Crime Scene Team Draws Viewers, Critics

The acrid stench of burning drywall wafted in through the open driver’s window as Justin Shipchack navigated his sedan into a parking spot.

Down the road, neighbors were huddled together, staring at the hollowed-out Fair Haven Heights home. At least three fire engines, two ambulances, and three police cruisers were parked along the street, their red and blue lights flashing.

Less than ten minutes before, I had slid into the backseat of Shipchack’s car. Before I had uttered so much as a proper greeting, his friend Kevin Morse turned from the passenger seat and said, ​“There’s a fire on Clifton Street.”

The duo listened close to their handheld BaoFeng radio, which was tuned into the official radio frequencies of New Haven, Hamden, East Haven police responders. Morse navigated while Shipchack drove. We reached the scene of the fire in eight minutes.

Upon arrival, Morse hopped out of the car and approached the fray, shifting to the ​“tunnel vision” he said he gets when he arrives on scene. He leapt over the rivers of water gushing from the engine, whipped out his iPhone 8, and began snapping pictures to be uploaded onto their Facebook page.

And thousands of New Haveners got their latest instant emergency update thanks to a fast-growing citizen scanner-response operation.

Scanner Tradition Meets Citizen Journalism

Morse and Shipchack are the co-founders of ​“On Scene Media,” a platform on which they post footage and livestreams snapped at the scene of fires, motor vehicle collisions, shootings and other crimes in New Haven County.

They are a hybrid between police scanner enthusiasts who belong to a long American tradition of trawling the official radio communications of first responders, and citizen journalists who ride the rising tide of social media to inform members of the public of the latest happenings.

The duo started posting on May 10. Within weeks, their number of followers exploded to 17,000. In a recent eight-day stretch alone, they gained 2,000 new followers.

Working with a third colleague, a New Haven resident named Andrew Golding, they aim to offer ​“super fast, live news” coverage of these incidents out to the public as soon as possible after an accident or crime occurs.

Some have called them the ​“TMZ of New Haven,” labelling their page as ​“sensationalist”. Others have accused the principals of being two white men from Milford exploiting the black community in New Haven. Others are riveted to their site and offer encouragement, applauding their use of social media to keep the public informed.

Shipchack and Morse have said that they are just regular guys with a Facebook page who were bored of staying at home during the pandemic, started fiddling with a radio, and discovered that they could tune into the police dispatch frequencies in New Haven and surrounding towns.

“The truth is we started it without any intentions. We’re just nosy,” said Shipchack.

As Morse walked back to the car, a female firefighter in a tight ponytail and bunker pants passed by. She smiled at Morse and said, ​“I follow you. Keep doing what you’re doing. You are doing a great job.”

Morse looked pleased.

“Usually, first responders don’t care for the media. I think they appreciate our perspective that we give, whatever that is, showcasing their work,” he said.

He told me how his followers would ​“go to war” for them. A couple dubbed him ​“Bruce Wayne.” Someone designed a Batman-inspired logo for On Scene Media; another follower had it printed onto T‑shirts for them.

“Why wouldn’t we keep doing this if we have all these people telling us to keep doing it?” he said.

I asked Morse if he had ever considered becoming a firefighter or first responder. ​“I don’t know that I can,” he responded. ​“Because I have felony convictions.”

Before The Fog Cleared

Eleven years ago, Morse served four months and a week in the Bridgeport Correctional Center for a third-degree burglary charge, a felony larceny charge and multiple misdemeanor larcenies. It was the culmination of more than a decade of drug addiction and petty crime. The night before he was sentenced, he was still getting high, clinging onto the slim hope that he wouldn’t get prison time.

Morse grew up with both his parents in suburban Milford. He started using substances even before he was a teenager — weed, pain pills, Xanax, Ritalin, and ​“anything I could get my hands on.” He moved on to methadone, oxycodone, and heroin. He became one of millions of Americans who have become addicted to opioids since pharmaceutical companies began to aggressively advertise highly addictive prescription pain medication in the 1990s.

“Before I knew it, that just became the lifestyle that I lived, and I accepted it: That’s just what I do, this is me, I’m an addict, whatever,” he reflected. ​“I was doing a lot of petty theft, stealing and selling it to whoever would buy it: diapers, batteries, condoms, deodorant sticks. I was getting arrested while out on bond multiple times, so I wasn’t learning my lesson.”

“Everyday when I woke up, before I went to jail, it was just, ​‘Who am I going to steal from to get money for crack?’” he said. ​“It was a full-time job with no benefits.”

