Thoughts on the Emergency Alert System?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Here in the Chicago area, they seem to have changed the Emergency Alert System for child abductions. While watching TV over the past couple of weeks, on at least 3 occasions our watching has been interrupted by an alert. I guess I’m unsure who this is aimed at, or what the expected/desired result is.

The warning is repeated three times, accompanied by a horn sound, with information presented in a computer voice. Each time I’ve been watching TV in my home, with no expectation of going outside in the near future - whether or not I’d be on the lookout for the identified vehicle/persons.

For me, yeah, the annoyance is minor - especially compared to the potential upside of rescuing a child. But I’m not sure why the alert has to be repeated three times, or why it couldn’t be presented as a scroll across the bottom of the screen.

Any thoughts? Any info on how many kids have been recovered from these alerts?

2

We’ve had Amber Alerts & Silver Alerts for years on Cell Phones.
So Amber alerts started in 1996 apparently.

  • As of May 2020, 988 children rescued specifically because of AMBER Alert
  • As of May 2020, 66 children have been rescued because of Wireless Emergency Alerts
  • As of September 2019, there are 86 AMBER Plans throughout the United States.

It looks like the Amber Alerts are helping.

So they are probably hoping extending it to TV will increase the number of recovered kids.

3

A little history.

Why were Amber Alerts started?

The Amber Alert system is named in honor of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman who disappeared in Arlington, Texas, where a witness says a man in a black pickup truck grabbed her off her bicycle and drove off.

The child’s body was recovered in a creek near her home. Her murder remains unsolved.

It appears Silver Alerts are even more effective.
Texas: Since 2007, when the alerts started, there have been 789 activations – 740 times, the person was found during the alert. That’s a 94% success rate.

4

Wait a minute - the fact that a kid was recovered “during the alert” does not necessarily establish that recovery was the result of the alert.

I’m curious about whoever decided the specific manner in which these alerts appear. I guess making them especially annoying might make them noticed - or it might cause folk to actively tune them out.

5

Funny you started this. Also in Chicagoland, and we were just mentioning that the EBS and Amber alert seemed all of a sudden different. At least by us, the alert is repeated three times (and at the bottom of each alert the cable system or area is different).

I said the same to my spouse- I’m not exactly sure what they think this will do- we’re inside watching tv. On a cell phone, sure. But on my tv?

6

I’m in the Chicago area, too (and on Comcast cable); when yesterday’s Amber Alert was issued, it repeated three times on our TV. There was a different Amber Alert issued a week or two ago, that I think repeated five or six times. My suspicion is that the EAS is set up to issue it separately for each county, and Comcast’s system can’t (or won’t) only show you the alert for the county you’re in. That is something that I wish that they would fix.

As far as “but I’m inside” – COVID concerns aside, while you’re inside now, you might well be leaving your house shortly, and it’s clear to me that they’re trying to get the information to as many people, through as many different channels, as possible.

7

Sure, I know that’s the logic, but it just seemed so odd to us. How many people are watching tv moments before jumping into their cars. I’m sure it’s nonzero, and there are are other people in the house, but we found it a bit baffling.

We’re on Comcast too.

8

Yeah - same thoughts here. The signs over the tollways make some sense to me, as does the alert via phone. But the TV seems tenuous at best. And even so - why repeat it 3x, and why not as a scrawl like weather alerts?

This most recent alert was from some place called Riverdale - which I googled and found as a S burb. Also said the kid was dropped off at a police station but the abductor remained at large.

I wonder how many folk watching TV - even if they DO later go out, remember to be on the lookout for a certain model vehicle. And for how long? Should they run a crawler saying the alert is cancelled once the kid is found? I don’t pay that much attention to nondescript other vehicles, and doubt I would’ve remembered.

Not a big inconvenience, and I hope abducted kids are found quickly and safely. But someone made choices which resulted in what we experienced, and in such instances I am often curious about why one specific alternative is chosen over others. I didn’t readily google anything explaining the recent change.

9

I don’t like these. For one thing, I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of the public attention to draw attention to random crimes you want to solve. You’re casting too wide a net for too small a target. Of course people are going to defend it because of our “think of the children!!!” emotional reaction but you’re just sort of training people to tune out of emergency alerts for minor things that almost certainly won’t affect them. I know I ignore the emergency alert messages on my phone because it’s probably just going to be the license plate of some dude that kidnapped his kid from his wife during a family dispute. What if it was an alert about a chemical leak or something that I really needed to know about quickly? I may well not bother to look because it’s used too often for things that affect almost no one.

Secondly, I don’t think it’s psychologically healthy to remind people of crimes happening in a broad area around them. This isn’t specific to emergency alerts but applies to crime/tragedy focused news in general, but at least with that news you can choose not to watch it, the mobile phone alerts go to everyone. Our society is already hysterical at the idea that danger lurks around every corner and you can’t let your kids out of your sight for one second because there’s a hoard of school shooters and child molesters around every corner!!! This is not mentally healthy.

