National Post (National Edition)
What if all these Amber Alerts are a bad thing?
In 2005, then-u.s. attorney-general John Ashcroft called the Amber Alert “the nation’s most powerful tool for thwarting child abductions.”
The emergency response system, which disseminates information about missing children, has been similarly praised in Canada; in a 2012 interview, Quebec’s Amber Alert co-ordinator called the program “quite a success story.”
Yet in Ontario on Monday morning, when cellphone users across the entire province received an Amber Alert — signalled by a jolting noise — on their phones, not everyone was pleased.
For many, it was their first experience with Canada’s new mobile emergency system. (A previous test of the system had failed to reach a lot of Ontarians.) And it wasn’t a great one.
A child in Thunder Bay had gone missing, the alert said. This seemed upsetting, and yet many of us living a two-day car ride away in southern Ontario wondered how we could possibly be useful in this situation.
A little later on, Ontario cell users heard another jolting noise, and a second alert came in saying … the same thing as the first alert, but in French.
This prompted one Torontonian, who also noted her lack of proximity to the apparent abduction, to Tweet, “Congrats, you have trained me to ignore emergency alerts.” And I don’t think she was wrong.
I was in a coffee shop later that afternoon when a third alert came in on my — and everyone else’s — phone. It was good news: the child was safe. But by this point, the Amber Alert noise was already being reflexively interpreted as an immaterial annoyance, at least by us self-centred Torontonians.
“Oh my god stupid amber alert ,” I heard a barista say under her breath when the noise for the last alert sounded. And I’ll admit it: immersed in a piece of difficult work on my laptop, I’d thought the same thing.
First, I chastised myself for being so selfish. If an Amber Alert can save even one kid’s life, then isn’t it worth putting up with the slight irritation of a few bothersome bleeps? Or 20? Or …
That’s when I stopped chastising myself for a moment and wondered how many Amber Alerts to expect. Because surely at some point of frequency, even the most selfless of humans will tune out cries of wolf (or sirens of cellphones) that have never before proven to signify anything germane. Security expert Matt Overton seemed to agree, telling the CBC that system managers “are intensely aware they could just dull people’s sense to the alert.”
That’s not what anyone wants to happen because the whole point of the emergency system — which the CRTC mandates — is to save lives by delivering critical information that the public can use.
It’s a funny thing about that saving lives part, though: as celebrated as the Amber Alert system is by law enforcement and child safety advocates, research in the United States has shown that these alerts aren’t nearly as effective as we think they are. Timothy Griffin, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has studied the issue, told the website Researchgate that in his reading of the data, “the number of children whose lives have been saved by Amber Alerts ranges from zero to something very close to zero.” In fact, Griffin worried that Amber Alerts might even be doing some harm.
Sounding not unlike a guest on a Freakonomics podcast who must patiently point out the simple but unexplored flaws of a beloved solution, he noted that “normal police investigation resolves the overwhelming majority of child abduction cases,” and “anything — including an Amber Alert and the flurry of subsequent calls made by the public — which could inhibit that investigative process needs to be evaluated objectively, based on evidence.”
Another problem: Amber Alerts get the public worked up and fearful about what is in reality an extremely rare event: kids being kidnapped by strangers.
As James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University professor of criminal justice, told the Boston Globe, the odds of a child in the United States being abducted by someone he doesn’t know are about one in a million.
A measure like the Amber Alert system, Fox said, “creates a sense of paranoia, not only in parents, but in children themselves.”
The Amber Alerts that do seem to work — in the sense that the missing child is returned safely — tend to be in cases where the child is abducted by a parent involved in a custody dispute. But that says less about the Amber system than it does about the fact that parents in these situations don’t usually pose a risk to the child in the first place. (They may be breaking the law, but they don’t intend to harm their child.)
If the government is to succeed in actually saving lives by providing emergency information, it is going to have to get a lot more selective and strategic about what details it shares, and with whom and how often it shares them. Otherwise, when that freak weather or public health emergency hits that really does require the communication of direct and immediate instructions, the group that needs to know will be too tuned out to notice.