A Preliminary Examination of AMBER Alert's Effects

Abstract

AMBER Alerts are public announcements designed to elicit citizen tips that could help rapidly recover abducted children before they can be harmed by their kidnappers. Using various media accounts as a data source to garner a convenience sample of 275 alerts, the authors gathered basic information, including victim–offender relationship, recovery time, and the direct effects of the alert. AMBER Alert does appear to provide some positive benefits in recovering abducted children, although the evidence suggests that the alerts are not often used in “stereotypical” stranger abduction cases, and rarely do they appear to have the effect of possibly saving lives. The alerts appear most likely to be “successful” in familial abduction situations instead of the more menacing stranger abduction cases for which they were intended. Policy implications are discussed.

An empirical examination of AMBER Alert ‘successes’

“…Table 1 shows the codings and descriptive statistics for the variables used in the analysis, with missing-data cases included. Prior research on AMBER Alert has shown the importance of the identity of the abductor in predicting the likelihood of successful recovery (Griffin et al, 2007), so for each Alert success story, the Relationship of the abductor to the abducted child is coded. The Alert Effect indicates the manner, if any, in which the Alert facilitated the recovery of the child.…”

“…In almost a third of the sample cases the Alerts made some contribution to the recovery of abducted children, but the system was far more likely to be effective where the abductor's motivations were not apparently sinister, such as when the child was taken by a parent in the midst of a custody dispute (Griffin et al, 2007). Furthermore, even "successful" Alerts rarely worked within the narrow window of time (three hours) generally regarded as crucial in cases involving abductors with perverse and cruel intentions, and were in fact least likely to be effective in such cases (apparently-a crucial caveat identified by the researchers is the impossibility of knowing how a kidnapping leading to an AMBER Alert "would have" ended absent the Alert.)…”

“…However, the limited available research on the effectiveness of AMBER Alert suggests it is inherently limited and that claims of its effectiveness should be sharply qualified (Griffin, Miller, Hoppe, Rebideaux, & Hammack, 2007). The system has been prone to over-and misuse (Hargrove, 2005) and even successful Alerts are likely to involve relatively less menacing abductors where recovery time is often far greater than the three hour window deemed crucial in the most dangerous cases (Griffin et al, 2007;National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2008).…”

“…However, the limited available research on the effectiveness of AMBER Alert suggests it is inherently limited and that claims of its effectiveness should be sharply qualified (Griffin, Miller, Hoppe, Rebideaux, & Hammack, 2007). The system has been prone to over-and misuse (Hargrove, 2005) and even successful Alerts are likely to involve relatively less menacing abductors where recovery time is often far greater than the three hour window deemed crucial in the most dangerous cases (Griffin et al, 2007;National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2008). These sobering findings are probably indicative of a number of inherent constraints to AMBER Alert registering a "life-saving" success, including the daunting need for immediate critical information when a child is missing and a rapid synchronization of the auspicious events necessary to ensure the safe return of an endangered child in a short time span (Griffin & Miller, 2008).…”

Community Notification Laws

“…Therefore, this "mission creep" of enacting further policies restricting sex offenders and inclusion of juveniles, some of which are guilty of consensual sex, may run the risk of causing "sex offender notification fatigue" (Griffin et al, 2007). In other words the general public may become desensitized and exhausted by the overload of sex offender information (number of names in registries and new legislation) and ignore the issue entirely.…”