Experts: Overuse, false alarms threaten impact of Amber Alert

Experts: Overuse, false alarms threaten impact of Amber Alert



A highway sign showns an Amber Alert in Nebraska in 2002. The Amber Alert system began in Texas following the 1996 abduction and eventual murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. By 2005, it had been adopted in all 50 states. Associated Press file photo



Posted: Saturday, November 30, 2013 8:00 pm | Updated: 9:26 pm, Sat Nov 30, 2013. 

By Chris Quintana
The New Mexican | 

Law-enforcement agencies in New Mexico, worried about the safety of missing 10-year-old James Agnew, issued an Amber Alert for him Oct. 29. They believed he had been abducted by his father’s fiancée.

TV and radio broadcasts blared information all day about the boy and his alleged captor, Rebecca Aguirre, who was engaged to the boy’s father, Steven Ohala. Cellphones buzzed and wailed, alerting anyone with a cell signal in Northern New Mexico about the missing child.

The Amber Alert was canceled when the boy was found hours later with Aguirre at a home near N.M. 14 and N.M. 599. He was uninjured.

But whether the boy was ever in danger — as a text alert that day suggested — is unclear. The alert, one of two in New Mexico in October, raises questions about whether enough thought is being put into the alerts before they are issued and whether the alerts are actually effective in helping officials recover missing children.

New Mexico State Police Lt. Emmanuel Gutierrez defended the Amber Alert, saying, “We stop the world in the state of New Mexico” in cases involving crimes against children.

The Amber Alert system began in Texas following the 1996 abduction and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. Spurred by federal legislation, the alert system had been adopted in all 50 states by 2005.

Now, with new technology such as reverse 911 systems that broadcast alerts to all cellphones in a selected area, concerns have grown about Amber Alert fatigue. Professors of criminal justice, as well as the father of a child who was kidnapped and murdered, express doubts about the system’s efficacy.

Amber Alerts have been used sparingly in New Mexico. Only six have been issued since the state’s adoption of the system in 2003, which makes the two in October more notable.

Early that month, authorities said nine young men had gone missing from the Tierra Blanca Ranch, a privately run correctional camp for troubled youth in Hillsboro, about 77 miles north of Las Cruces. Police issued an Amber Alert for them, and all eventually were found. The Associated Press later reported that an attorney for the ranch said the boys had been with their parents all along.

Good intentions, questionable results

Marc Klaas, who founded the KlaasKids Foundation, a research and advocacy group that works to end violence against children, said the motivations behind the Amber Alert system are noble. But he has been critical of its implementation and is especially skeptical of the automated cellphone alert.

Klaas’ 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was kidnapped and murdered in 1993.

“I think absolutely people are going to opt out of it,” he said of the Amber Alert in a telephone interview. “You’re just not going to notify the public.”

Klaas believes radio announcements are more effective than cellphone alerts. He also criticized the range of the alert. For example, he said, if a child is kidnapped in Dallas, phones as far away as El Paso may get the alert. He believes the system should be more localized.

Another problem with the system, he said, is that local law-enforcement agencies sometimes have to get their Amber Alert request approved by state officials, which wastes time and contradicts “the whole idea to get information out quickly.”

John DeCarlo, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said the Amber Alert system often is used in scenarios in which it probably shouldn’t be.

DeCarlo, a former police chief in Branford, Conn., said people are more likely to help law-enforcement officers if they have an option of receiving alert services, rather than receiving the messages by default, as is the case with new Amber Alert systems. Forced alerts, he said, could desensitize some people.

But for law-enforcement officials, DeCarlo said, it’s often a matter of doing nothing or issuing a public alert, so they choose the latter.

“It goes a long way of answering the question of, ‘What do we do?’ But it’s also a victim of its own success,” DeCarlo said.

Often, he said, Americans legislate by moral outrage, which creates systems that have good intentions but may have unintended consequences. He said the goal should be to implement systems that have been proven useful instead of “just taking a shot at it.”

Blanketing an area with the broadcast

The Amber Alert was started by broadcasters in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, who teamed up with local police to develop an early-warning system to find missing children. By 2001, however, only four states had adopted it.

In 2002, then-President George W. Bush requested that the U.S. attorney appoint the first national Amber Alert coordinator. In 2003, Bush signed the PROTECT Act, legislation that called for the Amber Alert coordinator to develop a national program. And by 2005, all states had an alert system in place.

Prior to 2013, wireless customers had to sign up to receive Amber Alerts, but that ended when the program joined the Wireless Emergency Alert program run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That’s the same agency that sends out warnings from the National Weather Service and other organizations. The Wireless Emergency Alert system broadcasts the signal in a set area, and any device that picks up the broadcast will display it. By default, most wireless customers are signed up for these alerts, but they can opt out by contacting their service provider.

Before an Amber Alert can be issued in New Mexico, the case has to meet five criteria suggested by the U.S. Department of Justice: Law-enforcement officials must confirm the child is missing; the child must be deemed at risk of serious injury or death; there must be a description of the child, the captor or the captor’s vehicle; the child must be 17 or younger; and the case must be entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.

The Santa Fe Police Department cannot issue Amber alerts on its own. It must make the request to the New Mexico State Police, city police department spokeswoman Celina Westervelt said.

In the case of James Agnew, police determined Aguirre had taken the 10-year-old without permission, according to a statement from the boy’s father. Police had photos of the boy, Aguirre and the vehicle she was driving, a 1990 teal Honda Accord. Westervelt also said law-enforcement agents were worried that Aguirre might have fled to North Carolina, in part because the boy’s father said he had not seen his child since Oct. 26. Also, Westervelt said, Aguirre was not Agnew’s legal guardian or biological parent.

