Just before dawn on a Friday morning last month, millions of Texans woke up to emergency alerts blaring from their phones at around 4 a.m.
“BLUE ALERT ISSUED FOR SETH ALTMAN WANTED FOR THE INVOLVEMENT IN THE INJURY OF AN OFFICER BY HALL COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE,” a notification sent to Texans—including those sleeping hundreds of miles away from the incident—said hours before the sun rose. It also included a brief, vague description of Altman as a 33 year old, 6’2, 220 pound white male in jeans and a t-shirt. The notification came with a piercing full-volume siren sound, blasting people awake across the state.
Predictably, people were pissed. In the days after the alert, the Federal Communications Commission said it received more than 4,500 complaints about it. AMBER and Blue Alerts managed by the Department of Public Safety are only supposed to be sent between the hours of 6 a.m. and 11 p.m.
404 Media filed a public records request with the FCC to see what exactly these (rightfully) enraged and tired Texans said in their complaints. The FCC gave us hundreds of complaints it received, many expressing concern about missing real emergencies because of this annoying alert, anger at losing sleep before their mentally demanding jobs, or simply writing to say it “scared the life out of me.”
The FCC said in its reply to our request that there were so many complaints, sending them all would be “an undue burden on the agency.” The request produced more than 4,500 complaints, it said; instead of sending them all, it sent a “sampling” of 504 complaints.
Many of the complaints contained the same message: “I received a blue alert at 4:52AM on 10/4 sent by the Hall County Sheriff that is roughly [miles] from my home and current location. This alert was marked as critical and was delivered to the entire state of Texas. I believe this is an abuse of the emergency alert system for an alert that I do not need to know about during a time when it is reasonable to expect most people would be asleep. I also believe this is likely to make citizens disable all critical alerts due to this abuse which will lead to actual critical emergency alerts not being delivered.” That message seems to have originated on Reddit, where someone in the r/Austin subreddit started a thread with instructions for residents to drop their own messages into the FCC form. “It may amount to nothing but if enough people do it maybe it will help,” they wrote.
Lots of the complaints followed this template, but many people put their own twist on things or added anecdotes. In the city of Spring, someone wrote: “It woke me up way too early and scared the life out of me.”
From someone in Harlingten:
“I received a blue alert at 4:52AM on 10/4 sent by the Hall County Sheriff that is roughly 700 miles from my home and current location. An EXTREME level alert for a Blue Alert is wildly, ultra inappropriate in the first place. Everyone involved has to be immediately fired. When the Blue Alert is 700 miles away from me, it is as outrageous as anything could be. Congratulations, I've turned off all alerts on my phone, so the state of Texas has made me less safe now. I will no longer receive any weather or other related alerts because the Hall County Sheriff and the state of Texas has decided a Blue Alert is an EXTREME alert, so I have no options to turn that off on my phone besides disabling alerting ENTIRELY.”
A Rowlett resident wrote:
“There was an abuse of power when an alert was sent at 5am about an officer involved shooting in West Texas. I am east of Dallas, over 220 miles away. I am not going to be on the lookout for anyone at 5am. I had to disable alerts since this is abused too much. I hope there is not a real emergency in my area.”
And from someone in Midland:
“It's not my problem if an officer fails to defend himself. Especially if I am over 4hrs away from the location. Your blue alert is resulting in Texans turning off emergency alerts, which will cost lives. Also, the description of the culprit was so vague. All you've done with this is made us lose even more faith in your abilities. Do better. Take me off the phone tree.”
A common theme throughout the complaints was the concern that people would disable emergency alerts because of this one annoying blast. Several said they were doing exactly that: “As a result of this alert, everyone in our household is turning off all government alerts on our mobile devices,” someone in Grand Prairie wrote.
In Austin, a straightforward message: “Waking the entire state up before 5 am for no good reason”
In San Antonio:
“For the love of god, don't spam the entire state of Texas (30 million people) to search for one criminal hundreds of miles away”
And in Plano:
“There is no need for me to know that a police officer was hurt 300 miles away from me. And to wake me up. Abuse of power”
A Lewisville resident wrote:
“My description will not need to be thorough to understanding this situation because THE ENTIRE STATE OF TEXAS experienced it at nearly 5 IN THE MORNING. We live nearly 400 miles away from Hall County. There is absolutely NO legitimate reason to alert people to something like this that aren't even remotely close to where it is taking place and it is a ridiculous abuse of power to wake everyone up for something like this.”
Some got more specific. A Dallas resident wrote:
“Stop. This ruined my sleep as I had to wake up early for work. I’m an air traffic controller. I’m sure you can imagine the chaos that could ensue if our attention waned. Get your people under control!”
From someone else in Austin:
“My entire household was loudly awakened just 1 hour before our alarm, at 4:53 AM in the morning when a sheriff in a TX county HUNDREDS OF MILES AWAY sent an ‘extreme alert’ for a blue alert to EVERY CELL PHONE IN TEXAS. Stop this.”
Another in Houston said the alert woke their entire household and their elderly dog, and wants justice for it: “I hope the public organization responsible faces appropriate consequences and takes action to ensure future alerts are relevant to those receiving them,” they wrote.
And from another Austin resident:
“At 4:52 Central Time I received an emergency alert for an activated Blue Alert in Hall County, Texas. As a resident of Austin, Texas, I believe this is a flagrant abuse of the emergency alert system. Not only was the alert sent outside of the hours that the Texas Department of Safety themselves set, it also failed to meet the criteria for a Blue Alert that the Texas DPS also states (there was no description of a vehicle or vehicle tag). On top of these two violations, the alert was issued almost six hours after the incident occurred in a county 400 miles away from where I live. There is absolutely no reason for the entire state to be woken up with an alert for an isolated incident that occurred hundreds of miles away. This only discourages folks to turn off ALL emergency alerts, potentially contributing to a future mass casualty/injury event when an actual emergency is taking place and folks aren’t properly notified.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety said in a statement sent to news outlets: "We would like to remind the public that Blue Alerts are urgent public safety warnings that are meant to warn people of possible danger. They are designed to speed up the apprehension of violent criminals who kill or seriously wound law enforcement officers by generating tips and leads for the investigating agencies, and therefore giving those agencies the best opportunity to apprehend a dangerous criminal.”
Authorities finally captured Altman more than three weeks after the alert.
404 Media also filed a public records request with the Texas Department of Safety trying to learn if there was any internal discussion or blowback from this alert. The agency simply sent us a copy of the alert and nothing else. 404 Media has appealed this decision.
