Titan6 said:
The other thing you have to keep in mind is that these days scanners only tell a part of the story. Police cars have had text messaging for a couple of decades now and the dispatch will often use that to keep the channel from being clogged with voice traffic. there may be a lot more going on than you know about.
Beyond the text messaging, we also have Nextels in our cars, our own personal cellphones, and an "I-call" radio feature that allows us to talk with just one other unit/dispatcher.
I'm no tech guy, so I can't tell you how half of this stuff works. But, I know that portions of our system are supposed to be protected from scanning. I'm also sure that there is someone out there somewhere who knows how to scan it anyway. But, back to the original point that Titan made, you probably don't have all of the information.
Beyond that, the street officers all know of the "routine" houses, or the ones that get bogus calls. We are also accustomed to interpreting the severity of these calls! By way of example, probably only 5% of our "burglary in progress" calls amount to anything other than a cold burglary! While we still respond accordingly, it doesn't necessarily mean that things are as they seem on the radio. As a second example, we have one lady in my district who calls in burglaries in-progress/home invasions about 3 times per week. She's old, she's nuttier than a peanut farm, and she's relatively harmless (save for the time she wastes on our end). But, many an uninformed dispatcher has given that call out with obvious concern in their voice!
The long and short of my disertation is that you would be best served to leave the police work to the police, particularly when you would have been basing your decisions on the limited amount of intel you could gain off of radio traffic.
