Civic News

Recent kidnapping reveals limitations of PA Emergency Alert System

After five-year-old Na’illa Robinson was kidnapped from her school last week, an Amber Alert was broadcasted on local TV stations with information about her disappearance. But the alert was missing something crucial, the Philadelphia Daily News reported: a photo of Robinson. That’s because the Emergency Alert System (EAS) can’t send photos to TV stations, the […]

Nailla_Robinson_missing

Five-year-old Na’illa Robinson was kidnapped last week but escaped her captors and was found by a Good Samaritan named Nelson Mandela Mayer (seriously). This photo of her wasn’t broadcast on TV stations because of limitations in the Emergency Alert System.

After five-year-old Na’illa Robinson was kidnapped from her school last week, an Amber Alert was broadcasted on local TV stations with information about her disappearance. But the alert was missing something crucial, the Philadelphia Daily News reported: a photo of Robinson.

That’s because the Emergency Alert System (EAS) can’t send photos to TV stations, the Daily News reported:

A limitation of the EAS system is that it isn’t built to transmit images, only text and audio, which is what most people in the Philadelphia area and beyond saw come across their television that night, Finn said.

She said television stations or cable providers would have had to extract the picture from a companion system and include it in their broadcasts.

Read the whole story here.

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