TEXAS — If you live in Texas and have a smartphone, you may have been awoken to the sound of an emergency alert early Friday morning.
At around 4:50 a.m., a “blue alert” was sent out across Texas for a suspect wanted for the shooting of an officer Thursday evening in Memphis, Texas, a small town in Hall County in the Texas Panhandle. The officer who was shot is Memphis Police Chief Rex Plant, and he is in stable condition, according to KVII-TV.
The alert named Seth Altman, 33, as the wanted suspect and listed a description of him saying he is 6 feet, 2 inches tall, a white male and was last seen wearing a blue T-shirt and blue jeans. A $10,000 reward for any information on the whereabouts of Altman was announced by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday evening.
While the situation met all the Texas Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) criteria for issuing a blue alert, many Texans were not thrilled by the wake-up call.
According to a report from CBS News Texas, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received over 4,000 complaints about the early-morning alert, and the agency has not said how it will handle the filings.
“Blue Alert” became a trending topic in the U.S. on X, formerly Twitter, with over 9,000 posts Friday morning.
Google Trends showed a huge spike in searches about blue alerts right after the alert was issued.
One X user, who mentioned that they live eight hours away from Hall County, argued that pushing the alert through “the whole-state emergency alert system for a state as big as Texas is insane.”
Some of the social media buzz surrounding the alert was whether it did more harm than good, with people commenting that they suspect now more people will go into their phone’s settings and turn off their emergency notifications.
Other Texans asked whether alerts like Friday morning's could be more region-based instead of being sent across the entire state, much like the emergency weather alerts from the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA).
The state’s blue alert program was created in 2008 by then-Gov. Rick Perry and is designed to speed up catching “violent criminals who kill or seriously wound local, state, or federal law enforcement officers,” the Texas DPS website says.