On Sunday, March 22 of this year, a large swath of the population in Quebec was woken up at 4:25 a.m. as cellphones lit up and screamed. An Amber alert had been broadcast. Less than four hours later, the two missing children were thankfully found, unharmed, and the alert was cancelled.
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Amber alerts cast wide nets in an effort to find abducted children and teenagers, but each time one is transmitted in Canada, we go through a predictable cycle. Many complain that these alerts cannot be turned off or muted, even in sleep mode, and that waking people up in the middle of the night to help them find a specific car that was last spotted 200 kilometres away is unnecessarily disruptive—with some even calling 911 to complain. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials remind us through the media that these alerts are only used when necessary and that they save lives.
Any subject tied to the safety of children is bound to evoke the deepest emotions. In fact, the crime that led to the creation of Amber alerts—and to their name—was monstrous enough that it’s no wonder it rallied influential people into building a system that could potentially prevent this kind of crime.
But warranted emotions aside, do Amber alerts even work? What little data we do have point to a system that has likely been oversold to us.
Her name was Amber Hagerman, and in January 1996, she was riding her bicycle two blocks from her grandparents’ home in a working-class neighbourhood of Arlington, Texas. “The streets are always full of kids playing,” a neighbour told The Associated Press, which covered the events at the time. “They aren’t now.”
Amber was grabbed by a man in a pickup truck, according to a witness, and she vanished. She was nine years old.
Her body was found a few days later in a creek bed by a man who was walking his dog. Her throat had been cut. To this day, her murder remains unsolved.
It’s easy to understand how such an unspeakable crime catalyzed change. It was a fellow Texan who contacted a local radio station and proposed that broadcasts could be used to recruit ordinary folks into finding missing children. Eventually, the idea snowballed into the Amber alert system in the United States—as well as the national sex offender registry. The word “Amber” (often spelled “AMBER”) is used in honour of Hagerman, but it has retroactively been turned into an acronym for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.”
The idea migrated to other countries and to media platforms beyond just radio stations: televisions, electronic signs on the highway, and eventually cellphones.
Amber alerts are only used for a small minority of child disappearances. In fact, an investigation by USA Today revealed that an Amber alert had been broadcast for only one out of every 1,000 missing children in 2021. Parents whose child has disappeared may wonder why theirs doesn’t warrant an Amber alert, but the criteria, which vary slightly from one jurisdiction to the next, are narrow: the victim must be under the age of eighteen and be known (or strongly suspected) of having been abducted. There must be sufficient information about the victim, captor, or the vehicle used, and often there has to be a risk of serious injury or death. Expanding this to any child that goes missing would result in a daily influx of alerts and undoubtedly cause alert fatigue: people would stop even looking at them.
Agencies in charge of Amber alerts will often tout very high success rates; these victories, however, can be built on a fallacy. If a child is safely found after an Amber alert, it can too easily be argued that the child was found because of the Amber alert. It’s important to remind ourselves that police officers do not sit idly by as soon as an Amber alert is declared. They continue investigating (possibly with renewed gusto inspired by the urgency of the alert), and this mundane police work can lead to the localization of the missing child.
You may wonder how easy it can be to identify the right stranger that kidnapped a child without recruiting thousands of pairs of eyes. After all, Amber Hagerman’s abductor was never found. The truth is that the majority of child abductions are done by a parent or relative. What little Canadian data we have on Amber alerts—this lot coming from a Canadian Press investigation apparently published in 2016—reveals that fifty-four of ninety-two Canadian Amber alerts that year involved kidnapping by a parent or relative, with an additional eleven implicating instead a non-relative who was known to the family or to the child. How many were caused by strangers? Twenty-two, or just under a quarter.
The situation is similar in the United States, where one researcher and his team have single-handedly been poring over Amber alerts, trying to suss out what is fact and what is fiction.
If you dive into the meagre scientific literature on Amber alerts, you will recognize one name pretty quickly. Timothy “Skip” Griffin is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he has published almost every paper out there interrogating the effectiveness of Amber alerts.