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AMBER Alert
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- For "amber alerts" in color-coded systems, see #Other "amber alerts"
An AMBER Alert is a child abduction alert bulletin in the United States and Canada, as well as other countries, issued upon the suspected abduction of a child. AMBER is officially a backronym for "America's Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response" but was originally named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old child who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas in 1995.
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- For "amber alerts" in color-coded systems, see #Other "amber alerts"
An AMBER Alert is a child abduction alert bulletin in the United States and Canada, as well as other countries, issued upon the suspected abduction of a child. AMBER is officially a backronym for "America's Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response" but was originally named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old child who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas in 1995. Exceptions are in Georgia, where it is called "Levi's Call", Hawaii, where it is called a "Maile Amber Alert", and Arkansas, where it is called a "Morgan Nick Amber Alert". Those plans were named after children who went missing in those states.
AMBER Alerts are distributed via commercial radio stations, satellite radio, television stations, and cable TV by the Emergency Alert System (where they are termed "Child Abduction Emergency" or "Amber Alerts"), as well as via e-mail, electronic traffic-condition signs, the LED billboards which are located outside of newer Walgreens locations, along with the LED/LCD signs of billboard companies such as Clear Channel Outdoor, CBS Outdoor and Lamar, and wireless device SMS text messages. Those interested in subscribing to receive AMBER Alerts in their area via SMS messages can visit Wireless Amber Alerts, which are offered by law as free messages. In some states, the display scrollboards in front of lottery terminals are also used. The decision to declare an AMBER Alert is made by the police organization investigating the abduction. Public information in an AMBER Alert usually consists of the name and description of the abductee, a description of the suspected abductor, and a description and license plate number of the abductor's vehicle, if available.
Activation criteria
The alerts are broadcast using the Emergency Alert System, which had previously been used primarily for weather bulletins. Alerts usually contain a description of the child and of their abductor.
To avoid both false alarms and having alerts ignored as a "wolf cry", the criteria for issuing an alert are rather strict. Each state's or province's AMBER alert plan sets its own criteria for activation, meaning that there are differences between alerting agencies as to which incidents are considered to justify the use of the system. However, the U.S. Department of Justice issues the following "guidance", which most states are said to "adhere closely to":
- Law enforcement must confirm that an abduction has taken place
- The child must be at risk of serious injury or death
- There must be sufficient descriptive information of child, captor, or captor's vehicle to issue an alert
- The child must be 17 years old or younger
Many law enforcement agencies have not used #2 as a criterion, resulting in many parental abductions triggering an Amber Alert where the child is not known or assumed to be at risk of serious injury or death.
It is recommended that AMBER Alert data immediately be entered into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information Center. Text information describing the circumstances surrounding the abduction of the child should be entered, and the case flagged as child abduction.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's (RCMP) requirements in Canada are nearly identical to the above list, with the obvious exception that the RCMP instead of the FBI is normally notified. One may notify the other if there is reason to suspect that the border may be crossed.
When investigators believe that a child is in danger of being taken across the border to either Canada or Mexico, border patrol agents are notified and are expected to search every car coming through a border checkpoint. If the child is suspected to be taken to Canada, a Canadian Amber Alert can also be issued. Mexico does not have a system similar to the Amber Alerts.
History
On January 13, 1996, nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas. A neighbor who witnessed the abduction called police, and Hagerman's brother Ricky went home to tell his mother and grandparents what had happened. On hearing the news, Hagerman's father Richard called Marc Klaas, whose daughter Polly had been abducted and murdered in 1993.
Richard Hagerman and Amber's mother Donna Whitson called the news media and the FBI. The Whitsons and their neighbors began searching for Amber. Four days after the abduction, a man walking his dog found Hagerman's body in a storm drainage ditch. Her killer was never found. Her parents soon established People Against Sex Offenders (P.A.S.O.). They collected signatures hoping to force the Texas Legislature into passing more stringent laws to protect children.
God's Place International Church soon donated office space for the organization, and as the search for Hagerman's killer continued P.A.S.O. received almost-daily coverage in local media. Companies donated various office supplies, including computer and internet service. Local Congressman Martin Frost, with the help of Marc Klaas, drafted the Amber Hagerman Child Protection Act. President Bill Clinton signed it into law in October 1996.
In July 1996, Bruce Seybert and Richard Hagerman attended a Media Symposium in Arlington. Although Richard had remarks prepared, on the day of the event the organizers asked Seybert to speak instead. In his 20-minute speech, he spoke about efforts that local police could take quickly to help find missing children and how the media could facilitate those efforts. A reporter from radio station KRLD approached the Dallas Police Chief shortly afterward with Seybert's ideas. This launched the Amber Alert.
For the next two years, alerts were made manually to participating radio stations. In 1998, the Child Alert Foundation created the first fully automated Alert Notification System (ANS) to notify surrounding communities when a child was reported missing or abducted. Alerts were sent to radio stations as originally requested but included television stations, surrounding law enforcement agencies, newspapers and local support organizations. These alerts were sent all at once via pagers, faxes, emails, and cell phones with the information immediately posted on the Internet for the general public to view.
Following the automation of the Amber Alert with ANS technology created by the Child Alert Foundation, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2002 expanded its role to promote the Amber Alert and has worked aggressively to see alerts distributed using the nation's existing emergency radio and TV response network. "Amber's Story" is a TV movie that was made about her tragic story.
