Does AMBER Alert ‘save lives’? An empirical analysis and critical implications

Abstract

A sample of 448 child abduction cases in which America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response (AMBER) Alert was issued was examined to determine the extent to which AMBER Alert is successful in rescuing abducted children, and whether the successes suggest ‘lifesaving’ rescues. We reached conclusions consistent with the scant available prior research on AMBER Alert: although over 25% of the Alerts facilitated the recovery of abducted child(ren) and are thus arguably ‘successful’ by that standard alone, there was little evidence AMBER Alerts ‘save lives.’ In fact, AMBER Alert success cases are in almost every measurable way identical to AMBER Alert cases in which the child(ren) were returned unharmed but the Alert had no direct role in that outcome: they typically involve abduction by family members and other (apparently) non-life-threatening abductors, and the vast majority of recovery times are over 3 h. The implications for the public discourse regarding AMBER Alert and directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response Alert
• child abduction
• familial abduction

Notes

^1.[email protected]

^2.[email protected]

^3.[email protected]

^4. To give readers some sense of the problem of missing data, we compared our numbers with those provided in the NCMEC reports, which presumably include all issued AMBER Alerts, and estimated a missing data percentage of approximately 35%. All of the NCMEC numbers (and NCMEC's specific terminology and categorization system) that were the basis of this estimate and exactly how this estimate was derived on a spreadsheet are available from the corresponding author upon request.

^5. Most news outlets follow the convention of not reporting the names of sexual assault victims or the nature of their victimization, but stories reporting the charges against perpetrators, who enjoy no such accommodation from news agencies, enabled our data collectors to identify whether sexual assault of the victim(s) occurred.

^6. The first and fourth authors were the data collectors. Standard intercoder reliability checks showed excellent agreement across the two coders for all variables of interest except the scale variables of Recovery Time (time between abduction and the recovery of the child) and Alert Delay (the time between the abduction and the issuance of the Alert). However, when these two variables were collapsed into the dummies of ‘Less Than Three Hours or Not,’ there was excellent agreement across the two coders. The cutoff of three hours for these dummy variables also aligns this study with prior research showing that most child abduction–murder victims are dead within 3 h of their kidnapping (Hanfland et al., 1997).

^7. We performed standard checks for multicollinearity among the predictor variables and verified it is no threat to model validity. Space constraints prevent their inclusion here, but the corresponding author can provide these analyses upon request.

^8. This might seem counterintuitive because NCMEC employs a more permissive definition of success, including non-abduction rescues, police-only recoveries, and other categories of success not related to the original design of the AMBER Alert system. However, while it is unprovable either way, the selection bias in our data is likely toward a finding of AMBER Alert ‘success’ even by our more restrictive definition, because relatively mundane cases involving unspectacular abductions and/or ‘no effect’ Alerts are probably relatively less likely to appear in media accounts of child abductions, as they do not involve the sensational narrative of innocent victim saved by effective law enforcers/rescuers that makes for such excellent news copy (Surette 1998).

^9. The percentage total for all family members, strangers, and acquaintances, and others, does not add to exactly 100% because of rounding errors.

^10. This discounts the six cases in which the Alert had some effect but the child still suffered some non-lethal harm.

^11. We also have qualitative analyses of the most impressive AMBER Alert successes within our sample, and the general suggestion from them is that even the most sensational successes do not conform to the image of an AMBER Alert quickly and dramatically rescuing a child from deadly abductors. Space constraints prevent their inclusion here, but they are available from the first author upon request.

^12. We do not claim to provide a scientific sample of the publicly stated rational for the AMBER Alert system by law enforcement agencies and public officials, but assert the reader would be satisfied by a casual review of mission statements by various federal and state law enforcement agencies that these statements are very typical. We are aware of no official agency associated with the AMBER Alert system that openly asserts the likely limits to its utility or affirms its value as strictly symbolic or other than originally intended.

^13. The corresponding author can document several instances of both of these reactions upon request.

^14. One of the co-authors of this article has in fact been invited on numerous live media and print interviews and has attempted to make this exact point during those opportunities. The hope is that public exposure to the potentially sobering realities about the Amber alert system could help to promote at least a trickle of criminological knowledge into the public discourse about crime and its effective remedies in general.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy Griffin

Timothy Griffin, Ph.D., Department of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, 2002, is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research specialties include the AMBER Alert system, criminal case processing, and media constructions of crime and justice.

Joshua H. Williams

Joshua H. Williams, M.A., Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Reno, 2012, is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis. His research interests include pre-trial incarceration and the sociology of punishment.

John Wooldredge

John Wooldredge is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. His research and publications focus on institutional corrections (crowding, inmate violence, inmate adaptation) and criminal case processing (sentencing and recidivism, extra-legal disparities in case processing and outcomes). He is currently involved in research on judicial effects on sentencing, and official responses to prison inmate rule violations.

Danielle Miller

Danielle Miller, B.A., Department of Criminal Justice, graduated with distinction from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2011. She is currently employed by the Reno Police Department.