After her death, the Arlington, Texas, community where she lived rallied in hopes of preventing future tragedies like hers. Residents suggested broadcasting abduction information using the Emergency Alert System (EAS), the same way emergency weather alerts are broadcast.
By July 1997, the first Amber Alert Plan was in place in Dallas, dedicated to the memory of Amber Hagerman.
Fast-forward to 2001, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) implemented a nationwide Amber Plan geared to getting information to the public to help find missing children. Since its inception, the NCMEC Amber Plan has formed an official partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice. The goal is helping local governments across America create and implement their own localized Amber Alert systems.
"The premise of Amber Alerts is to enlist the eyes and ears of the public," said Bob Hoever, deputy director of Special Operations for the NCMEC. "The more people you get out there looking for a child, the better."
Time is of the essence. It's reported that 74 percent of abducted children who are found dead were murdered within the first three hours. This makes getting the world out quickly critical.
Now the public can join the effort to bring home abducted children. In May 2005, the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) and the NCMEC went live with Wireless Amber Alerts, a program that sends out Amber Alerts to citizens across the nation as text messages to their cell phones.
"With 60 percent of Americans owning wireless devices and seldom going anywhere without them, this will significantly increase the reach of the program by notifying people wherever they are that a child has been abducted," said Roxanne Robbins, CTIA spokeswoman, noting that more than 191 million people subscribe to wireless telecommunications services in the United States.
"This program equips people to -- no matter where they are -- receive a description of suspects and abducted children," Robbins continued, adding that law enforcement has a much better chance of getting valuable tips from people who have the information handy and can confirm what they are seeing matches the descriptions.
Whether sitting at a coffee shop, driving down the freeway or shopping at the mall, people can get the alerts as soon as they are sent out.
"It's my understanding that we have the potential to reach more than 90 percent of the wireless community," said Hoever.
Alerting the Public
When a child goes missing, local law enforcement must determine if an Amber Alert is warranted. This is done based upon criteria established by local law enforcement, which usually demands that the child is under a certain age, is known to have been abducted and is considered in imminent danger of bodily harm.
Once determining that an alert is necessary, law enforcement issues the information, which is then sent out to anyone capable of helping, including the broadcasting community.
The NCMEC receives this information, which is then reformatted and routed to cell phone users through Syniverse Technologies, the company responsible for the system's design. It is then sent to participating wireless carriers, who forward it to the customers signed up to receive alerts.
Participating wireless carriers include Sprint, Nextel, Verizon, Cingular and T-Mobile.
There Is Another Way
The Wireless Amber Alerts system is not the pioneer in wireless Amber alerting. Another system is in place that can do the same thing and involves a simpler process, according to Todd Sander, chief operating officer of the Amber Alert Portal, which has been in operation since July 2004.
The Amber Alert Portal is a very different concept from the "daisy chain alerting system" stemming from the NCMEC/CTIA partnership, he said.
Sander explained that the Amber Alert Portal allows law enforcement to log in, input the information, then send it directly to all interested parties including radio, television, e-mail, fax machines, electronic road signs, cell phones and other wireless devices.
"When the system came together, it was created by the states and by law enforcement," said Sander. "[Law enforcement] said we needed to be able to alert as many people as possible, and since there are multiple ways for people to get the information, we needed our system to be able to handle all of them."
To Sander, a system with multiple methods of distribution, like the Amber Alert Portal, makes more sense, especially since it's a more streamlined approach.
"Why do we need a piggyback approach?" he asked of the Wireless Amber Alerts system. "Why do we need this niche activity when there is a system out there being used by a group of states available to all states at no cost that does what [the Wireless Amber Alert] can do and so much more?"
He explained that leaving information intact provides a quicker, less error-prone method of transmission -- a preferable method in a time-critical, information-sensitive situation.
Referring to cell phone alerts in particular, Sander said, "We don't touch them. We don't change them. We don't reenter them. It's the most direct way for people with cell phones to receive those alerts because they come directly from law enforcement."
Nationwide Possibilities?
