VIRGINIA BEACH — There’s a private group on Facebook where Virginia Beach residents come together to celebrate law enforcement and discuss crime in real time.
The page — dubbed the Virginia Beach Police Scanner — was created nearly two years ago by a city resident named Ronald McCallion.
It currently has more than 13,000 members, and it’s growing rapidly with about 2,000 new members joining every month, said 55-year-old McCallion.
McCallion and a small team of local Facebook administrators monitor the page, updating it with information gleaned from the Virginia Beach Police Department’s live audio scanner feed.
The feed details communications between 911 dispatchers as they direct law enforcement officers to respond to active calls for crimes, accidents and medical emergencies.
But the page isn’t limited to updates from the scanner feed.
Members also flock to the page seeking advice on legal situations, the area’s best schools and who they should call if they suspect illegal activity in their neighborhoods.
Some people also post news articles in the group, updating the community with new details that emerge on cases they’ve heard generate over the scanner. Some of Southside Daily’s staff are members of the page, including this reporter, and the news site’s articles are frequently posted in the group.
And at the end of the day, all information is good information if it helps people understand the end goal of policing in Virginia Beach, McCallion said.
“We want community policing,” McCallion said. “That’s what I want from the page — an understanding of what police are doing.”
The Facebook group is not affiliated with the Virginia Beach Police Department, spokeswoman Linda Kuehn wrote in an email. She added that the VBPD doesn’t know how many of its officers are members of the group.
Cluing the community into crime happening around them
McCallion, who is originally from Alaska, said he started the Virginia Beach Police Scanner Facebook page when he moved to the city in 2015.
It wasn’t McCallion’s first time founding a police scanner page. In 2006, he also created a page in Alaska — now titled Anchorage Scanner JOE — that has more than 43,500 members to date.
McCallion is no longer involved in the moderation of the Anchorage police scanner group. He puts his focus into updating the Virginia Beach scanner page, and on certain nights he switches over to the scanner’s “members only” page where he posts audio for people who have donated a bit of money toward the group.
He’s helped by about nine other administrators who listen to the police scanner, update the page with real-time information and moderate the discussion among members, which can devolve quickly into arguments, especially when a post involves topics like domestic violence, race or drug use.
McCallion works in federal security, not law enforcement; however, he’s passionate about public safety. He said he was inspired to create his first police scanner Facebook page when he was working as a security guard in Florida after getting out of the Army.
McCallion was doing security work at a Winn-Dixie grocery store in Gainesville, Fla. when he bought his first police scanner to listen to for fun.
One day, he overheard officers talking about a woman who was waving a gun in the parking lot of an area grocery store. He listened intently to find out which location she was at, only to realize the crime was happening just outside of the Winn-Dixie he was guarding.
Because he’d heard the call over the police scanner, McCallion was able to alert the Winn-Dixie manager who locked the store’s doors and kept customers safe until police arrived.
That experience taught McCallion that he couldn’t necessarily rely strictly on the media to tell him about crime happening in the area.
“That’s how the page came into play,” he said. “A lot of people don’t havea clue how much crime really goes on because the news stations can’t report it.”
Third-party information can be problematic
Pamela Kovach has lived in Virginia Beach for 52 years and has been listening to the police scanner since she was a child. Although there was less crime in the area during her childhood, Kovach said her dad always had a police scanner on and she was fascinated by it.
Kovach is one of Virginia Beach Police Scanner’s moderators, and she said that her police scanner is on all day. She doesn’t post every call, but over the year’s she’s heard police officers get injured in the line of duty and SWAT teams successfully resolve dangerous situations.
Kovach said she believes the scanner page is important to the Virginia Beach community because it “makes people aware of their surroundings.”
Although well intended, police say the scanner page has been problematic in the past. Information that is being presented over a police scanner is initial and coming from a third party. More often than not, it doesn’t reveal the whole story unraveling at a police scene, Kuehn wrote.
“That information cannot be verified until first responders actually arrive on the scene and evaluate the situation,” Kuehn wrote. “Often times the circumstances of a case may be very different than what was originally broadcast, or it may be completely wrong. Much of that information may or may not be relayed back over the air so the person who is monitoring a scanner would not be aware of that.”
McCallion said that he and other scanner moderators are aware that the information they post will not always be accurate. To protect officers who are in high-stress situations, McCallion has a policy that doesn’t allow anyone to post information about dangerous situations as they are being reported in real time on the scanner.
“The cops don’t want you doing anything that’s going to jeopardize them,” he said. “I don’t really think we’re risking a lot of officer safety. I think we’re bringing a lot of awareness and appreciation.”
Posts on the page can also instigate serious discussions and arguments about touchy subjects, like race.
When talking about the scanner page, McCallion doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that he includes people’s race when he’s posting about scanner-related crime. He said he includes that information for the safety of the public who may be in an area where someone is shooting or committing other violent crimes.
“A lot of times people will get offended and say … ‘Why do you have to point out the race of this person?'” he said. “The way I see it, that’s factual. That’s why you want to know the race of the person, because if it’s close to you … you want to know who to avoid. Race is just another way of helping you avoid the problem at the time.”
And when it comes to disagreements on the scanner page, McCallion’s rules are simple: Respect one another.
“That’s who you want to help — is the people who want to help each other,” he said. “You don’t have to know them, you don’t have to be their friends, you do what is right.”
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