LAPD Phonetic Alphabet - Table

Table

The LAPD phonetic alphabet represents the letters of the English alphabet using words as follows:

There are several local variations of this system in use. The California Highway Patrol, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, San Jose Police Department, the San Francisco Police Department, and other agencies across the West Coast and Southwestern United States, as well as the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department, use versions that allocate "Yellow" to "Y" and other agencies' versions allocate "Baker" or "Bravo" to "B", or use variations that include "Nancy" instead of "Nora" for "N" or "Yesterday" for "Y".

The use of the word "Ocean" seems to be advantageous in the radio communication of the letter "O" because it begins with the long, clear vowel "O". The phonetic words "Ida" and "Union" feature this same advantage. However, phonetic alphabets seem to rarely use initial long vowels. With the exception of "Uniform", none of the initial vowels in the NATO alphabet are like this. In an earlier U.S. military alphabet, "A" was indicated by "Able", which does start with a long "A", but has since been changed to Alpha (also spelled Alfa, particularly outside the English-speaking countries).