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Hey, I'm Welcome to the short stuff.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's sitting in for Dave, which makes everything normal.
That's right.
Chuck.
Yes.
We're going to do this like an old school stuff you should know episode.
Oh, I have a feeling I know what's coming.
Have you ever gotten an Amber alert?
Yes, I have.
There's nothing more sort of ear splitting and troublesome, immediately troublesome, and
upsetting than getting that clacks on Amber alert all of a sudden at your nightstand
coming through your smartphone.
Yeah, that's actually a little older than I thought.
I think those started in 2012, Wireless Emergency Alerts.
Yeah.
Yes, you can turn them off, but if you turn them off, you are shedding a slight amount
of your humanity, perhaps.
Although there's a debate about whether they're being overused or not.
One of the wireless emergency alerts that you can get is an Amber alert specifically.
There's other ones we'll mention at the end of the episode, but the Amber alert is like
the OG and it has a terrible tragic origin story to it.
Amber actually is an acronym for America's Missing, Colin of all things, broadcast emergency
response, Amber, but it's also the namesake of a girl, I think a nine year old named
Amber Hagerman, who lived in Arlington, Texas in 1996.
That's right.
We should probably tell you what an Amber alert is before we get into that sad story because
if you're from abroad, you don't know that an Amber warning is when a child has gone missing
and they send out basically, we'll see it's operated by the state, but it essentially almost
always ends up being a nationwide alert sent to highway billboards that are digital, sometimes
lottery signs that are digital and can be changed.
Your cell phone on the television and they just, they get it out in all these ways that
hey, we're issuing this now because usually it's like this child is in this kind of car
and on a highway.
And if everyone keeps their eyes open, we may get lucky here if everyone really pays
attention for the next few hours.
That was a great definition of the Amber alert.
Yeah, I mean, I sort of went off of my own thing, but I think everyone knows that the
likelihood of finding an abducted person or a missing person gets less and less as time
goes on.
So those first, that first hour is just so critical even if they can get out of warning
that says there's a Ford Taurus with this license plate and this kid is in it.
So keep your eyes peeled.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, thanks for setting me up for telling the tragic story of Amber, Hey, you're
in, but I kind of have to now back in January of 1996, Amber, who was like I said, a
nine year old from Arlington, Texas, had gotten a bike for Christmas and was riding it around
near her grandmother's house.
And there was an abandoned Windixi grocery store, the parking lot of which she was
riding around, riding her bike around.
And there was a local man, a 78 year old man named Jimmy Kevill, who was watching her
ride her bike.
And Jimmy Kevill apparently is the lone witness to Amber's abduction.
He said that a black pickup truck showed up and a white or Hispanic man in his twenties
or thirties got out and took Amber forcibly with him.
And there was a nationwide search for Amber.
I'm not exactly sure what it was about that case that that God everybody, but her, her
disappearance launched a nationwide search preamber alert.
And tragically three, I think three days later, dog walker found her body in a creek because
of the need it showed to coordinate to get the word out.
The Dallas Fort Worth area police department's law enforcement got together with the broadcasters
from the area and said, Hey,
let's figure out like a basic way to get the word out for abducted children like ASAP.
Let's figure out a standardized way to do that.
And they came up with the amber alert.
I think within 10 months, they had the system up and running.
Yeah, which is a great thing.
Sadly, they, as a case, it remains unsolved, but let's take a break and we can get back
and talk a little bit about the specifics of how they work right after this.
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All right.
So, I mentioned that it was up to the state, which is true.
Every state has their own criteria for issuing amber alerts and how it goes down.
But the DOJ, the Department of Justice, did issue guidelines about recommendations that
kind of break down into five categories for different reasons.
The first one is law enforcement has a reasonable belief that a child was abducted.
This one's pretty obvious on what that means.
The second one is law enforcement believes the child will suffer serious bodily harm or
worse.
And the reason they have these criteria is because they're missing children all the time
and not all of them.
In fact, very few of them get the actual amber alert.
So this is to sort of qualify for that specific case.
And the bodily harm one is the need for just a timely response.
If they have information where they believe in a lot of times it could be like a relative
that has them that's very upset or has made threats and things like that.
Yeah, but I think the crux or the underlying gist of amber alerts is abduction by a stranger
because that's the greatest danger typically that an abducted child can be in.
There's also a standard that most states have adopted 17 or younger.