“We needed to find the child as quickly as possible,” she said.

But Aguirre clearly had a close relationship with the child and often picked him up from school. Her telephone number was listed on a police report about the incident.

It’s still unclear what prompted the father to notify police that his child was missing, and several calls to Aguirre for comment on the situation also have not been returned.

Instead of returning the child to his father, the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department took custody of the boy, according to a department spokesperson.

Both Aguirre and Ohala are reportedly transients, Westervelt said. Aguirre is not facing charges.

Westervelt and Gutierrez both said the alert led to the speedy recovery of the child, but it’s impossible to know if he would have been found in the same amount of time without an alert.

Westervelt said the department tracked down Aguirre through her cellphone signal, as well as through tips police had received about her location.

A system with ‘cry wolf’ potential

David Finkelhor, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the director of the Crimes against Children Research Center, said the system has “big cry wolf” potential, but he believes the criteria for issuing an alert have helped deter potential abuse.

“Evidence suggests overall that people like to be involved with law enforcement,” he said. “They appreciate opportunities to contribute.”

He said it’s hard to determine if the public is sick of the alerts, especially since the system has only been used six times in New Mexico. But he supports the idea of using technology to locate missing children.

The Amber Alert’s purpose, according to informational materials from the U.S. Department of Justice, is to find missing children fast and to reduce the chances they will be harmed. According to the Amber Alert program’s website, about 500 children have been recovered nationwide as a result of the alerts.

The alert system was used last August to safely recover a 16-year-old California girl, Hannah Anderson, whose mother and 8-year-old brother had been murdered in the burned home of her accused abductor, James Lee DiMaggio. The search lasted nearly six days before a group of horseback riders saw Anderson and DiMaggio in Idaho and tipped off authorities. DiMaggio was killed in a shootout with FBI agents.

But Timothy Griffin, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nevada who has studied the Amber Alert system, questions whether many of the children recovered with the help of the alert system were ever in real danger. He also challenges the numbers provided by the program.

“The question is, is the program working in situations where the children are in genuine peril?” he said in a telephone interview. “Evidence shows that doesn’t happen. In my opinion, the system is of limited value.”

Griffin said he’s found in his research that the majority of child abductors have familial connections to children they kidnap. He argued that the main factor in a child’s safety isn’t necessarily how quickly officials find the child, but the kidnapper’s intent.
And an Amber Alert, he said, won’t change a person’s motivations for taking a child.


http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/experts-overuse-false-alarms-threaten-impact-of-amber-alert/article_cf506975-4bf1-5be8-85b1-3c0bcc96455f.html

Amber Alerts

This article begins with a Facebook status that a friend of mine, a student-teacher, posted yesterday saying, “Amber alert tripped off six of my students’ phones in class today. Hope the kid gets found.”

One of her Facebook friends (after having the term “Amber Alert” explained to her) responded to the post with the following comment, “seems like an invasion of personal property to me… i mean, the sound thing just goes off without your consent, you could have been sleeping, near a baby that was sleeping, in a library, drs office…anywhere where being quiet and having VERY LOUD, SURPRISING NOISES would be a bad thing.”

It’s true, there are places that would be inappropriate for this to happen, but as I understand it, the Amber Alert (which is a default setting) can not only be changed, but also will not make noise if the phone is on silent. It behaves as a usual text message would, if your phone is on the proper setting. Basically, someone who was upset about this, probably doesn’t know how to properly operate their phone or doesn’t know how to take any responsibility for themselves.

For example, it would be a very bad thing for a loud text message to go off while a brain surgeon was operating…but I would also expect that someone who lives under those conditions every day would know to shut their phone off, put it on silent, or even leave it out of the room if they were operating. For Christ’s sake, they’ve got their hands in someone’s delicate purple alien brain goop! Therefore, a good surgeon would recognize that their situation is both unique, important, and take the responsibility to take the necessary precautions to ensure that their own phone didn’t go off. The same goes for anyone else who’s daily life depends on complete silence. Your problem, your responsibility, you have the option available to you to fix it right under “settings.” It’s not hard or time costly to figure it out.

That being said, I do not believe Amber Alerts are in “invasion of privacy” they are an emergency. Emergencies are not an inconvenience to you, they are your *darn* responsibility as a halfway decent human being. Someone’s child is being abducted and could die. While it’s true that suffering is relative and people are dying all the time all over the world, and you can’t just stop to save everyone, those people’s problems are indirectly related to you. They live far away and you most likely have few or little resources to do much about it. However, Amber Alerts go off for child abductions in your local area. This is for more directly related to you – this is your community. Do you really want some scumbag criminal who hurts minors of all people, running around free in your area? Do you have children? No? Oh well, know someone who does? How comfortable does it make you feel knowing people who could potential hurt or take them are in your area? How do you think the mother or father or grandparents of that child feel? How would it make you feel to be in their position?

This scenario is very similar to that of an ambulance behind your car in heavy traffic with its siren on. Yes, it is loud. Yes, it has annoying flashing lights. Yes, it slows everything down. But someone is DYING or in a very serious health situation. True, it doesn’t involve you because you don’t know them and you don’t have the skills or resources to save them…but at the very least you could get the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge OUT OF THE WAY. Your refusing to move quickly could be directly related to why that person dies. Do you really want that guilt on your hands? Of course not! Regardless of the fact that it’s also illegal not to move your vehicle, most people pull over without a second though simply because it’s the right thing to do. After all, if it was you or your wife, husband, best friend, you’d want people to move too – giving that person at the very least, a chance to make it. Life is so fragile and precious, dying before we’re ready is a fear that we all have in common.

http://ajlion.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/amber-alerts/