The Fire Wire Standard
What we publish, what we hold back, and how mistakes get fixed.
Jefferson County Fire Wire is built entirely on publicly broadcast radio traffic. That means we hear far more than we publish. Most of what comes across the airwaves never appears on this site or our social feeds, on purpose.
None of the filtering described on this page is required by law. Scanner traffic in New York is public, and plenty of pages and apps repost all of it. We choose not to. This page is the standard we hold ourselves to, written down so anyone can check our posts against it.
Where the information comes from
Everything on Jefferson County Fire Wire comes from publicly broadcast, unencrypted public-safety radio traffic: the same audio anyone with a $30 scanner receives. We have no access to CAD systems, no insider sources, and no records requests feeding the live service. If it wasn't said over the air, we don't know it.
Because radio audio can be misheard, every post we publish carries this disclaimer, verbatim:
⚠️ Auto-generated from radio dispatch. Initial details may be misheard or incorrect, and may change as the incident develops.
What never gets posted
These calls are dispatched over the same public airwaves as everything else. We suppress them anyway.
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Medical calls. All of them.
A cardiac, an overdose, a fall: never on the public feed, regardless of how newsworthy.
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Sensitive calls.
Mental-health calls, and call types where posting could put someone at risk.
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Calls where the fire department is assisting with a matter about a person.
Entry assists and lift assists at residences, welfare checks, and standbys while another agency handles a medical, overdose, or disturbance call. These carry fire call types, and we suppress them anyway. Operational fire coverage, like a station move-up during a working incident, does post.
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EMS operational announcements.
Crew callbacks, hospital status, and similar internal traffic.
What we remove from what we do post
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Patient details, on any call.
No ages, no genders, no consciousness or breathing status, no descriptions of how someone was found, no symptoms. Injury information is limited to a count or a status, like "one person injured" or "injuries reported." A crash or a fire posts; how a specific person is doing never does.
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Names.
Residents, callers, and involved people are never named publicly.
The rule the whole pipeline follows:
The public needs to know an incident happened and responders are on it, never how a specific person is doing.
How we work toward accuracy
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Dual-engine transcription.
Two independent AI transcription systems process every call and are cross-checked against each other.
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Address validation.
Locations are checked against New York State GIS mapping data before they appear on a post or the map.
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A disclaimer on every post, because none of that is perfect.
Radio audio can be misheard. We say so up front, on every single post, rather than presenting automated output as verified fact.
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A human is notified of every automated action.
The system never operates unwatched, and automated changes have hard limits: anything touching people, numbers, or injuries requires human review.
Corrections and removals
Every incident page on this site has a report option. Corrections are verified against the original dispatch audio and mapping data, and verified fixes are applied to the post, the website, and every related record, typically within minutes. Corrections left as Facebook comments get picked up and processed too.
Developing incidents update the original post in place, marked with 🔄, instead of scattering new posts that leave the outdated version standing.
Anyone directly involved in an incident can request a takedown. The post is hidden first and reviewed after: removal is immediate, questions come later. Posts are hidden, never quietly edited to pretend they didn't exist.
Comment moderation
On our Facebook posts:
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Comments that identify involved people or their homes are hidden.
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Scam and "video footage" bait comments are hidden.
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Community outcome updates, like "they've been found," are always left visible.
Questions about this standard, or a post you believe doesn't meet it?