The “us and them” mentality of the Public Safety community has been in existence forever, or so it seems.

​The use of abbreviations, 10 Codes and other terms and jargon came into being as a sort of verbal shorthand for personnel to communicate over the radios.  Departments nationwide had 9-Codes, 10-Codes, 11-Codes, Q-Codes, numerical status codes, etc.

This section is designed to give you a brief overview of the Incident Command System and NIMS. It is not designed to teach you how ICS works, nor how ICS and NIMS work together.  There are much better resources that can take care of that.


What is the Incident Command System?