It’s tough being a cop in Virginia. You may be 10-7 (off duty) when you see a 10-54 (livestock on a highway) cause a 10-50 (traffic accident). There’s nothing to do other than call in a 10-32 (alarm) and a 10-13 (request a wrecker). 10-4? Message received?
Probably not.
For decades police departments across the US have used the 10-codes as verbal shorthand when calling in incidents over their radios. But in those decades the codes have come to mean different things to different cops.
Now Virginia, dismayed at the confusion caused when police departments have to cooperate, has scrapped the codes and introduced a far more sophisticated communication system: plain English.
The change was prompted in part by the police response to disasters such as the 9/11 attacks. When police from several local departments rushed to the Pentagon they found that they did not share a common language with each other or with other agencies such as the FBI.
”Local police were talking 10 codes. So were the Pentagon police. The FBI have their own little 10 codes,” Arlington fire department captain Richard Slusher told the Washington Post. ”You didn’t know what they were talking about.”
So while a 10-54 means livestock on highway to Virginia state police, to those in Alexandria county a 10-54 is code for a breathalyser. And while a 10-13 may be a request for a wrecker in nearby Montgomery county, in Alexandria it is the more alarming message that an officer is in trouble.
The confusion reached crisis point during last year’s Hurricane Katrina disaster when Fema, the government’s emergency management department, decided to ditch the 10-codes because of the variations in meaning.
The 10-code system dates from the 1930s, when police had just one radio channel and time on air was at a premium. So they devised a system of verbal shorthand to enable them to convey information in the shortest time possible.
A 1940 meeting of the police communication officers’ standards committee first tried to impose some order on the already unruly system.
While some signals, such as 10-4 for acknowledgement, have remained in use others have been lost.
In 1940 a 10-24 meant ”Trouble at station — unwelcome visitors — all units vicinity report at once”. Today a 10-24 is more likely to mean ”assignment completed”. And while a 10-82 was a request to ”reserve room with bath for officer” to a 1940s radio controller, today it could equally mean traffic signal out or stop for interrogation/arrest.
Some police forces developed separate call code systems to avoid the confusion. The California Highway Patrol, for example, has its 11-code (11-99: under attack, immediate assistance required).
The practice soon spread to other sectors, with truckers and CB radio enthusiasts becoming the most high-profile users of the codes.
But with police forces now investing in high-tech communications, the need for such brevity is long gone. – Guardian Unlimited Â