Pa. responders discard confusing archaic codes

By Jill King Greenwood
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
Copyright 2007 Tribune Review Publishing Company
All Rights Reserved

Medicine and crime-fighting are more sophisticated these days, but when it comes to calling for help, old-fashioned plain speaking is back in vogue.

Across the country, emergency responders are phasing out the use of codes when communicating on police scanners and simply saying what they mean.

Using codes and signals usually isn’t an issue when emergency workers from the same agency or county are communicating on a day-to-day basis, said Greensburg police Chief Walter J. Lyons.

But if a disaster strikes a region — such as the flooding from Hurricane Ivan’s heavy rain in 2004 — responders from other areas can become confused.

“If you have a large-scale emergency, different agencies can’t communicate with each other because what a code means to you means something totally different to them, and it’s like speaking a foreign language,” Lyons said.

“It makes much more sense to just use plain talk. If you need paramedics sent to an accident scene or homicide detectives called, just say that.”

Emergency responders in Allegheny County last year completed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Incident Management System (NIMS) training, which aims to provide a coordinated approach for federal, state, county and municipal governments to work together in emergencies.

Phasing out terms such as “code red” for an emergency, “code 3" for calling the medical examiner and “10-4" to indicate everything is fine was part of the training. The county now is fully compliant with the NIMS training, county Chief Executive Dan Onorato announced last month.

In Virginia, an initiative endorsed by several emergency agencies to make plain-speaking communications the norm passed last year. Police, fire and emergency medical workers in West Virginia and Ohio also are discussing doing away with codes.

Pittsburgh police Assistant Chief of Operations William Bochter said city dispatchers rarely use codes anymore, except “10-4,” a universal term.

“As long as we’re all speaking plain English, we’re all on the same page,” Bochter said. “There are advantages to codes, so you can communicate without worrying about people monitoring the scanner knowing what you’re saying, but there are serious disadvantages in terms of miscommunication.”

Lyons said the code “10-28" — meaning an officer needs a dispatcher to check a driver’s license, plate or registration — is widely used in Greensburg’s 34-officer department. But Bochter said many Pittsburgh officers, particularly younger ones who weren’t on the job when code-speak was the norm, might not know what that means.

Tom McDonough, operations manager for the Allegheny County 911 center in North Point Breeze, said police, fire and EMS chiefs from agencies throughout the county meet monthly to discuss issues and trends. All agree on the importance of enforcing plain talk on the airwaves.

Codes vary greatly from one agency to the next, he said. Before the county began NIMS training a few years ago, one agency used the code “10-19" to tell an officer to return to a station or precinct. But “10-19" to another agency meant call the station. Still others used it to indicate an officer had a visitor waiting at a station.

“Can you imagine how chaotic that would be if we were dealing with a disaster and had responders from 15 different agencies flooding the area to help?” McDonough said. “It would make an already bad situation worse. Just saying what you want and what you mean makes much more sense.”