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.
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. “Blue Alert” has even become a trending topic in the U.S. on X, formerly Twitter, with over 7,000 posts.
Google Trends showed a huge spike in searches about blue alerts right after the alert was issued Friday morning.
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.” The post has received over 2,000 likes and has been viewed by over 97,000 people.
Brent Taylor, a communications person with the Houston Office of Emergency Management, posted on X that he is begging Texas DPS “to stop sending blue alerts in the middle of the night.”
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.