Emergency Alerts

Last month, Hong Kong friends were stunned by their shrill shrieking phones when an emergency alert was broadcast. Then there was a collective eye roll when they learnt that the Hong Kong government and its leader thought it apt to announce it to the nation in this manner, to utilize a HKD150-million emergency alert system to inform the public about a general hospital being redesigned as a Covid-patients only hospital. 

Then I read John Hendrickson's essay in The Atlantic published on April 14, 2022 about how the police sent out a state-wide alert for 62-year-old Frank James wanted as a suspect in the Brooklyn shooting. It's titled 'Today Your Phone Became a Police Radio: Roughly four hours after an unusual push-alert dragnet, Frank James was captured. Did policing just change?' 

Four hours later, the suspect was apprehended some nine miles from the scene of the shooting. Nobody knows if this was a direct result of the alert pushed out; at least this information isn't made public. 

Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama, described the digital feature to me as a “reverse 911” mechanism, an emergency-management tool that lets authorities contact citizens.

The New York Alert website says that the system’s goal is “providing critical updates to protect lives,” and that it pushes notifications for events including severe weather, public-health warnings, and missing children. The site makes no mention of manhunts. Using the tool for this alert rises “to the level of a first-in-kind,” Kayyem said. “If you sort of cross this bridge, as New York has done—and done this for a non-child case, a non-Amber case—what are their standards going to be? And that’s worth asking. Because you couldn’t do it every time there was a shooting.”

While the government alerts are turned on by default on Apple phones in US, mine doesn’t even offer a function to turn on and off these government alerts. Like at the bottom of Settings, there isn’t that option. We're locked to the telcos geographically, and government regulations. To be honest, I rather alerts come in through subscribed apps and such. I don't want my phone blaring out of the blue. 

Singapore is so small, and not difficult to set up alerts or tracing infrastructure. For now, we're thankfully geographically sheltered from many natural disasters. But we do need a national alert system.......... for everything else. We do have a public warning system by way of sirens, and an old-school system of FM radio and TV channels, and SMS texts as public alerts. Of course we also have whichever official government live feeds on YouTube or whichever video-streaming platform for announcements, and Telegram and WhatsApp channels to disseminate news to subscribers. I don’t think our government wants to provide the option (yet) for our phones to shriek at us for 10 seconds by way of sending out an emergency alert.