Can I program a UHF radio to listen in?

I must admit, I have a sheepishly silly question. I have a pair of Kenwood TK-360Gs that are just lying around. They're UHF, and I was wondering, could I program them to listen in on police radio? I figure that I could just get the cable and software and just use the radios as a scanner.

Depends on your local police. They may or may not use UHF.

The HT's are not good as 'scanners', actual users do not 'scan' everything, they want radios that stay on ONE channel and receive it well.

Since you don't tell us where you are, we can't look up what you might receive locally.

Just to get it out of the way, do not even THINK of programming them to transmit on any frequency you are not licensed for. Receive only.

Bluntly, for almost all users, a 'real' scanner works better than a commercial HT for 'scanning'. Some people just like to have the official logos.

Update, found your info, you say you are in Queens, New York. No police agency there uses UHF, they're all 800 MHz Trunked, some of them scannable (with the proper scanner), some not.

I'm in New York City and looking to listen in primarily on NYPD, which to my knowledge is UHF according to n2nov.net, are they inaccurate? It appears I could receive according to this list: http://www.n2nov.net/nypd_ems.html

So what are the advantages of using a real scanner as opposed to simply programming several channels on my Kenwoods?

And of course I wouldn't dream of interfering with police communications by transmitting.

NYC has some many different frequencies that an 8 channel HT really won't give you all that much. Charlie, n2nov's website is accurate so is the database here, take a look at what is there. You can easily use 100 channels for NYPD, FDNY, EMS alone.
The good news is you don't need anything very expensive right now for NYC really.
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?ctid=1855

IF that radio will do it, simply enter 0.0 as your transmit frequency. I know that on a lot of Motorola equipment you simply put in BLANK for the xmit and if you key up you get a BEEEEEP. I would check the owners/program manual.

Do you guys have any favorites for desktop scanners? I don't intend to listen to it anywhere else but at home so I figure a desktop one will do well. I intend to put it within five feet of a window, ground floor (in case one has to figure that into antenna performance). I don't mind spending a little extra for quality and performance.