Scanner Radio
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Cleveland is the urban core of Cuyahoga County, home to roughly 360,000 people inside the city and 1.2 million across the surrounding county. It's a dense, fast-moving place: a Lake Erie port, a downtown that fills for Browns, Guardians, and Cavaliers games, and dozens of distinct neighborhoods stretching across the East and West Sides. All of that activity keeps the city's radio channels alive at every hour, from routine calls on a quiet weeknight to the steady stream of traffic that comes with a packed event downtown.
Cleveland Police & Metro Housing Authority Cuyahoga County, OhioTap the button above to open the Cleveland Police and Metro Housing Authority feed in Scanner Radio. It's the most popular Cleveland feed and a natural starting point for new listeners, pairing city police dispatch with CMHA police traffic on a single channel.
To branch out from there, open Scanner Radio and search "Cleveland" or "Cuyahoga." You'll find separate feeds for Cleveland Fire and EMS, suburban departments around the county, and surrounding agencies. No hardware, antenna, or setup required. Just an app and a few seconds to tap into a feed.
Cleveland scanner traffic reflects a dense, neighborhood-driven city. Dispatchers route units across the East Side, West Side, and downtown, coordinate with CMHA officers at housing developments, and call in mutual aid from suburban departments when an incident scales up. Fire and EMS run their own busy channels, responding to everything from structure fires to lakefront and Cuyahoga River calls. When something significant breaks, scanner traffic is reliably the first place it surfaces, well ahead of local news alerts.
Two Scanner Radio features are worth turning on before you settle in. Community-tagged headlines let listeners flag the incident type active on a feed (building fire, pursuit, police activity) so you can see what's happening at a glance, and listener spike alerts push a notification when a feed sees a sudden surge in activity, often the earliest sign something major is underway.
Yes. Listening to publicly broadcast scanner traffic is legal in Ohio and across the United States. Restrictions only apply to using a scanner while committing a crime.
No. With the Scanner Radio app, you can listen to Cleveland Division of Police, Cleveland Fire, and Cuyahoga County feeds straight from your phone. There is no hardware, antenna, or setup required.
The Cleveland Police and Metro Housing Authority feed is the most popular starting point for new listeners. It carries city police dispatch alongside Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority police traffic on a single channel.
The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) has its own police department that patrols public housing communities across Cleveland. Their radio traffic runs alongside Cleveland Division of Police dispatch on the same Scanner Radio feed.
Yes. Scanner Radio is free to download on iOS and Android, and live Cleveland feeds stream at no cost. You can start listening within a minute of opening the app.
Some tactical and investigative channels are encrypted and will not appear on any scanner. The dispatch channels that handle day-to-day police, fire, and EMS calls in Cleveland remain available to listen to live on Scanner Radio.
Search "Cleveland" in Scanner Radio to browse every available Cuyahoga County feed. From the lakefront to the housing communities the CMHA patrols, you'll be listening to live dispatch in under a minute.