Greitens signs Blue Alert bill into law
Missouri citizens will soon be getting emergency alerts when a law enforcement officer is assaulted or killed in the line of duty.
Gov. Eric Greitens signed the Blue Alert bill into law in St. Louis Thursday morning. Missouri now joins 27 other states with the alert system similar to an Amber Alert.
Like an Amber Alert, the Blue Alert would send out information to the public in hopes to help capture the suspect.
Adam Duncan, assistant director of the Law Enforcement Training Institute in Columbia, said he thinks the Blue Alert system will be helpful with communicating information to other law enforcement agencies if an officer is assaulted and the suspect is on the run.
“This formalizes a method of getting that information where it needs to be,” he said. “Particularly, as we move in to the more rural areas of the state where it becomes more difficult to disseminate that information.”
Two Missouri law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty in 2016, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. St. Francois County Deputy Sheriff Paul Clark, 55, died on July 4 from complications from injuries when he was intentionally hit by a suspect’s car in 2015. Blake Synder, 33, with the St. Louis County Police Department, was shot and killed while responding to a disturbance on Oct. 6.
Duncan said he and his students take each instance in which an officer is killed in the line of duty as a learning opportunity.
“Whenever there is an officer that is assaulted, particularly whenever the officer is killed as a result of that assault, we look at the tactics, we look at the circumstances and try to figure out what can we learn from that,” he said.
The new law also increases the penalties for assaults on law enforcement officers.
ABC 17 News reached out to several mid-Missouri law enforcement agencies for comment on the Blue Alert system, but didn’t receive a response.
Lt. Paul Reinsch with the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the agency doesn’t comment on any pending or current legislation.
