Legislation is being introduced in California that would add another color of alerts to Amber Alerts. These alerts would be dubbed Blue Alerts. They would be issued in certain situations when a law enforcement officer was fatally shot, wounded or assaulted with a firearm.
A Blue Alert, like an Amber Alert, would prompt activation of the Emergency Alert System (EAS).
To satisfy the Blue Alert criteria, the suspect must still be at large and be considered an imminent threat. A detailed description of the suspect's vehicle or license plate must be known, and officials must have determined that dissemination of the information could help avoid further harm or result in the suspect being apprehended faster.
The legislation is being introduced by Senator George Runner of Southern California. Senator Runner was one of the legislators behind the original Amber Alert law in California.
There are Blue Alert programs already in Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida. There's really no cost to adding Blue Alerts to Amber Alerts, other than interruption of TV and radio broadcasts. Seems like this would be good legislation for the rest of the states. A copy of the language to be used in the legislation can be found here.
All the best,
Rick
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I would have to disagree about there being no cost to add a Blue Alert. EAS encoders are programmed with a specific set of event codes (such as flash flood warning, to Child Abduction Emergency, etc). In order to add these "Blue Alerts" would have to have the FCC mandate an addition to the event codes.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there is already an event code LEW (Law Enforcement Warning) that can be used for such a purpose.
We shall see what happens.