This would be cool but I think it would be hard for the average Mechanical Turker to get it right. They'd have to learn all the numeric codes police use for everything, for one thing. Also the dispatcher and cops know the local geography very well and use a lot of shorthand. Here's the live police scanner feed for Seattle (mostly silent right now since it's 1am):
Having said that, I don't think you need to hire mechanical turkers - you could make a nice app for the community of people who are really into listening to this stuff, and they'd do the work for you - Timmy is not alone. Make a community site around that does a nice job aggregating the feeds, and that rewards accurately reporting them and adds maps, trends, etc. Not sure there's a business there - you might be able to get some grant money to get it off the ground though.
http://www.komonews.com/news/content/scanner/31214074.html?v...
Lots of other feeds are linked here:
http://www.police-scanner.info/live-police-scanners.htm
Having said that, I don't think you need to hire mechanical turkers - you could make a nice app for the community of people who are really into listening to this stuff, and they'd do the work for you - Timmy is not alone. Make a community site around that does a nice job aggregating the feeds, and that rewards accurately reporting them and adds maps, trends, etc. Not sure there's a business there - you might be able to get some grant money to get it off the ground though.