispatches together — all automatically.
Why It Exists
At its core, DispatchDB is a form of news media — covering emergency incidents exactly as they unfold on the fireground, sourced directly from dispatch radio. The information is public, the technology is now accessible, and communities deserve to know what's happening in their area.
AI made this possible. The same tools that power the product — transcription, classification, analysis — are the same tools used to build it. What once required a newsroom full of people monitoring scanners around the clock can now happen automatically, at scale, with better accuracy and speed.
The Vision
DispatchDB was designed from day one for multi-county, multi-state operation. As AI analysis capabilities deepen, the platform will follow incidents from initial tones through the entire fireground radio traffic, producing detailed incident reports that tell the full story of what happened, how agencies responded, and how events unfolded.
Real emergency journalism, powered by AI, delivered in real time.