The Validity Of Amber Alerts?

Just about everyone in this country by now knows what an Amber Alert is. A child goes missing, the police are notified, and an alert is issued state wide through various media outlets and also via cell phone text messaging. But just how effective are those Amber Alerts really? Boston.com profiled the alert system, where proponents and detractors both had their say on the validity of the system itself.

The program's champions say that its successes have been dramatic. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, more than 400 children have been saved by Amber Alerts. Of the 17 children Massachusetts has issued alerts on since it created its system in 2003, all have been safely returned.

Those are amazing statistics, but some say very misleading as well. Criminology researchers from the University of Nevada believe that even though the Amber Alert system causes a lot of “drama” and brings wide spread knowledge of a missing child to the forefront of the community, that they actually accomplish very little.

The lead criminology researcher at the University of Nevada, Timothy Griffin, refers to the Amber Alert system as “crime control theater” and worries that the system may be based more on emotions that actions that may actually work. However, the work of the criminologists only focused on a handful of the Amber Alerts issued, and they also did not have the full report in any of those cases. He still claims that his research is absolute.

One of the main arguments for the effectiveness of Amber Alerts is that, in the vast majority of kidnappings in which Amber Alerts are issued, the children are returned safely. But most of those kids, says Griffin, would have been rescued whether an alert had been issued or not. Around 63 percent of Amber Alert issuances they looked at had "no direct effect on recovery," Griffin and his coauthors wrote in a paper last year in the Criminal Justice Policy Review. Instead, kidnappings were resolved in many cases by traditional police all-points bulletins and investigations - or because kidnappers simply changed their minds.

Does it hurt though to have as much information about a missing child out there as possible? Many don’t think so.

Defenders of the program reject Griffin's argument. Some dismiss it as needless hair-splitting, while others question his data. And, considering the grim stakes, most see little point in criticizing a tool that saves any lives at all. "If an Amber Alert saves any child, don't you think it was worth it?" says Terrel Harris, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.

If it saves even one child’s life, the system is worth whatever drawbacks it may be perceived as having.