Amber Alerts now showing up on phone as Public Safety Messages
Texas Department of Public Safety highlights importance of AMBER Alerts on National Day
Done it twice now, both after the date of this article. What gives? I don't want to turn off Public safety messages, but Amber alerts are notorious for waking me up in the middle of the night for a child kidnapped 300 miles away.
I gave up and just turned it all off. Too many “boy who cried wolf” alerts about things happening on the other side of the state, etc.
Or blue alerts
I got one of these earlier tonight, even though I have them turned off. Surest way to get people to block all your communications is to disrespect their filtering settings.
Weird, they show up as separate categories in my phone.
As an aside, I wish I could opt into alerts for neighboring counties only. But, yeah... The state-wide alerts are out of hand.
My wife feels the same way and has everything off. I tell her imagine if that was our kid missing, youd want as many people to see it as possible. She still has it off though.
TL;DR: laws based on emotion (especially those named after individuals, or that include the words children or patriot) are rarely good laws.
I tell her imagine if that was our kid missing, youd want as many people to see it as possible.
AMBER alerts don't do what the public thinks they do; they do what the politicians know they do: demonstrate doing something when the base demands "somebody's gotta do something". It's political equivalent of looking Very Serious and intoning "thoughts and prayers".
If we actually cared about the kids we'd notice the majority of AMBER alerts are due to frustrated non-custodial parents taking their kids, and to runaways. We could address the problems at first base, or we can continue to be shocked, SHOCKED I say, and go through the kabuki once again.
Wtf keep smoking that good stuff bro