A mid-May shooting spree across South Austin that wounded four people did more than send police racing to multiple scenes. It sent residents scrambling into their phone settings, trying to figure out why some people got a shelter-in-place alert and others were left in the dark.
The city pushed out a shelter-in-place message through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, while officers hunted for suspects. The alert covered a broad swath of South Austin roughly bounded by South Slaughter Lane, East McKinney Falls Parkway, North Ben White Boulevard and West Escarpment Boulevard, according to the Austin Police Department. Investigators asked anyone with information to contact the department’s Aggravated Assault Unit.
The emergency message itself was short and tense by design, sent to phones inside a geofenced area. Austin Emergency Management officials say that brevity can be jarring and, in some cases, confusing. It also exposed a quieter problem, the one hiding in your phone’s settings…