this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Funnily enough, I actually work in an agency that's very close to Philly and deal with my counterparts in the city fairly regularly.
I don't get (or want) to listen to a whole lot of PPD radio chatter, we have plenty in our own county to keep us busy, so I don't know for certain if they're actually still using 10-codes or any other similar system or not. I can't think of any time I've heard a Philly officer or dispatcher use one with me, but it's certainly possible that they're still in use there internally.
Also even though we're using plain language, there's still some weird miscommunication that happens.
I remember one time needing to advise Philly of a report of gunshots we received that might have been relevant to them, it was near their border.
So I called over to their dispatch and advised them that "we received a report of shots fired in the area of..."
Which kind of sent their dispatcher into a bit of a tizzy because in Philly dispatch lingo "shots fire" basically means an officer has fired their gun, but to us it's just any report of gunshots (which, more often than not, means fireworks or something that the caller mistook for gunshots)
Sounds like perhaps unified codes would be the answer to that problem!
It is and it isn't
Certain things absolutely need to be standardized
But in other cases it can just kind of bog things down.
I remember one training thing we had to do to keep our certifications up to date, part of it had to do with fire dispatch.
And at the beginning of that, our instructor basically said "Almost nothing in this course is at all relevant to us. But it's a national standard and we have to teach this to you"
It had a lot to do with wildland firefighting and some other specific situations that have nothing to do with how things operate in our area or with the kinds of situations we deal with.
It was interesting, I learned some fun facts, but I haven't yet had any reason to use any of the knowledge I picked up from that training.
And that time could have probably been better spent doing something else.