AMBER ALERTS ARE IMPORTANT
If a child’s life is in danger, inconvenience me all you like, Lorraine Sommerfeld says.
An Amber Alert was issued last month when Riya Rajkumar disappeared after her father failed to return her to her mother. It was the little girl’s 11th birthday; it was also her last.
She was murdered by her father, 41-year-old Roopesh Rajkumar, who died at a Toronto hospital of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, suffered before he was taken into custody by police. He was found and arrested because a citizen saw the Amber Alert, though it was too late for Riya.
Amber alerts aren’t new. They were developed in Texas in 1996 after nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was kidnapped and murdered. As electronic highway billboards came into use, they became another tool to help locate children. Cellphones can now be looped in.
Police use the alerts sparingly, understanding that bombarding your audience with too much messaging is counterproductive. So hoops must be gone through and procedures must be followed before they finally push that button. If my child was missing, I’d want that button pushed immediately. So would you. When you were a kid, you saw the emergency broadcast bulletins. This is only a test, they intoned. In the event of a real emergency, you would be given further instructions. They always interrupted cartoons. I never saw a real emergency, and I worried about what would happen if there was a real emergency and I wasn’t watching TV when it happened.
Well, apparently what happens is people get annoyed. When the Amber Alert for Riya was finally issued, it lit up cellphones across the province. And the owners of some of those cellphones actually called police and service providers to complain about it. The complainers have been scorched in the media. Some started deleting their complaints almost as fast as they’d made them. Some doubled down. But there’s no point in lambasting those who complained, because anyone who considers it anything other than their moral duty to try to save a child is beyond reach of reason.
Imagine the factors at play for police: a missing child, with each passing minute things getting more dangerous; knowing while you have formidable tools at hand, the public is still your best bet for blanket awareness; knowing the technology is fallible, but reasonable; knowing you have to be 100 per cent certain this is the best procedure; knowing if you put out the alert, people will deluge 9-1-1 with complaints that you did so.
Cops took the heat when an Amber Alert wasn’t immediately issued for Tori Stafford, abducted and murdered in Woodstock, Ontario in 2009. That resulted in a change to the requirements for issuing an Amber Alert. Previously, they had to meet three criteria:
A child under 18 had been abducted.
The child was in danger of serious harm.
There was enough descriptive information about the child or abductor that a media alert would be helpful.
Those requirements are now guidelines, which gives officials more leeway in making a move. I get angry at scammers sending me texts, I’m tired of telemarketers phoning me, and I get really, really angry that politicians text me. My phone is for my convenience, not theirs. But if I’m driving and see that alert, either on a highway sign or on my phone, I know I am part of the best mobile force the police have to look for a needle in a haystack. If a child’s life is at stake, inconvenience me all you like.