Full Notification

Dear Chula Vista Residents,

This past Sunday (Oct 29th), some of you received a phone call to your home phones in the early morning hours. These calls did not have a recorded message and provided no information. These calls were made in error. In our diligence to put out information to you about an at-risk missing person, one of our staff mistakenly selected the emergency option of the San Diego County AlertSD program, which automatically sent these calls.

The Chula Vista Police Department would like to apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused and reassure you that the SDAlert, or reverse 911 system is a valuable tool to alert our community to emergency conditions, such as evacuations, or other emergency situations which directly affect you and your family’s safety. This Emergency AlertSD system will only be used in the future to alert you to emergency or disaster information crucial to your safety.

Over the past several months, the Chula Vista Police Department has successfully used the Outreach aspect of the AlertSD program to reach out to you for assistance in locating at-risk missing persons. There have been several incidents where subscribers to this system were instrumental in helping us safely return a missing family member to their loved ones. The Chula Vista Police Department values our community partnerships and is committed to providing dedicated, transparent and professional service. We want to reassure you all that this was an isolated incident involving a training issue. We have addressed our AlertSD training protocols to prevent this issue in the future and to reserve the Emergency AlertSD service for true emergency and disaster situations. We will continue to use the “Outreach” portion of the system to ask for assistance on at-risk missing persons and to provide other, non-emergency public safety information.

AlertSD is an invaluable tool for emergency response personnel to provide timely and crucial disaster information and updates. We encourage you sign up at http://www.readysandiego.org/alertsandiego/ if you haven’t already. Recent San Diego County wildfires and the tragedies associated with the Northern California wildfires serve to highlight the importance of systems like AlertSD to provide timely, necessary safety information to the communities impacted by emergency or disaster events. In the event of such situations, AlertSD emergency messages will contain valuable, recorded information and safety instructions or point you to available resources.

Once again, the Chula Vista Police Department apologizes for any inconvenience or confusion to those impacted.

Respectfully,

A/Captain Eric Thunberg
Investigations
619-585-5670 – desk
619-385-6733 – mobile
[email protected]
FBINA Session #255