Kicked out of his parents’ house several times, he slept under bridges and on playground slides. He once got caught shoplifting with his toddler in a Stop & Shop.

He witnessed a shooting in Bridgeport with his young child in car and has been arrested so many times he now considers himself to have ​“insider information” on the arrest and court process. He said knew full well he was putting others in danger, but kept doing it anyway.

One Christmas Eve, with his 1‑year-old son in the back seat and partner in the passenger seat of his car, he drove to make a transaction with a dealer. The drugs turned out to be fake. He returned to confront the dealer, thinking he would feel bad for ripping Morse off on Christmas Eve. But the man just reached into the wheel well of his Jeep Cherokee, grabbed a pistol, and walked Morse back to the car.

“It’s one of the harshest memories I have, the things I used to do with my own son in the car, and the danger I put them in, almost every day of the week, for almost two years. That’s where that one pill can take you,” he said about that night in a 2019 BBC documentary about the opioid crisis.

In 2007, Morse broke into a neighbor’s house in Milford. He stole loose change and ​“things I didn’t think they’d notice were missing.” The neighbors had a surveillance camera installed, and the footage captured him in the act. He ended up getting sentenced to five years in jail, suspended after 8 months served, with three years on probation.

While he was incarcerated, for the first time in his adult life, he was clean, he recalled. He was eating regular meals, working out, playing basketball. His second son was on the way with his then-girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancee. If he had served his full eight-month sentence, he would have missed his son’s delivery. ​“So it kept me focused on keeping my nose clean and staying on the right path,” he said.

“When the fog cleared, I suddenly saw things differently. I started believing in myself,” Morse said. He was released on July 20, 2009. His son was born on Aug 28.

For the past six years he has run an addiction intervention business. People hire him to persuade and escort their family members or friends with addiction problems to seek help at rehabilitation facilities across the country. It has taken him from coast to coast, from Missouri to Colorado. His work got him featured in the BBC documentary about the opioid crisis.

“If I hadn’t had the life experience I had, this page wouldn’t exist,” Morse said. ​“I’m not scared to walk down a street in the middle of the night in New Haven. I feel like I have that sense of awareness to what we’re doing. Just being incarcerated, I know when things are going to happen, there’s a sense in the air.”

Morse is built like a football player, and indeed played linebacker for the minor-league Connecticut Bearcats. A reporter asked him in 2010, just over a year after he was released from prison, why he played. “”I get to take out my aggression in a controlled atmosphere,” he said then.

“Where else,” he told me while on scanner-call patrol this past Thursday evening, ​“can I go and hit someone and get a high five for it?”

“Attracted To Chaos”

As Shipchack and Morse drove away from the Clifton Street fire, the handheld radio crackled and popped like gunfire. The transmission was garbled; the duo have trained their ears to understand what is said over the interference. They have memorized the important police codes — for example, 49 means ​“report of person shot” while 24 means ​“fire.”

“There’s a gunshot victim in Hamden,” Morse said all of a sudden. I had missed the dispatch call, but they had heard it.

Morse searched for the fastest route to Warner Street.

“Take Edwards up to Prospect,” he told Shipchack.

“White male on 170 block of Warner Street with an assault rifle,” the radio sputtered with the dispatcher’s voice again.

“Wow. Did you hear that?” Morse asked.

“We’re alerting the community to what’s happening in real time, alerting the community to avoid certain areas,” said Shipchack, as Morse started typing a Facebook post on his phone warning people to stay away from Warner Street. ​“It’s a danger for us. Something like this, we’re not going to get super close.”

I asked him if they would walk into an active shooter scene.

“No,” he said.

“Well, that’s what we’re doing right now,” said Morse.

“Well, we’re not walking into an active shooting,” Shipchack said.

“Well, I am,” said Morse. ​“Drive up Sherman Avenue.”

A police cruiser with a wailing siren whizzed past us, overtaking in the left lane. ​“There goes the NHPD,” Morse said.

As we approached the scene, lights flashing in the distance, we saw a long line of several cars driving down the street in the opposite direction. Morse has said that when a shooting occurs, most people run away from it. He and Shipchack run toward it.

An ambulance passed by. ​“There goes one of your victims,” said Morse.

He hopped out of the car while Shipchack looked for somewhere to park.

As we brisk-walked toward the crime scene, I asked Morse why he thinks people tune into his live streams of crime scenes.