They're like, let's not pronouncements on what's a child or not.
We can all just basically agree anybody under 18 is a child.
And if they meet this criteria, then we're going to issue an amber alert.
And then the last part is this is a step that not everybody takes, but it seems very critical.
You want to take that information that you send out on the amber alert and enter it in
the National Crime Information Center system.
Flag it as a child abduction and all of a sudden the amber alert will go from a local
or a state or a regional thing all the way out to national like nationwide law enforcement
all around the country will have an alert that this kid has been abducted.
So be on the lookout for them, but not all not all states have that as part of their
criteria contingency plan, which is surprising.
Yeah, for sure.
There was one we missed.
There was the other criteria is there's enough detail about the appearance and the abduction
of the child.
So they won't issue an amber alert if it's just like like I don't know what my kid was
wearing.
I don't know where she last was.
I really have no information.
They have to have pretty concrete information about what the child was wearing at the
time, what they look like at the time and where they might have been abducted.
And especially if there's anything like, you know, it was a black pickup truck or it was
definitely my brother-in-law and this is his car and license plate number.
And on the 17 and younger thing because it's different states, some states may have a
guideline that it's let's say 15, but they agree to honor the rule of the state that
the abduction took place in.
Yeah.
If the amber alert makes it across state lines.
Yeah.
So there's, I said that some people are critical of not necessarily amber alerts, but it
just alerts in general because if you're woken up at 3 a.m., whether it's an amber alert,
a silver alert, which is used to alert people of a missing person with like dementia or
Alzheimer's, purple alert is one for an adult with cognitive impairment who's gone missing.
It's all the same to you.
So there's a part of issuing amber alerts.
One of the reasons why the criteria is so strict is you don't want to get people used
to those alerts.
You want it to be a big deal when your phone goes off with an amber alert at 3 in the morning
that everybody takes the time to wake up and look, that's crucial.
It's a crucial part of it because if everybody becomes desensitized to it, that's a problem.
On the other hand, there are people who are like, there's a lot of people who need to
have the fact that they're missing, be alerted out to everybody that just don't meet the criteria
of the amber alert.
And so there's other kinds of alerts.
It's someone's ever-bridge alert, which is it's cases where children have been targeted
or abducted or gone missing, but they don't meet the criteria of the amber alert.
Like say you know for a fact the child was abducted and that they're probably in danger,
but you don't have, like you said, the description of what they were wearing or what kind of
car they were forced into.
You might not issue an amber alert.
In fact, in 2020, there were 365,000 entries that year in the National Crime Information
Center System for missing kids, but 200 of them met the criteria for amber alerts to
be issued.
So there's a weird balancing act that you have to go through that.
I don't think anybody's figured out yet, but that's why that criteria is supposed to
be so rigidly adhered to.
Yeah.
And from what I've read, it's not like there's any, it's just about the alert, not like
necessarily how hard the cops may be working to try and find this missing kid.
It's just a very specific criteria because I think when it meets that criteria, that means
there's a decent likelihood that if you act fast in the next few hours, like I said at
the very beginning, then somebody might see something that could really help because we
have all this information.
I feel like most of the ones I've seen have been family members, which is interesting.
I had had no idea that it was supposedly for stranger abduction, but they've done a
lot of good work from 1996 to 2023.
Amber, specifically amber alerts have contributed to the recovery of 1,186 children.
And then other wireless emergency alerts rescued 165.
And over that, that may not seem like a high number over that period of time, but if
it's literally the success of a single signal being sent out, finding 1,186 children,
that's amazing.
Yeah.
One of the stories I've seen bandied about by pro amber alert people, to basically everybody,
that there was like a kid who had an amber alert issued and was recovered within like
less than 30 minutes because of the amber alert.
So it definitely does work.
I mean, if they're only issuing 200 a year and they in seven years, they managed to recover
almost 1,200 or 1,300 children, that's a pretty good track record, really.
Yeah, for sure.
Are you got anything else?
I got nothing else.
Keep that alert on.
It's just stressing.
But and if you're on the road at the time and you see something like that, do your
part.
That's what they're looking for is people to really keep their eyes peeled and be vigilant.
Yeah, and if you're a state legislator, maybe take the time to really sit there and see
if your state has too many or is issuing too many of these things in as in danger of
desensitizing the public because you do not want to do that.
And of course, since I just spoke directly to state legislators, that means short stuff
is out.
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