The Amber Alert System
During the late 1990s, Amber Alert systems were set up in many states and received support from the federal government in 2003 to help searchers enlist the cooperation of the public. Amber stands for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, but the system is named after a nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped while riding her bicycle in Texas in 1996. A neigh- bor was able to describe to the police the vehicle
into which she was lured, but without an effective system to widely disseminate that information, law enforcement agencies were unable to find the car in time. Community residents were outraged four days later when her body was discovered and demanded the establishment of some way to broad- cast emergency bulletins so that more people could be rapidly enlisted to hunt for a missing or abducted child. Using the same arrangements as for severe weather warnings, a rapid-response network of radio and television stations broadcasts descriptions of the suspect, the youngster, and other clues like a vehicle’s license plate to a huge audience in the immediate area. This voluntary partnership among police departments, broadcasters, and transportation agencies has branched out to incorporate the truck- ing industry, social networking websites, the wire- less industry, and Internet providers (NCMEC, 2010).
Its goals are to deter kidnappings by scaring would-be offenders with the prospect of being swiftly apprehended and severely punished, and failing that, to rescue children quickly, before they are injured or killed. The system sends out a mes- sage whenever a law enforcement agency has a rea- sonable belief that a child under 18 has been abducted and is in imminent danger of severe bodily harm or death. By 2005, all 50 states and an additional 64 localities had set up Amber Alert systems, including the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
During the period from 2005 to 2010, almost 1,340 alerts were issued nationwide in an effort to recover endangered children. Most of the cases were either family child snatchings (mostly by non- custodial parents) or nonfamily abductions (but not necessarily by strangers); a small number concerned lost children. Each year between 10 and 25 alerts turned out to be based on hoaxes intentionally called in by parents or the youths themselves, and a roughly equal number of reports of emergencies later were deemed to be unfounded (inadvertent mistakes concerning the whereabouts of the child). Issuing the alert directly led to saving one or more endangered children in nearly 290 recov- eries. Most of the rescues credited to an Amber
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Alert took place when a member of the public or a law enforcement officer spotted the child or the vehicle, or when the abductor became aware of the manhunt, panicked, and released the captive. Unfortunately, over the six-year period, 57 of the children died before they were located (but not all were murdered by their abductors). Most of the foiled hostage takings turned out to be parental abductions. As for a profile of the typical children being sought, most were either infants and toddlers or in their early teens. The majority were not white, and girls outnumbered boys by a small margin each year. As for trends, the number of Amber Alerts issued annually during the seven- year time period dropped substantially, presumably indicating that the abduction problem is decreasing (NCMEC, 2011). The yearly figures drawn from annual reports appear in Table 8.1.
The police in New York City received about 25,000 calls from people worried about missing persons (of all ages) during 2010. About 90 percent were resolved by the end of the year. During the first half of 2011, NYPD detectives investi- gated about 5,800 missing person cases, of which 3,500 involved children between the ages of 10 and 17. Detectives suspected that about 265 of these youngsters were “victims of involuntary dis- appearances” for at least a short period of time (Goldstein and Baker, 2011). The NYPD first used the high-tech Wireless Emergency Alert sys- tem that automatically sends text messages to all cell phones operating in the city to quickly locate a 7-month-old boy who had been abducted by his
mentally ill mother in 2013 (Hu and Goodman, 2013).
The importance of an immediate mobilization— “the more eyes, the better”—in order to “beat the clock” was underscored by a study of 600 kidnap- pings that ended in tragedies. About three-quarters of the children were killed within the first three hours, and nine-tenths within the first 24 hours (Jones, 2003; Zgoba, 2004; and NCMEC, 2010). Long-term abductions that eventually lead to a suc- cessful recovery are rare, but a case like this illus- trates the optimistic view that there may be a ray of hope when a child’s fate remains unknown for months:
A 14-year-old girl is sleeping beside her 9-year-old sister when an intruder puts a knife to her throat and warns, “Don’t make a sound. Get out of bed and come with me, or I will kill you and your family.” The kidnapper, a homeless street preacher who once briefly worked for her parents, forces her to hike for hours uphill to a campsite in the woods. With the help of his wife, this self-proclaimed “prophet” per- forms a “marriage” ceremony in a tent that night, rapes her, and then holds her captive, sometimes by chaining her. As part of this polygamous “marriage,” she is forced to consume alcohol and other drugs and raped nearly every day, sometimes several times a day. Occasionally the trio travels around in public, with the captive wearing a religious-looking veil. After nine months, a passing motorist recognizes her walking with the couple around a suburb near her home, and she is rescued. Nearly nine years later, the
T A B L E 8.1 Accomplishments of the Amber Alert System, 2005–2011
Year Number of Alerts Number of Recoveries
Recoveries Directly Resulting from Alerts
Child Recovered Too Late: Deceased
2005 275 220 49 15 2006 261 214 53 10 2007 227 188 48 6 2008 194 166 40 8 2009 208 166 45 9 2010 173 150 28 9 2011 158 144 28 5 Totals 1,496 1,248 291 62
SOURCE: NCMEC’s Amber Alert Annual Reports, 2005–2011.
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street preacher is judged mentally fit to stand trial. She testifies about her ordeal, and he is convicted of kidnapping as well as unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines for sexual exploitation and is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. “I hope that not only is this an example that justice can be served in America, but that it is possible to move on after something terrible has happened,” the girl tells reporters as she walks arm-in-arm with her mother out of the courthouse. (Dobner, 2010a, 2010b; and AP, 2010, 2011a)