“I don’t know,” he said. ​“I think there is an adrenaline rush that comes with it.”

“For some reason, I’m attracted to chaos,” he said as he neared in on the scene. Yellow crime tape shimmered in the night, three police officers in uniform stood rapt with attention by their cruisers, and the two passersby crouched by the side of the dark road. He pulled out his iPhone and began live streaming the scene to his waiting crowd of followers.

False Reports; Growing Pains

On Scene Media’s initial Facebook post about the shooting on Warner Street included a warning: ​“NHPD in route to assist Hamden PD as they have a man in the 100 Block of Warner with an assault rifle.” Less than three minutes later, the radio dispatcher said that the man with the assault rifle was not the suspect. The post was edited and any mention of the assault rifle owner was scrubbed.

“We don’t want to be misleading in any way or make mistakes,” said Shipchack as we drove away from the shooting.

The very nature of this form of fast-moving citizen journalism carries the risk of frequent mistakes (on top of the frequent mistakes made by conventional news organizations). Morse, Shipchack, and Golding rely entirely on the dispatch calls and eyewitness reports from their Facebook followers to figure out the facts. They cannot get any useful information from the police officers on scene because at that early stage, investigations are still ongoing and most cops are instructed not to speak to reporters.

On July 31, the team received a message from a follower who had ​“heard” there was a shooting at Winthrop and Derby Avenues in New Haven. Morse, who was not in New Haven at the time, posted about ​“hearing reports” of a shooting but said they ​“have not been able to confirm”.

The ​“shooting” turned out to be a car accident: a person in a motorized wheelchair was hit by a car. The post was amended three hours later. By then several commenters had reacted to the supposed shooting, writing that they are moving out of New Haven or voicing opposition to ongoing defund-the-police rallies.

Other times, their mistakes could be attributed to the police dispatcher, who sometimes communicated mistaken information based on inaccurate 911 calls. On Scene Media would publish the initial info. After all, their goal is speed: to publish information as fast as possible, in real time, even if it means they cannot verify any of the facts first.

They posted about a report of a shooting one recent Saturday that turned out to just be fireworks. And on July 27, they posted about ​“a female waving a gun in a threatening manor in the 800 Block of Congress Avenue New Haven.” The post was updated 15 minutes later to read, ​“No one found with a gun and sounds like an object may have been mistaken for a gun …”

Shipchack called these mistakes a ​“growing pain” for their page. They have emphasized that they are just amateurs, not trained in news reporting or in journalistic ethics. ​“We’re not journalists, we don’t know what the heck we’re doing,” Morse said in an interview on The Raw Report, a popular New Haven talk show streamed on Facebook.

The errors are also haunting reminders of every other instance in this country where police officers have acted on mistaken assumptions, resulting in the deaths of mostly Black and brown people. When 911 call takers and police dispatchers in Cleveland failed to communicate that Tamir Rice was ​“probably a child” and that the gun he had was ​“probably fake,” the 12-year-old boy was shot and killed just for playing with a toy gun.

Accusing someone of waving a gun around or reporting that a shooting occured when it did not is no small mistake. It shapes and influences how the page’s 17,000 followers view New Haven County, and eventually, can affect the kinds of policies they support. In response to the false report of a woman with a gun on Congress Avenue, a commenter wrote: ​“Amazing Congress Ave was not a safe place to be in 1975 and here we are 2020 nothing has changed for the better.”

Blowback vs. ​“2 White Guys From Milford”

On Thursday night, the drive that Morse, Shipchack and Golding took with me around New Haven resembled a twisted tour of the city’s crime scene locations. They pointed out each of the street corners and parking lots where tragedies have upended the lives of residents in recent months.

There was the Eastern Street home where a mother of three lost everything in a fire. There was the Whalley Avenue convenience store where a man had died from a stab wound. There was the block of Munson Street where a shooting had taken a Hamden resident’s life. There was the Walgreens parking lot where someone was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot.

They also pointed to the location of a positive story they covered: a parking lot on the corner of Pond Lily Avenue and Valley Street where Alder Honda Smith had organized a cookout for people who suffer from food insecurity living in nearby motels and the town.

On Scene Media has received intense criticism from the Black community in New Haven for sensationalizing crime in an urban area, and participating in what critics see to be exploitation of the inner city. The trio have said in response that their page has no political agenda, that it is not pro-cop or anti-cop, that it does not take a stance on Black Lives Matter. They aim simply to report on what happens.

They have made two appearances on The Raw Report, a New Haven talk show hosted by Rob Dee with a following in the Black community.

