An empirical examination of AMBER Alert ‘successes’

The AMBER Alert system was designed to recover endangered missing children through the solicitation of citizen assistance via swift public announcements. Rigorous empirical support for AMBER Alert's effectiveness has been lacking, but since its inception program advocates and public safety officials have lauded the system's ability to “save lives”, often basing their optimism on AMBER Alert “success” stories. However, in this paper quantitative and qualitative analyses of 333 publicized and celebrated AMBER Alert “successes” suggest AMBER Alerts rarely result in the retrieval of abducted children from clearly “life-threatening” situations, and that most of the publicized successes involved relatively benign abductors and unthreatening circumstances. The routine conflation of such apparently mundane cases with rare dramatic successes by AMBER Alert advocates suggests popular portrayals of AMBER Alert are overly sanguine. The potentially negative effects of this and policy implications are discussed.

Research Highlights►Almost all of 333 acclaimed AMBER Alert successes examined did in fact contribute to the safe recovery of abducted children. ►Although the vast majority of the cases were genuinely “successful” in the broad sense of assisting in the recovery of abducted children, most of the successful Alerts examined did not facilitate rescue within the three-hour window deemed crucial in the majority of child-abduction murder cases. ►In the overwhelming majority of the cases examined, the circumstances of the abduction did not suggest the children were in “life-threatening” peril, suggesting AMBER Alert's achievements are probably being exaggerated by those claiming it routinely “saves lives”.