About 616 Dispatch

Where the calls come from

• Ottawa County Central Dispatch's public incident board, live.
• The Ottawa County Sheriff's Office's public incident data, posted about a day later.
• Kent County Dispatch Authority's live incident map.
• The City of Grand Rapids' dispatched calls lists, about 30 minutes behind.
• MDOT Mi Drive for highway crashes and lane closures.
• Fire and EMS dispatch radio, received by our own scanner and transcribed automatically. A word can be misheard, so radio calls are checked against the town that was said before they're posted.

Each call's page says which of these it came from. Some sources post late, so a call can appear after it's over.

How it's made

616 Dispatch is independently run from West Michigan. Calls are gathered, cleaned and posted by software, around the clock, without a person checking each one first. Radio dispatches are transcribed by speech-recognition software on our own server, and an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) picks out each call's town, block, type and units and writes the short summary of what crews reported. That's what makes it fast, and it's also why a detail can occasionally be misheard. We review the results, fix errors as soon as we find them, and welcome corrections.

What we publish, and what we don't

• Locations are shown to the block or the intersection. House numbers are never published.
• Names are never published. Dispatcher notes are cleaned automatically to remove names, phone numbers and street numbers.
• Calls about a person in crisis are listed by type and town or block only, with no note. The hourly report counts them but never reads them out.
• Medical calls can include an age, sex and complaint as dispatch gave them, never who the patient is.
• A call type is the dispatcher's first description from a 911 call. Many calls turn out less serious than they first sound.

More on what we collect and keep is in our privacy policy.

Corrections and removal requests

If something on a call is wrong, or a call identifies you or someone close to you and you'd like it changed or taken down, email [email protected] with the link to the call's page. We answer within 2 business days, privacy requests first. More on Contact & corrections.