Law enforcement agencies vary tremendously in appearance, culture, and practices, but one consistent theme is the pervasiveness of radio traffic. It’s in the background of every news interview of a cop in the field, and you’ll hear it in any police station you visit. Several cop shows began or ended with the voice of a dispatcher.

Cops spend a lot of time talking on the radio, and the jargon creeps into their everyday speech. California cops don’t respond to burglaries; they go to 459s. A New York cop in trouble is a 10-13. There is an ongoing movement to do away with radio codes in favor of “plain speech” to facilitate interoperability with other agencies that use dissimilar radio codes. The cops understand the need, but are still resistant to change.

Our chief came from a larger department in a neighboring state, where the radio procedure was entirely different. I was more aware of this than most of my colleagues, as I had been a dispatcher for a small department in the same town, and used the same codes. When I moved, I had to re-learn how to talk on the radio.

The chief hadn’t bothered. In fact, he had been there for several years before he came to realize that he couldn’t understand what anyone was saying over the radio. I suspected this was because he seldom came out of his office unless it was to go to the airport, to attend a high-level conference where he would tell everyone what a fine job he was doing. Rather than learn a new set of codes, he decreed that everyone would use plain speech over the radio from that point forward. From his perspective, it was better to force 400+ people to change their ways than to have to learn anything new himself.

The cops struggled with this. The radio codes had become such a part of the vernacular that they had forgotten the precise meaning of some of them. They knew a 10-25 with the sergeant meant driving to a parking lot and handing paperwork through the car window to their supervisor, but “meet” had vanished from their memory.

Ironic as it sounds, we had a K-9 officer named Billy Barks. Billy and his dog Kimo (did you think “Billy Barks” was the dog’s name?) were one of the best K-9 teams to serve with us. If you needed to find a bad guy in a building, Billy and Kimo were your go-to guys. One rainy night when no one was especially motivated to get out of the car, Billy was notifying our dispatcher he was clearing from a call somewhere in the city.

Billy: “Reno, what am I supposed to say when I’m 10-8?”

Dispatch: [silence, as she can’t remember the literal translation of the code]

Me: [trying to be helpful] “In service.”

Billy: “Hey, thanks, Timmy! Reno, I’m 10-8.”

By the time I returned from my regular days off, we had returned to using the old radio codes. They are still in use today.

Editor to Tim: “10-4”