Six states now use the Amber Alert Portal as their primary alerting system, in conjunction with the emergency alert systems already in place. Those states are Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Arizona and Missouri, with four states still pending.
"The states who are the owners of the system believe it can and should be a national system because it allows them to share information quickly across state lines and get it directly to the public in the quickest fashion," Sander said.
With the Wireless Amber Alerts deployed by the NCMEC and CTIA, alerts are geographically specific even though they have the capability of reaching people nationwide.
"There's a national initiative out there, there's just not a national program," Hoever stated. "It always needs to remain localized -- a grass-roots type operation -- because the investigating agencies dictate where the alert needs to go."
There is a difference, however, between generating nationwide alerts and using a single nationwide method to generate localized alerts, and Sander said giving law enforcement control over the process is key. The Amber Alert Portal, he said, ensures that the information law enforcement agencies put in is the information that goes out.
Sander also noted that having a common platform would allow information to cross state lines quickly and more effectively, so when an abductor leaves a state, the information can quickly follow.
Joining Hands
In the states using the Amber Alert Portal, both systems are currently available. "The interesting part of this is how are the two going to work together?" said Sander.
Creating a unified system using the Amber Alert Portal to disseminate alerts to secondary systems such as Wireless Amber Alerts could be the answer, according to Jeff DeVere, chairman of the Amber Alert Portal Consortium and captain with the Washington State Patrol.
"We'll be looking to merge any additional alerting technology with what we already have to make them coexist and work well to get the information out to more people," he said. "If we activate an Amber Alert in Washington, what we would like to see is when we press the button, the same information that's entered into the portal is also used through the secondary system."
DeVere said the more secondary systems involved, the better.
"Basically it's another channel for us to distribute the information about an abducted child, and the more channels we can get to notify people when we have a missing child, the better off we are," he said.
But as Robbins observed, Wireless Amber Alerts is the only program that has an official partnership with the NCMEC and with the wireless carriers.
In addition, she argued that rapid electronic transmission allows information to travel quickly without compromising the original message's integrity. "The seriousness of the situation and the importance of accuracy -- that comes first and foremost."
Regardless of their differences, sources from both systems agree that the main objective of any Amber Alert system is to apprehend abductors and recover missing children in the quickest amount of time.
"Our hope is that if child abductors learn that we can get information out within minutes of the abduction of the child -- or within the hour at least -- the likelihood of them getting caught is higher," said DeVere. "So I think the portal indirectly assists us in deterring people from abducting children to start with."
It's Your Call
Both systems are currently available for use at no charge.
"There's no cost to law enforcement, there's no cost to the public and there's no commercialization involved in it," Hoever said about Wireless Amber Alerts, adding that the wireless community donated equipment, time and resources.
"We're working with the wireless companies, where customers can sign up directly with their wireless carrier and they're not charged any air time and it doesn't cost them anything to get this," he said.
Wireless users interested in signing up can do so by visiting www.wirelessamberalerts.org. They will be asked to choose a ZIP code representing an area they frequent, and any time an alert is issued matching the area chosen, they will be notified.
The Amber Alert Portal is freely available as well.
"It's just a matter of states becoming familiar with the portal and what's available to them to understand that it doesn't cost them," Sander explained. "They don't get any bills, and they don't have to pay anything."
Change Is Good
"Initially we defined Amber Alerts as, 'Rapid notification to the public utilizing the broadcast media when a child has been abducted under critically dangerous situations.' We changed that definition to, 'Rapid notification to the public utilizing all available technology,'" said Hoever.
"When there's better technology, we should utilize it," he continued. "Every day we have people calling us with new things and better technology, and we just keep incorporating that -- that's why [the program] should always be improving."
Although various alert systems continue to exist in the United States, statistics show that Amber Alerts in general have made a difference in the lives of many children and their families.
"We have recovered 209 children specifically because of the Amber Alert program -- clearly a tool we don't want to lose," Hoever stated, comparing finding a missing child to finding a needle in a haystack. "The more people we have out there looking, the smaller that haystack is."
Visit here for information on the Amber Alert Portal.
Visit here for information on the CTIA and NCMEC's Wireless Amber Alerts.
