Amber Alert is not a crayon

Because of the recent Tori Stafford murder, Amber Alerts have ended up under a spotlight. Thousands of citizens have signed an online petition demanding that the Ontario government change the criteria for an Amber Alert so that they are issued "any time a parent finds it out of character for their child to be missing". Aside from the fact that the Ontario government has no jurisdiction over Amber Alerts, I'm here to inform you that this proposal would actually make the Alerts less helpful at finding missing children.

I'm not insensitive to the Stafford tragedy, or to the similar events experienced by far too many parents. I understand that losing a young child can be one of the most harrowing and nerve-wracking experiences of one's life, and that anything which could shorten or avert that experience must seem like a no-brainer good idea. But that's not the case here.

As the news media have been telling us (in their incessant desire to report that Woodstock police are drawing criticism for following the rules), there are certain criteria that must be met for an Amber Alert to be issued. These criteria include that the child has been abducted, and that there is reason to believe the child is facing the possibility of harm.

Now, think back to the day Tori was first pronounced missing. That's right, 'missing'. Not abducted. At this point, the news coverage was simply that a nine-year-old girl had gone missing in Woodstock. We didn't have reason to think it was an abduction; we didn't have the now-infamous security cam footage. So it didn't fit the criteria for an Amber Alert, and the Woodstock police were 100% correct in not issuing one. In fact, getting the story out as much as it was is something that should be commended.

To some extent, the heart-tuggers have realized this, and that's why their efforts have been redirected to getting the Amber Alert criteria changed. However, there are two massive flaws in their plan:

1) It wouldn't have made a difference in this case. Let's say an Amber Alert went out at 4 PM on the Wednesday - roughly the time Tori was reported missing. If I had seen the alert, be I in Kitchener or Brantford, I would not have suddenly started viewing every nine-year-old I came in contact with as a potential kidnapping victim. I'd have thought that the girl ran away from home, or maybe was abducted, but Woodstock's far enough away that I'd need to see something really out of the ordinary to make any sort of connection.

So far out of the ordinary, in fact, that it would have had to be the sort of thing that would pique my interest even if there hadn't been an alert. More to the point, the one specific I've heard where an Amber Alert might have saved Tori was that they were in the parking lot of a Home Depot store in Guelph. If I were living in Guelph, going to Home Depot to pick up a lightbulb or a scroll saw or something, and saw a couple of people with a nine-year-old in the parking lot? I'd have thought it was maybe a little unusual, but not enough to warrant any further thought. This wouldn't have changed had I known that a nine-year-old was missing in Woodstock. There'd have had to be something rather overt - something that would have caught my attention whether there was an Amber Alert or not.

2) In a more general sense, overexposure leads to indifference. According to CBC (stop the presses, Ryan did actual research for a blog), at least 50,000 Canadian children were reported missing each year between 1993 and 2005. The actual lowest number was 51,973, and the last few years were all above 65,000, but we'll use the lowball number of 50,000 anyhow.

Let's further say that, for whatever reason, the parents found it completely "in character" for half of these children to go missing. (I don't understand that, I don't know how many kids would go missing often enough for it to be part of their character but rarely enough that you'd report them missing.) That leaves 25,000 cases in Canada each year where parents believe it is out of character for their child to be missing.

That works out to an average of about 68.5 children reported uncharacteristically missing each day. If an Amber Alert is issued for each of these kids - which seems to be what the petitioners want - we'd be seeing a new Amber Alert every 25 minutes or so. Admittedly, they'd be spread out across the country - but that still leaves one every few hours for Southern Ontario. With that many Amber Alerts going out, nobody would pay attention to them. The less often something happens, the more attention it gets.

Amber Alerts are an extremely useful tool for getting out information about abducted children. They are used when enough information is known about the abductor and abductee that they are actually worth the time spent broadcasting them.

Losing a child is a horrible ordeal, and nobody wishes to see Tori Stafford-type situations play out. However, jeopardizing the potential safety of children who could be helped by Amber Alerts to make a virtually nil improvement on the safety of other missing children is not the way to prevent these tragedies.

--Ryan