The degeneracy of police-broadcast alerts
Dec. 9th, 2022 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyesetzI got an Amber alert for some teens in Alliston. I do not recall the place-name "Alliston", so obviously there was no point in drafting me for this posse. I hate that the Ontario Provincial Police are allowed to send out mis-classified alerts that are marked as unstoppable-alert-missiles-incoming-now but should actually be Amber-alert-use-the-emergency-app-to-configure (so that people who are generally not of much use for posses can opt out of these usually-late-night alerts).
I get these alerts as phone popups and also as emails (due to my being on a weather-alerts list). Here is some text: "Victim 1 Shakir Charles, 13 years old, boy, black. Victim 2 Shakira Charles, 13 years old, girl, black. Suspect 1, female, black. Suspect 2, female, black. Suspect vehicle is a black SUV. Last seen in Alliston." Maybe my memory is rosy, but I seem to recall that Canadian police reports were notably less racist than the American ones, until the George Floyd riots.
There's no useful information here, other than race and vehicle class. With those names and ages, are the victims fraternal twins? Is either suspect a relative? What is it that the cops want the public to watch out for, other than black people? This didn't used to be Ontario. Ontario used to hate on the Québécois. Do the people in the black SUV speak French?
*sigh* Of course, everyone and their dog will now be visiting Wikipedia to find where the bumblefuck is the settlement of Alliston (pop. 19,243). But wait! Kid #1 gave me a 256 GB SD card, pre-loaded with Wikipedia and Wiktionary (she knows I like that sort of thing). I can look up "Alliston, ON" off-line while everyone else clogs up the Wikipedia servers and Google Maps tile-servers, trying to figure out where these problem blacks are that they're supposed to look out for. Alliston is at 44°09′00″N 79°51′48″W, which is over 100 km away from me and nearly two hours' drive. Shouldn't provincial-police alerts be limited to a reasonable radius and not "every phone we can reach"?
Importance HIGH Description Ontario Amber Alert in Effect. The Ontario Provincial Police have requested an AMBER Alert on 2022-12-09. Clangety-clang!
So now I have this called-up off-line Wikipedia entry about Alliston, of fairly recent vintage (my previous Wiki-copy was over 2 years old) Being on mobile, I am expected to select from a summary list of the section titles. A frequently-interesting selection is "Notable people". I am often surprised that someone I've actually heard of is actually from some random little town I happen to be looking up. Wikipedia is great that way!
Sir Frederick Banting, the insulin guy. Many hockey players and politicians. Margaret Atwood, for a time. Hey, Theodore Loblaw! I usually shop at supermarkets that are part of a chain still named "Loblaws" (but now controlled by the Weston family).
Alliston is amalgamated with the Town of New Tecumseth. It is in Simcoe County, which had "the earliest French exploration and settlement of Ontario". What language are they speaking in that black SUV? How could the colour of their skin possibly be more important than that? Are these actually Canadian police, or fifth column Americans wearing maple-leaf hats? Canada's #1 enemy has always been the USA, where some Democrats think it's a funny joke to talk about invading Canada.
I get these alerts as phone popups and also as emails (due to my being on a weather-alerts list). Here is some text: "Victim 1 Shakir Charles, 13 years old, boy, black. Victim 2 Shakira Charles, 13 years old, girl, black. Suspect 1, female, black. Suspect 2, female, black. Suspect vehicle is a black SUV. Last seen in Alliston." Maybe my memory is rosy, but I seem to recall that Canadian police reports were notably less racist than the American ones, until the George Floyd riots.
There's no useful information here, other than race and vehicle class. With those names and ages, are the victims fraternal twins? Is either suspect a relative? What is it that the cops want the public to watch out for, other than black people? This didn't used to be Ontario. Ontario used to hate on the Québécois. Do the people in the black SUV speak French?
*sigh* Of course, everyone and their dog will now be visiting Wikipedia to find where the bumblefuck is the settlement of Alliston (pop. 19,243). But wait! Kid #1 gave me a 256 GB SD card, pre-loaded with Wikipedia and Wiktionary (she knows I like that sort of thing). I can look up "Alliston, ON" off-line while everyone else clogs up the Wikipedia servers and Google Maps tile-servers, trying to figure out where these problem blacks are that they're supposed to look out for. Alliston is at 44°09′00″N 79°51′48″W, which is over 100 km away from me and nearly two hours' drive. Shouldn't provincial-police alerts be limited to a reasonable radius and not "every phone we can reach"?
Importance HIGH Description Ontario Amber Alert in Effect. The Ontario Provincial Police have requested an AMBER Alert on 2022-12-09. Clangety-clang!
So now I have this called-up off-line Wikipedia entry about Alliston, of fairly recent vintage (my previous Wiki-copy was over 2 years old) Being on mobile, I am expected to select from a summary list of the section titles. A frequently-interesting selection is "Notable people". I am often surprised that someone I've actually heard of is actually from some random little town I happen to be looking up. Wikipedia is great that way!
Sir Frederick Banting, the insulin guy. Many hockey players and politicians. Margaret Atwood, for a time. Hey, Theodore Loblaw! I usually shop at supermarkets that are part of a chain still named "Loblaws" (but now controlled by the Weston family).
Alliston is amalgamated with the Town of New Tecumseth. It is in Simcoe County, which had "the earliest French exploration and settlement of Ontario". What language are they speaking in that black SUV? How could the colour of their skin possibly be more important than that? Are these actually Canadian police, or fifth column Americans wearing maple-leaf hats? Canada's #1 enemy has always been the USA, where some Democrats think it's a funny joke to talk about invading Canada.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-10 04:58 am (UTC)(And yes, it's such bullshit that they circumvent you telling your phone to ignore Amber alerts.)
Which weather-alert email system are you on? AlertWR doesn't send Amber alerts.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-10 05:31 am (UTC)The email alerts come from theweathernetwork.com. They claim provenance as "Issued By OPP Provincial Operations Centre".
no subject
Date: 2022-12-12 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-18 04:00 pm (UTC)The thing that's most annoying about the mis-classified phone alerts is how long this has been going on, with no regulatory response. The metadata on those alerts is false (there is a defined "AMBER alert" class that should apply but is not being used), so this is falsified data being transmitted through official channels. Really, the incoming-missiles alert should be reserved for military use and the cops shouldn't have a button they can press to send out one of those.
And it's not like Premier Ford has the province's cops in his back pocket from all his gifts of power to them. In December 2018, Deputy Commissioner Brad Blair complained in public that Ford had made the OPP buy a custom camper for the premier and then hide the cost on its books. Also that month was Ford's wildly-unpopular appointment of Ron Taverner as OPP Commissioner (he later stepped down in March 2019). And those shiny new licence plates that Ford ordered up, without checking whether cops could read them during traffic stops? This is not a premier who asks his police for advice before ramming policies down their throats. Let us not forget how on a Friday in April 2021 Ford announced that regional police would start carding people who had the nerve to be out-and-about during a pandemic; half the province's police departments announced that this was un-Canadian and they wouldn't do it, so Ford cancelled the policy later that same weekend — and then people started calling for the premier's resignation, which I thought was a little excessive.