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Hello All,
I’ve recently been asked about other states that have blackout windows for the WEA. In Utah, we currently have a blackout window from 10pm to 7am.
Do any other states have blackout periods? And if you do can I ask what your policies are regarding that or reasons?
Thank you so much
Indiana does not have any blackout windows. We have 24 hour access to put out any WEA that falls under our jurisdiction.
Iowa does not have blackout windows. We issue AMBER Alert WEA’s 24/7.
Florida generally issues WEAs in a 0700 to 2200 window. We can expand that time frame if, we have a WEA that is targeted to a smaller area, or the investigation of the missing incident indicates the child or children are in an extreme amount of danger. If the time window is extended, we will notify our sworn command chain.
There was a large amount of push back when the first Florida CAE WEA was sent out at 3am. There was a concern about protecting the WEA as a resource and those timeframes were decided upon.
Our current WEA’s include a clickable hyperlink that we can generate stats from. It appears that somewhere in the vicinity of 60% of smartphone users have opted out of the AMBER WEA. This number is extremely fuzzy. Because of the high number of visitors to Florida we have no way of knowing how many visitors are hitting off of our cell towers and skewing the numbers. If we hadn’t instituted those timeframes, we expect that opt out percentage to be even higher.
We have a program that allows us to issue WEA for children who wander on foot and whose life is threatened by the local geography (water, busy highways, etc.) These WEAs will usually be a circle with a radius of a few miles or a polygon that defines a neighborhood and a few geographic features. We’ve had huge public buy in, literally zero complaints, and a lot of direct recoveries from the program, even if we sent the WEA outside of our usual hours.Oklahoma does not have a window but we were just discussing this topic last week. Im concerned that setting off a WEA in the middle of the night will cause people to opt out. Currently we setup an EAS message over TV/Radio and a WEA message. For an event in the middle of the night, I am leaning towards the EAS being set off immediately. That way anyone that is awake and the news media will immediately get the information. We could always set off the WEA once we hit an appropriate time window.
New York State has 24/7 access to ABMER WEA via NCMEC only. No other access at this time. We are not held to any time limitations.
I just wanted to add a little nugget of a potential future option.
I have been in discussions with IPAWS about providing an option during the activation of the WEA to remove the tone during deployment. This has not been approved, but is currently being discussed. This would provide alert activators the ability to send WEAs at all hours of the night without the tone that seems to startle so many people. This could also help the blackout window that many states have.
Feel free to message me if you have comments or suggestions.
-Eddie Bertola
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