Scanner Radio
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New Orleans wraps around a bend in the Mississippi River, which is how it earned the Crescent City nickname, and its boundaries are the same as Orleans Parish, so the city and the county are one and the same. Roughly 380,000 people live inside those lines, packed from the French Quarter and the Central Business District out through the Marigny, Uptown, Mid-City, and the neighborhoods stretching toward Lake Pontchartrain. On top of the residents, the city draws a steady flow of visitors: Bourbon Street on a weekend night, Mardi Gras parades rolling through winter, Jazz Fest and Essence Fest crowds in the spring and summer, and Saints game days that fill the Superdome. Add hurricane season, when the whole region watches the Gulf, and the calendar gives the public safety radio plenty of busy stretches. Traffic ebbs and flows like any city's, quiet on an ordinary overnight and layered with cross-talk when a parade route or a big call draws units from across the parish.
New Orleans Public Safety Orleans Parish, LouisianaBegin by downloading Scanner Radio, a free app that streams live police, fire, and EMS radio straight to your phone. Once it's installed, tap the button above to open the New Orleans Public Safety feed. It carries public safety radio traffic across the city and Orleans Parish, which makes it the natural first stop for anyone new to New Orleans scanner listening.
To widen your listening from there, open Scanner Radio and search "New Orleans" or "Orleans Parish." You'll turn up the dedicated New Orleans Fire Dispatch channel, a Special Events feed that comes alive during Mardi Gras and festival weekends, and Louisiana State Police traffic covering the highways around the metro. No hardware, antenna, or setup required. Just the app and a few seconds to tap into a channel.
New Orleans radio traffic reflects a compact city with an outsized calendar. On an ordinary night you'll hear the steady rhythm of a downtown beat: welfare checks, traffic stops, disturbance calls in the Quarter, and fire and EMS crews responding across the parish. During a parade or a festival, the tempo changes completely, with units coordinating road closures, crowd movement, and staging along the route. When something significant breaks, scanner traffic is usually the first place it surfaces, ahead of any local news alert. If you're new to the codes and shorthand, our guide to scanner codes makes the chatter easier to follow, and the history of scanner listening explains how the hobby went from dedicated radio receivers to the app on your phone.
Two Scanner Radio features make the New Orleans feeds easier to follow. Community-tagged headlines let listeners flag the type of incident active on a feed (structure fire, parade incident, police activity), so you can see at a glance what's unfolding, and listener spike alerts send a notification when a feed suddenly draws a surge of listeners, often the earliest sign that something big is underway.
You can listen to New Orleans public safety, fire, and EMS radio using the Scanner Radio app.
Yes. Listening to publicly broadcast scanner traffic is legal in Louisiana 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 New Orleans public safety and fire feeds straight from your phone. There is no hardware, antenna, or setup required.
The New Orleans Public Safety feed is the most popular starting point for new listeners. It carries public safety radio traffic across Orleans Parish.
It carries public safety radio traffic for the city of New Orleans, which is coterminous with Orleans Parish, Louisiana.
Search "New Orleans" or "Orleans Parish" in Scanner Radio to browse every feed available in the area. From French Quarter patrols to the fire and EMS crews working calls across the parish, you'll be listening to live dispatch in under a minute.
Listening from somewhere else? Swipe through our other city guides.
