Canadians not being able to disable Amber alerts sent at presidential level all the time might also be interested to be able to sleep again...
This is crazy.
That is so bizarre. How embarrassing.
The best way to avoid an -ism is to forget about it.
The fighters cannot forget, so they fall into a trap of their own making.
In the same way Trump claimed to be the President of Peace, supposedly "left" or "progressive" politicians will push these measures forward while also pocketing money from businesses/organizations who benefit from various social/fiscal causes being ignored.
These are the legislative equivalent of the Dem leadership doing the kneel with the Kente cloth around their necks.
These politicians would never push to end qualified immunity, audit overtime usage, investigate police unions, etc. That requires actual change your donors might not like.
Same thing here, no work needs to be done determining why black/native women go missing at higher rates. That's hard, that's a deeper societal problem. It might just implicate a Sheriff or two or illuminate rape kits going unprocessed.
36% of missing person cases in the US are black women and children, even though only 13% of the population is black, but those cases get much less media attention and are treated less urgently than missing white people.
Creating a separate alert for those cases is meant to bring more attention to them.
There is a similar issue with Native Americans, who go missing at an even more disproportional rate than black women and children, and receive much less attention and resources than white cases.
Just set it so that it doesn't bypass do-not-disturb and it'll have the same result while not disturbing sleep. Those awake will get the notification, and for the others, they can see it in the morning.
I’m sure a ton of people just turned them off. They did ridiculous damage to the system.
I thought about starting an Amber Alert Milita; so any amber alert gets a fully armed response from the kind of people who join militias. That would have probably made the cops think twice about sending stupid alerts for stupid things.
Brenda escaping the memory care center yesterday morning (!) does not mean you should warn us all to watch out for her the next morning at 2am. Unless she’s found an axe and is going door to door chopping people up. That’s the only reason to send that alert.
I bet they killed a few people with heart attacks by setting off sirens in every bedroom in the county.
Condolences for the subjects, but it’s bonkers they’re used to spam people about vulnerable individuals who aren’t posing an active threat.
It's unfortunate because the world would presumably benefit from a properly standardized and above all globalized way of subscribing to geographically local alerts of various sorts. My local government should be able to advertise their servers via the cell towers and I should be able to add and remove subscriptions from anywhere in the world as I see fit. And above all the messages should be properly authenticated. Last I checked the system was so half baked that it was trivially vulnerable to spoofing.
they almost never send them where I live. Probably because the first one was sent at 2am, next morning the news reported the kid was found - safe with the parent who had legal custody the whole time.
My phone is always on vibration, but even on do-not-disturb, Amber alerts make it vibrate on my nightstand and that is enough to wake me up (especially since I have a work phone and a personal phone triggering at the same time).
Anyway, it's definitely a first-world problem but it is one with an easy, no-downside solution.
Sometimes they do it even twice in the same week. They're probably worried about a repeat of the Valencia floods and getting blamed. So they're constantly covering their asses. But I'm sick of them crying wolf all the time.
We don't have this amber thing but it works the same way (prioritised cell broadcasting) so it can be blocked.
The app is com.android.cellbroadcastreceiver on Android 13 and above
But yeah I view this in the same vein as the governments wanting to hijack our phones for spying on us (chatcontrol) or forced identification (the topic of this article). I'm sick and tired of my phone taking orders from other people than me.