Originally published at: Entire state of Texas woken up by middle of the night alert - Boing Boing
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Looks like turning off those warnings actually works, at least for me. I didn’t get this.
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The text states that the officer was injured by the Hall County Sheriff’s Office. 
This was obviously just a distraction so the sheriff could make a clean get away.
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For this reason it’s super short-sighted for government agencies to send out too many of these alerts to folks who don’t need to be getting them.
About a month ago I received three separate emergency alerts on consecutive days just to inform me that wildfire evacuation orders for regions about 40 miles away from me had been lifted. One would presume that the affected people who had been evacuated would be following the news and could get that information without blasting many thousands of people far from those areas. Hate to do it, but one or two more of these and I’ll disable the alerts myself.
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Wait, there’s a super-special blue alert if a cop stubs their toe, so it doesn’t get lost in the swarm of trivial notices about tornadoes and missing toddlers?
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No one needs to get these. This is pure theater, meant to scare the public into continuing to vote for Tough On Crime™ Republicans. What possible actual good could it do to alert the entire population of the state of Texas about someone who assaulted anyone, including a police officer? Amber Alerts make sense. These don’t. It’s pure Back The Blue performative nonsense.
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From a technical standpoint if law enforcement wanted to use this system it should only sent to a set radius from the incident automatically, and if some sheriff really thinks that’s not good enough he should have to call into the governor’s office to request accessing millions of citizens attention because he forgot to lock the door behind him.
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… well they can’t expect everyone to stop whatever they’re doing any time a criminal assaults one of us peasants
They have to prioritize 
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… do they though?
It’s still 4 a.m. and I’m still not Batman 
… it doesn’t take too many before we realize that recognizing bad guys driving by our house is not a thing that’s ever going to happen
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Entire state of Texas woken up by middle of the night alert
Count me out, i turned off the alerts entirely years ago. When i did keep them on i would get a constant stream of alerts for areas on the other side of the state, i got fed up so that stays turned off.
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Probably not, but I think an argument could be made for the amber alerts. It might be a flawed argument, but I think it would be reasonable. There’s no reasonable argument for a blue alert. It’s just designed to perpetuate this myth that the police are a persecuted group.
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If that’s all these alerts ever were then I would have disabled them already. But at least on my phone there’s no option to just disable dumb alerts sent out by police but leave the alerts related to wildfire evacuations and flash flood warnings that might actually apply to me.
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When I was teaching, an Amber Alert set off a bunch (23-27 phones) of my HS students’ phones. My kids wondered why my alert didn’t go off. I told them that I have them turned off because I teach. They thought I was thoughtless until I pointed out that I was sure that we wouldn’t spot the missing child from inside our classroom.
I have them turned off, but a “Silver Alert” (for missing elderly people) came through on my CA-based cell phone sometime in the last two weeks. Not sure how the local authorities get permission to override this with the carriers, especially since the alert was over a week old.
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It’s unclear how effective they actually are in real life, but I think the theory is that the cops are more likely to get a useful tip about someone who absconded with a child if there are thousands of people looking up from their phones to see if there happens to be a vehicle with a matching description and license plate passing by.
Does it work in practice? Depends who you ask.
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I wish there was more robust study of the effectiveness, and also the downside risks. I haven’t seen hard data but I have to think that potentially having thousands of drivers on the highways and freeways all getting distracted by loud alerts on their phones at the same time would have a non-zero risk of contributing to serious or even fatal car accidents. There may well be situations that make such a risk worth it. But certainly something like letting people know that an evacuation order has been lifted doesn’t seem to me like it meets that threshold.
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I wouldn’t mind getting the Amber or even Silver alerts if the damned things were silent. Nearly everyone checks their phone every few hours while awake. They don’t need to be audible. Particularly when the alert is from some place over 400 miles away and the abduction happened an hour ago.
The blue alerts can fuck right off. They aren’t local enough to be useful. Our local PD/city has text alerts for traffic, extreme weather, gas leaks, and SWAT incidents. These are opt-in and can be silenced. I do not need to know a cop in Wichita was injured 2 hours ago when it takes 6 hours to drive from there.
I’m not sure how, but I do get the tornado alerts even tho all the color ones are turned off.
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After being jolted away by an Amber Alert FROM EARLIER IN THE DAY, I turned off all but like the most severe alerts on my phone.
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I went looking for a batlogo with a strikethru, but no such luck.
So, sorry, you’re getting this amazing water-pistol!
You are most welcome x
Oh, yeah, it’s blurred for a reason.
Whaddya mean, the warning came too late?
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It’s important if it’s a cop that was assaulted.
Less so if it was just some private citizen.
Even less important than that if the victim wasn’t white.
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Here in California, I’ve very sporadically and inconsistently ever gotten alerts on my phone, regardless of whether I had the alerts turned on or not, sometimes at inconvenient hours for things happening in other cities. (And even if they were happening in my city, the alert information was insufficient for me to do anything about it. A child/elderly person is missing, but I don’t know what they look like, even? What TF am I supposed to do with that information?) Seems like there’s a huge degree of control that local law enforcement agencies have over the system, but they’re also apparently totally incompetent in its use. Which just ends up making the whole system pretty useless.
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