Many in Utah were awakened by an AMBER Alert in the early morning hours on Sunday morning. Those that were awakened were also confused by the alert that did not have complete information, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety.
Due to this, the Utah Department of Public safety has initiated a thorough review of the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system.
“This means WEA will not be available for local law enforcement agencies to send AMBER Alerts until a complete review of the system can be completed,” the department announced.
However, the department explained that the Wireless Emergency Alert system is just one component of notifying Utah residents. “Various other systems will still be available, such as direct messages to law enforcement, news media, social media and to the alert.utah.gov website,” the Utah Department of Public Safety shared.
Despite the pause on AMBER Alerts, the system will still be available for other notices. “WEA will still be available for evacuation orders, hazardous materials warnings, or other civil emergency messages,” the department shared. “This is a pause only on sending AMBER Alerts as a Wireless Emergency Alert to cell phones.”
The following is part of a statement released by the Utah Department of Public Safety on Sunday:
Background
The authority to send AMBER Alerts rests with local law enforcement to ensure the quickest alert can go out to the community. The software that sends those alerts is owned by state government. By policy, AMBER Alerts have been sent statewide to mobile phones via Wireless Emergency Alert, to the news media and are posted to alert.utah.gov.
Early Sunday morning, the South Salt Lake Police Department issued an AMBER Alert through their local dispatch center, the Valley Emergency Communications Center, to ask for the public’s help to find a child abduction victim, who has since been located. The AMBER Alert was canceled at 6:08 a.m.
The alert, which was sent statewide as a Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) at 3:33 a.m., mistakenly included no useful information. We recognize that this has happened with AMBER Alerts in September and in November. Over the past several months, we have been working to improve AMBER Alert notifications.
This was the first AMBER Alert since our efforts to fix past problems.
What didn’t work well and what we’re doing about it
When the information was sent, the software didn’t include the WEA message, just a message header. Because we can’t test WEAs in a demonstration mode, we didn’t see this issue until now. The code for these alerts has been updated to ensure both the header and the message are sent in the future.
Some phones received the alert multiple times. This is something that happens with these types of alerts and we have no control over it.
We recognize that a cell phone alert at 3:33 a.m. has little chance of alerting the public to be on the lookout for a missing child. We are turning off the Wireless Emergency Alert for AMBER Alerts until a complete review of the system and its history in Utah. As always, various other methods for alerting will still be active, such as alerts to law enforcement, news media, social media and the alert.utah.gov website.
What worked well
In past alerts, the public had no access to detailed information if the alert message was blank.
Last year, we created alert.utah.gov, which includes current AMBER Alert information, as long as an alert is active. The site is built to include photos of the suspect and victim, as well as information provided by the local law enforcement agency. The site stayed up and active and was automatically updated when the alert was canceled.
Information about AMBER Alerts is automatically sent to the news media with pictures and a script that can be published to news websites quickly. Our news media partners received the information and posted it to their websites.
We built the alerting software to automatically tweet AMBER Alert information and a link to alert.utah.gov from our @UtahDPS and @UtahEmergency twitter accounts. This worked.
The system also automatically sends a tweet notifying our followers that the alert was canceled. This worked.
Future discussions
The Department of Public Safety will continue to review policies and procedures. We will work to complete more offline testing of the system until we can have perfect confidence in the system.
Until that time, we will continue only sending AMBER Alerts directly to law enforcement, the news media, to social media and to alert.utah.gov.