Empirical evidence for AMBER alert as crime control theater: a comparison of student and community samples

ABSTRACT

While the AMBER Alert system is intended to facilitate the rescue of abducted children, it has practical and psychological limitations. Participants indicated their emotions and perceptions about Alerts before and after reading a vignette that manipulated details about a child abduction. Results indicate that the Alert system fits some criteria of Crime Control Theater (CCT). CCT polices are emotion-based legal actions that appear to address crime but fail to do so and have unintended consequences. Participants experienced panic about child abduction and believed the system is an effective tool which should be used no matter the unintended consequences. Emotions and panic positively related to perceptions of the system. Still, perceptions were not particularly positive, indicating that some participants recognize the system's limitations. Female and community participants generally had more positive perceptions than males and students, especially when experiencing high emotions or panic. Reading about an abduction reduced emotions overall and led to more positive perceptions (but only in the ‘AMBER Alert success’ condition). Reading about an ‘Alert failure’ did not affect perceptions. Results highlight the role of emotion in shaping perceptions of the system. As with other CCT policies, lawmakers should rely less on community sentiment and more on science when adopting legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime control theater
• legal attitudes
• community sentiment
• emotion
• AMBER alert
• personal relevance
• individual differences
• child abduction

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Tatyana Kaplan for her helpful comments on early versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although CCT can apply to any legal action, we will use the term ‘CCT policy’ to refer to a broad group of legal actions including policies, laws, and legislation.

2 Of course there might be other measures of effectiveness (e.g. that Alerts prompt abductors to return the child rather than killing the child to ‘get rid of’ the evidence), but we do not know of any such studies. While there have been some legitimate successes, they tend to be rare. Instead, ‘successes’ are more likely to be the return of a child who was not likely in critical danger (e.g. a misunderstanding about which parent would pick up the child after school and thus there was no actual abduction; a child taken by a non-custodial parent who believed s/he was doing what was best for the child by removing the child from the other parent; for more on the ‘successes’ of the system, see Griffin, 2010; Griffin et al. 2015).

3 Only the Attitudes scale and the PANAS were measured before the experimental manipulation. We did not want to tip off the participants as to the purpose of the study more than necessary, so the Support, Effectiveness, and Do Something measures were only asked after the manipulations.

4 We could have included a condition in which an Alert was issued, no one in the community was able to assist, and the child was found dead. We initially focused on conditions in which participants would see the system as a failure, as described above. In the omitted condition, the failure was with the community (because they did not see the Alert or report seeing the child), not the system. Other conditions would have been nonsensical (e.g. a community member cannot give a tip to police if the Alert was not issued) and thus the design could not be fully crossed.

5 We are unaware of any existing measure of moral panic that would be appropriate to use for this study; thus, we developed this scale. The Do Something Scale is related to emotion as measured by PANAS. Specifically, it is correlated with post-vignette positive affect PANAS scores (r = .157, p <  .001), and with negative affect measured both pre- (r = −.202, p < .001) and post- vignette (r = −.255, p < .001).