GREENSBORO, N.C. — When the Blue Alert came across phones and TVs, alerting us about the shooting of a Greensboro police officer, most people had never received one of them before.
However, the Blue Alert system has been in place since 2015.
“The whole deal is this, it's to identify and get the persons responsible for these violent acts off the street as quickly as possible and to protect the public and protect our officers,” said Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, an Executive Committee member of the NC Sheriff’s Association.
The National Blue Alert Network was created to rapidly get messages out to other law enforcement agencies, the media, and the public. This is a voluntary nationwide system and 37 states are part of the network. North Carolina law enforcement agencies have sent out a Blue Alert since 2016. But most of us have never seen it before.
2 Wants To Know looked at the criteria for the alerts. Only the agency with the primary jurisdiction over the incident can make it. Three sets of criteria must be met to issue a Blue Alert. In the case of the Greensboro officer shot the scenario met the criteria for the first criteria: the agency confirmed the officer was hurt or killed, the suspects had not been caught, and there was sufficient descriptive information about the suspect, including the vehicle used.
“When the info comes in, the ranking official from that agency can have the information forwarded to the alerting system then it's pushed out through the blue system through DOT signage, you got it on your cell phone,” said Page.
Blue Alerts are pushed out through the Emergency Alert System, the same system that gives you weather warnings, Amber and Silver alerts.
History from the COPS fact sheet:
In 2015, Congress passed the Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu National Blue Alert Act, named in honor of two New York City police officers killed in an ambush attack on December 20, 2014. The Act establishes a voluntary nationwide system to give police an early warning of threats against police officers and to aid in the apprehension of suspects who have killed or seriously injured an officer. In 2016, the COPS Office was asked to implement the Blue Alert Act and establish a National Blue Alert Network.