On the first, Morse and Shipchack sat in a parking lot as they fielded calls from angry viewers who questioned whether it was their place to be seeking out and publicising crimes, accidents and other misfortunes suffered by resident New Haveners.

One caller who identified herself as Ericka said, ​“Your page is becoming a whirl storm of crime in New Haven.” She said she has read what commenters have said on the page, and ​“A lot of them are predominantly white, making those stereotypes like, ​‘Oh look at the N******, killing themselves again, killing each other,’ and I don’t see you guys police that.”

Many comments on the page do not target or criticize New Haven; a significant number do, as do posts on sites like the Independent, WTNH and the New Haven Register. Commenters on a July 31 On Scene Media post about a stabbing on Whalley Avenue called New Haven ​“the wild west.” Another wrote, ​“That’s New Haven for Ya.” Yet another said, ​“This is how new haven is … Nothing has ever been any different […] People arent like “” oouu defund.. (sic) Lets cause havoc, muhahahaaaa”. Based on their profile photos, the commenters appear to be white-passing.

“My issue is that crime in the urban community, or in the community, especially New Haven, is always emphasized as being black-on-black crime or crime in urban areas,” Ericka said.

“We don’t control that though. That’s just what it is,” Morse responded.

“You guys do control that because you’re the guys disseminating that information,” said Ericka.

Shipchack and Morse said that they are covering crimes and incidents that will happen regardless of whether or not they have a Facebook page. Community critics like Ericka have accused them of focusing intensely and exclusively on negative happenings, thus painting a picture of New Haven as a crime-ridden, dangerous place.

They have also questioned why the page primarily reports on crime in the city of New Haven instead of the surrounding suburbs. Shipchack and Morse responded that New Haven is one of the few cities where the radio channels for police dispatchers are not encrypted — in their town of Milford, they cannot eavesdrop on these calls.

“Shootings don’t happen in Milford. Maybe once a year,” Morse added during the ride-along with the Independent. In 2017, Milford had zero cases of assault involving firearms and zero murders. New Haven had 23 murders and 240 firearm-related assaults the same year.

A caller who identified himself as King Jazz said that crime is a daily reality for residents of New Haven. ​“For the people who live here, this is our reality, every day, day in and day out … I can’t do nothing about what you’re doing there, but it’s clear exploitation,” he said. (Jazz is a New Haven resident named Joseph Smith.)

“To everybody who is listening: Are you guys willing to let this white man from Milford come into the town where we’re from and try to make money off of our pain, off of our struggle?” said local education activist Nicole Huckaby to Morse during his second appearance on The Raw Report. ​“We don’t need that.”

“Why can’t I just be a man? Why must I be a white man?” Morse responded.

“Because that’s who you are. For the same reason that wherever I go I’m going to be looked at as a black woman,” said Huckaby.

The trio make regular posts asking their followers for donations. ​“We only want to make money so we can keep doing this,” Morse said.

His and Shipchack’s main day job is running a CBD store in Bridgeport. ​“I’ve never seen anyone get rich doing a Facebook news page,” said Shipchack.

In Morse’s view, their page is meant to be politically neutral. Morse said that they are not obligated to do anything different, that there is no law preventing them from doing what they are doing.

“We can do what we want,” he said in response to their critics on The Raw Report show. ​“We don’t have to conform to anything. And if people don’t like it, just keep scrolling,”

“All Right Guys, Be Safe”

On Thursday evening at Warner Street, Morse stood in the shadows swatting mosquitoes from his face as he live streamed the scene of the shooting that had happened minutes before. Within an hour, his video would be viewed 5,500 times and shared 100 times.

The next day, newspapers and media sites including this one would report that a party with over 100 guests had turned violent at Warner Street, that police arrived as a gunshot victim was being loaded into a vehicle. The Independent further reported that the person with the assault rifle was a white man who pulled a gun on his black neighbor and her group of friends who were standing peacefully outside their own home.

In that moment, minutes after the incident occurred, neither Morse nor Shipchack nor their 17,000 followers knew any of that. All they knew was that there was a police call, that somebody was shot, and that they were hungry to know more.

Morse and Shipchack delivered an immediate, minute-by-minute update of what they saw, what they heard, on the scene of a crime right after it occurred. 

“All right guys, I’m going to hop off here. You guys, be safe,” said Morse as he ended the 18-minute-long video. He and Shipchack slipped back into their car and listened close to their radio, getting ready to roll again.