National growth
In October 2001, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children launched a campaign to have Amber Alert systems established nationwide. In February 2002, the Federal Communications Commission officially endorsed the system. In 2002, several children were abducted in cases that drew national attention. One such case, the kidnapping and murder of Samantha Runnion, prompted California to establish an Amber Alert system on July 24, 2002. According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, in its first month California issued 13 Amber alerts; 12 of the children were recovered safely and the remaining alert was found to be a misunderstanding.
By September 2002, 26 states had established Amber Alert systems that covered all or parts of the state. A bipartisan group of over 20 US Senators, led by Kay Bailey Hutchison and Dianne Feinstein, proposed legislation to name an Amber alert coordinator in the U.S. Justice Department who could help coordinate state efforts. The bill also provided $25 million in federal matching grants for states to establish Amber alert programs and necessary purchase equipment, such as electronic highway signs. A similar bill was sponsored in the U.S. House of Representatives by Jennifer Dunn and Martin Frost. The bill passed the Senate unanimously within a week of its proposal. The bill passed the House several weeks later on a 390–24 vote. At an October 2002 conference on missing, exploited, and runaway children, President George W. Bush announced improvements to the Amber Alert system, including the development of a national standard for issuing Amber Alerts.
The alerts were offered digitally beginning in November 2002, when America Online began a service allowing people sign up to receive notification via computer, pager, or cell phone. Users of the service enter their zip codes, allowing the alerts to be targeted to specific geographic regions.
International expansion
The program emigrated to Canada in December 2002, when Alberta launched the first province-wide system. At the time, Alberta Solicitor-General Heather Forsyth said "We anticipate an Amber Alert will only be issued once a year in Alberta. We hope we never have to use it, but if a child is abducted Amber Alert is another tool police can use to find them and help them bring the child home safely." The Alberta government committed to spending more than CA$1 million to expanding the province's emergency warning system so that it could be used effectively for Amber Alerts. Other Canadian provinces soon adopted the system, and by May 2004 Saskatchewan was the only province that had not established an Amber Alert system. Within the next year, the program was in use throughout the country. Ontario furthered its reach by offering Amber Alerts on the province's 9,000 lottery terminal screens.
The Australian state Queensland implemented a version of the Amber Alerts in May 2005.
In February 2006, France's Justice ministry launched an apparatus based on the AMBER alerts named Alerte-Enlèvement (abduction alert) or Dispositif Alerte-Enlèvement (abduction alert apparatus) with the help of most medias and railroad and motorway companies.
In September 2007, Malaysia implemented the Nurin Alert. Based on the AMBER alert, it is named for a missing eight-year-old girl, Nurin Jazlin.
On 11 November 2008 AMBER Alert Nederland was launched in the Netherlands.
False alarms
Advocates for missing children are concerned that the public is becoming desensitized to AMBER Alerts because of a large number of false alarms — where police issue an AMBER Alert without strictly adhering to the U.S. Department of Justice's activation guidelines.
A Scripps Howard study of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States in 2004 found that most issued alerts did not meet the Department of Justice's criteria. Fully 50% (117 alerts) were categorized by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as being "family abductions," very often a parent involved in a custody dispute. There were 48 alerts for children who had not been abducted at all, but were lost, ran away, involved in family misunderstandings (for example, two instances where the child was with grandparents), or as the result of hoaxes. Another 23 alerts were issued in cases where police didn't know the name of the allegedly abducted child, often as the result of misunderstandings by witnesses who reported an abduction.
Only 70 of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in 2004 (30%) were actually children taken by strangers or who were unlawfully traveling with adults other than their legal guardians.
U.S. postage stamp
The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp commemorating AMBER Alerts in May 2006. The 39-cent stamp features a chalk pastel drawing by artist Vivienne Flesher of a reunited mother and child, with the text "AMBER ALERT saves missing children" across the pane. The stamp was released as part of the observance of National Missing Children's Day.
Retrieval rate
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, of the children abducted by strangers and murdered, 75% of them were killed within the first three hours. Amber Alerts are designed to inform the general public quickly when a child has been kidnapped and is in danger so that "the public [would be] additional eyes and ears of law enforcement." As of August 2002, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that 17 children had been successfully recovered after an Amber alert was issued, including one case in which the abductor released the child after hearing the alert.
By September 2002, Amber alerts were used by all or part of 26 states and had helped to recover 27 children.
Controversy about success rate
Some outside scholars examining the system in depth disagree with the "official" results. A team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that Amber Alerts actually played no role in the eventual return of the abducted children. In those rare instances where kidnappers did intend to rape or kill the child, Amber Alerts usually failed to save lives. Amber Alerts successes were usually about child custody fights which did not pose a risk to the abducted children.
Other "amber alerts"
The color amber is a frequent component of color coded systems, and by extension, of alert state systems, especially outside of the U.S. where yellow or orange would more typically be used. The BIKINI state of the UK Ministry of Defence has an "amber alert" status, and other "amber alerts" are known to be in use by hospitals for patient emergencies, weather bureaus for storm warnings, etc.
In an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, Barney Fife claims/orders an "amber alert" with the capture of Ernest T. Bass who is committing vandalism around Mayberry. His definition is to be "on the look out" or "in aggressive pursuit" of Bass who was rejected by the army (he only wanted the uniform, not to serve).
See also
External links
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