Many people in Milwaukee County were awaken by a blaring alarm sound around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday after county officials decided initiating the Wireless Emergency Alerts system was the safest way to warn the local public of a potentially dangerous situation.
Early Wednesday morning, a Milwaukee County Sheriff's deputy was shot. At the time, the man who allegedly shot the deputy was on the run and believed to be armed.
"It is not very often that we even utilize it. So it's not something that we take lightly and so there are only certain situations in which you can use it," said Cassandra Libal, director of the Milwaukee County's Office of Emergency Management, which is the office tasked with initiating the Wireless Emergency Alerts.
Libal said it wasn't the unique circumstances of an officer-involved shooting that triggered the alert but that it occurred in a residential area and officers didn't have a location of the suspect.
The system wasn't utilized Jan. 13 when an off-duty Milwaukee police officer was shot during an attempted robbery, she said.
"The fact that a law enforcement officer was shot is not the determining factor," Libal said. "The effective factor was the case that there was a person who had shown a propensity for violence that was out in the community on foot in a residential area."
According to the emergency alert message, the suspect was in a T-shirt and no coat in below-zero temperatures. So, Libal said that increased the likelihood that the suspect would be hiding indoors or in a vehicle. Therefore increasing the urgency to alert residents.
Why did people miles away receive the alert?
Libal said they decided the message should go out countywide and opted to not use geofencing technology to limit the message, because a broader scope was needed to ensure that as many people as possible affected by the potentially dangerous situation would get a message.
"There's a high propensity for people to stop or be stopped in that area. So we thought it was important to share with the community at large, the broader community of county wide, as opposed to keeping it in the small geographic footprint where individuals who may be traversing into that area but do not live in that area would have missed that message," Libal said.
However, people as far away as Franklin reported receiving a message and that might be in large part due to cell towers also pinging phones in the nearby area as well. Libal said the alert went out for all of Milwaukee County.
You can turn off Emergency Alerts, but officials recommend you don't
Some residents who were far away from the scene complained about the inconvenient time and sound of the alarm and asked for ways to turn them off on social media.
Emergency alert messages, like law enforcement messages and Amber Alerts, can be turned of in your phone settings. Here is how you do it on an iPhone:
- Open the Settings app.
- Scroll down and tap on Notifications.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen, where you'll see the heading Government Alerts.
- Toggle off AMBER Alerts and Public Safety Alerts.
- Tap Emergency Alerts.
- Toggle Emergency Alerts off.
Libal does not recommend turning off emergency alerts. "I know that it was a bit alarming in the middle of the night, but we definitely want to err on the side of caution and letting people know what risks are out there in the community," Libal said.
"And we don't want people to disengage from this alert system because of the inconvenience of being alerted. Because the chance awareness is going to be their best course of action when it comes to public safety. We don't want to discourage people from utilizing this valuable tool."
Contact Drake Bentley at (414) 391-5647 or DBentley1@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DrakeBentleyMJS.
