Texans have turned to official channels to complain about last Friday’s ear-splitting Blue Alert, which spurred hundreds of angry posts on every social media channel used by the more than 30 million Texans who received the early-morning notification from police.
As of Monday morning, approximately 4,500 consumer complaints had been filed over the alert, the Federal Communications Commission told The Barbed Wire via email.
In case you missed it (or miraculously slept through it), at 4:52 a.m. on Friday, the Texas Department of Public Safety sent out a Blue Alert statewide, prompting anger and jokes. It also apparently compelled many Texans to simply turn off their public safety alerts altogether, which could have serious unintended consequences in the event of a real statewide emergency. Law enforcement uses the system to expedite the process of finding suspects who’ve killed or seriously hurt any local, state, or federal officers. The sheriff’s department recommended the alert to notify the public of an alleged shooter on the loose after he injured an officer, but, considering the size of Texas, most people who received it were hundreds of miles away — and in bed — at the time it went off.
What’s more, state guidelines say cell phone alerts from the Texas Department of Public Safety are only to be sent out between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m., which wasn’t the case on Friday. It was not immediately clear on Tuesday whether an exception for “Texas regional alert networks,” for whom hours “could differ” based on individual emergencies, covered last week’s situation.
Tuesday, the alert was still active out of Hall County in the panhandle, and police were still looking for 33-year-old Seth Altman in connection to the shooting of the police chief in the town of Memphis. The chief, Rex Plant, was released from a Lubbock hospital sometime last weekend after he was allegedly shot by Altman while attempting to serve an arrest warrant on burglary charges, according to local ABC affiliate KVII.
“All of Texas at 4:55am yesterday after receiving that bullshit Blue Alert for Seth Altman,” one user wrote sarcastically on X (formally Twitter) along with what appeared to be an AI-generated image of “Texans” in cowboy hats with their phones running to find someone.
The FCC does not send out or mandate the Blue Alerts, but officials said they can use the complaints to help “adopt technical and operational rules for the communications providers that deliver alerts to the public.”
Blue Alerts were trending on social media over the weekend, with most people frustrated that they were woken up about something that was not happening in their community, seemed not to be an emergency outside of the town of Memphis, and for which the description of the suspect was extremely vague.
“.@TxDPS I am begging you to stop sending blue alerts in the middle of the night. I’m sleeping. I will not find the bad guy at 4am. I am not Batman,” one user posted on X last week.
FCC officials told The Barbed Wire, we “encourage consumers to stay opted-in to WEA alerts, which save lives.”
