AMBER Alerts Work

We’ve all heard them – the ear-piercing sound of an AMBER Alert. Whether you have heard it on your own phone, or have heard it on someone else’s, AMBER Alerts interrupt your day’s activities – and that’s exactly what they are supposed to do. 

It did so on Monday evening this week. An AMBER Alert was issued for a 3-year-old little boy. He was abducted from San Antonio and when the alert was sent out, someone in Fayette County took the alert seriously and reported a car that looked like the one that the child was in at the time of the abduction.  

I heard the alert, but I was busy and did not take the time to read it until later when I heard that the child had been recovered near Flatonia. Thankfully, the child was unharmed. 

I have been guilty of ignoring those alerts in the past and have even considered turning them off on my phone. But then something like this happens and reminds me of their importance. In this particular case, the child was left in the car alone with the keys in the ignition. The person was probably not trying to take the child, but simply trying to take the car. However, there are other instances of abduction where the child is the target. 

According to Wikipedia, AMBER is officially a contrived acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, but was named after Amber Hagerman who was a 9-year-old little girl who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas.

The AMBER Alert program began in 1996 and was originally distributed via radio and television stations, but with increased hand-held technology, it is now available on our cell phones. As technology increases, there will be more and more information sent out through this program such as links to photographs of the abducted child and phone numbers to report sightings.  

The U.S. Department of Justice website states that as of February 2017, there have been a total of 868 children successful recovered through the AMBER Alert system. They started automatically sending them through the Wireless Emergency Alerts program in 2013, which I’m sure has increased the number of successful recoveries. 

The incident on Monday night was a real wake up call for me. No longer will I ignore the alerts on my phone, (no matter how annoying they might seem.) We all need to pay attention to all emergency alerts. When something like this happens, every second counts. 

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