The article is long but comprehensive, please see if for the full discussion.
Agencies tout very high success rates, but some experts compare it to “crime control theatre”
On Sunday, March 22 of this year, a large swath of the population in Quebec was woken up at 4:25 a.m. as cellphones lit up and screamed. An Amber alert had been broadcast. Less than four hours later, the two missing children were thankfully found, unharmed, and the alert was cancelled.
Amber alerts cast wide nets in an effort to find abducted children and teenagers, but each time one is transmitted in Canada, we go through a predictable cycle. Many complain that these alerts cannot be turned off or muted, even in sleep mode, and that waking people up in the middle of the night to help them find a specific car that was last spotted 200 kilometres away is unnecessarily disruptive—with some even calling 911 to complain. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials remind us through the media that these alerts are only used when necessary and that they save lives.
Any subject tied to the safety of children is bound to evoke the deepest emotions. In fact, the crime that led to the creation of Amber alerts—and to their name—was monstrous enough that it’s no wonder it rallied influential people into building a system that could potentially prevent this kind of crime.
But warranted emotions aside, do Amber alerts even work? What little data we do have point to a system that has likely been oversold to us.
The only members of the public who might reasonably be expected to offer some help finding a license plate are driving, and aren’t supposed to be messing around with phones.
This built-in contradiction has always bothered me.
These days there are ALPR cameras everywhere, and it’s very hard to imagine John Q. Public is going to have a hot tip before our dystopian AI panopticon does. It has seemed obvious to me that, whatever their intention, the Amber alerts primarily function as copaganda: Persuading us that we live in a dangerous, unpredictable world, and that only the police can save us. By asking us for help locating license plates, while we’re at home asleep at 3AM.
Don’t amber alerts predate license plate cameras getting popularized by a little bit? Like mid 1990s, so there would have been a decent window before ALPR cameras really took up enough real estate to be useful
While I mostly agree with you, it is worth noting that vehicles can (and often do) have passengers accompanying a driver. They would be free to mess around on their phones when the alert goes out.