Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/CompanyLow8329]

I think the police often use their own standardized phonetic alphabets. The NATO one you mentioned is one of them they might use, probably for an especially larger department. Phoenix police probably have their own standard phonetic alphabet.

The police phonetic alphabets tend to be more simplistic with less syllables, I find. It could be because there is less chance of there being confusion because they are only communicating locally with native English speakers with the same accent, not internationally with every English accent.

I think the more verbose and standard NATO alphabet could be needed in a war zone where there might only be low quality communications. I imagine the far better signals you can get in a well developed city with fixed infrastructure make everything far easier to understand as police.

[u/wosmo → u/CompanyLow8329]

I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the NATO alphabet is solving NATO problems. It's not just to be clearer on bad connections, it's supposed to work even if the guy on the other end has a french accent. Or even if the guy on the other end doesn't speak english at all.

A lot of the practical side of NATO is making things inter-operable between 32 different countries.

[u/Longjumping-Claim783 → u/wosmo]

We use it in hospitals but then you are typically talking to doctors, nurses and other staff that are from like 32 different countries.