We live in a great, safe, peaceful, prosperous time to be alive (especially if you ignore the last few years specifically) but everyone is miserable because they’re convinced that the world is falling apart and it’s the end times because the media sells them fear. Everything is terrible! Crime is everywhere! Tragedies are everywhere! Terrorism is everywhere! But it’s not true. People are convinced it’s more dangerous now than it’s ever been, but it’s almost exactly the opposite. But people can’t understand how big their region/country/world is, they don’t understand that with millions of people around them, hundreds of millions in their country, and billions in the world, if you hear about every bad thing that happens you’re going to be completely swamped by those bad things even if they’re rare and the world is generally safe. To most people, the world feels like a few hundred, or maybe a few thousand people deep. That’s how they conceptualize it. Their brain can’t handle the enormity of the real size and numbers. So when you tell them 20 bad things are happening today among hundreds of millions of people, it feels like it’s happening among the hundreds or thousands of people they perceive the world to be, it’s like they live in an isolated village where dozens of people are having bad things happen to them every day. That’s what gives them this distorted sense of danger. They’re getting the bad news from 7 billion people, and it feels like it’s happening to their little village to them.

Anyway, having constant CHILD IS IN DANGER! CHILD IS KIDNAPPED! messages only reinforces this perception and hurts their psychological wellbeing, and makes them influence/vote for policies that are wrong based they’re based on false premises, that actually damage the world more than the events they’re trying to prevent.

For related reasons, I oppose running “active shooter” drills or re-designing schools in obvious ways to mitigate school shooters. Yes, someone shoots up a school once in a while, but there are 125,000 schools in the US. The odds of your kid ever being in danger are extremely slim. And yet our obsession with focusing on every school shooting, and running active shooter drills, and all that, are scaring our kids to death. They’re convinced they’re not in a safe environment and it hampers their learning and their psychological well being, even though shootings are rare and statistical fluke and extremely unlikely to affect them. But the active shooter drills and perception that they’re constantly in danger is going to affect them. Inflicting that on them does more damage than any active shooter drills would mitigate.

10

I don’t have cites, but I think that the typical situation is that the person who calls the police is someone who knows the abductor. It’s not “Oh, I’d better be on the lookout for a bearded man in a red Ford pickup”-- It’s “Say, Bob has a beard, and he drives a red Ford pickup. He’s been going on a lot lately about his estranged daughter, and I always thought he was kind of unhinged”.

11

You lost context on your quote, the high success rate was for the Silver Alerts (Seniors with some level of dementia) The child find rate is far lower sadly. That is the Amber Alerts.

12

Locally the channels just put a crawl with the info on it and then they follow up when it’s over.

13

I wonder if there is going to be a point where they will use the Emergency Alert System to interrupt NetFlix or other streaming services since the number of people still watching local TV is getting lower and lower.

14

I’ve had Netflix interrupted for tornado warnings, and I think that’s a good thing.

Yeah, people have complained over the years about being awakened, via cell phone alert, for Amber Alerts that were nowhere near their area. That doesn’t make sense to me either.

15

How many of those 988 recoveries were actually in danger? In my town, every phone was rung at midnight, urgently seeking a missing child. Turned out he was at a friend’s house, said he had permission for a sleep-over, and peacefully went to bed.

16

Here is SoFL the freeways are equipped with the big computerized signs. I see a Silver Alert probably once per 90 minutes of drive time on the freeway. So most of my commutes to/from work have one. And of course it’s on every sign I pass for the rest of that drive.

What I have been totally unable to find out, despite searching, is how smart the authorities are about the geographic area they alert. For all I know, they’re lighting up signs in my area for something that was reported 10 minutes ago 300 miles away.

Logic says that from the time the missing person was last seen until now, it’s possible they could be anywhere in about a 60mph radius of that spot. In just two hours you’re looking at an area 120 miles in radius. For one person / car. That’s clearly a simplified analysis, it’d be better to imagine the person fanning out at 60mph along freeways and the at 30 mph from each and every offramp. So a growing tree of possible locations. Nevertheless, in a pretty short time it’s a massive haystack and a single needle.

I like to play the game of looking for their car; powers of observation and all that. But I have no expectation I’ll ever see one before I win the Powerball. And I still don’t know that it’s even physically / chronologically possible that the person could be where I am at the time I’m there or whether the authorities are just spewing the warning into the greater aether willy nilly. This being FL, my cynical side suggests the latter.

17

It looks like the silver alerts work pretty well. I’ve heard most of the time, they don’t go too far and are often found napping on the shoulder or a parking lot after realizing they didn’t know where they were.

We recently had a nude silver alert guy wandering in a County Park. I had nearly forgotten that.

18

Silver alert targets aren’t trying to hide and are pretty mentally ineffectual.
Amber alert alert targets are trying to hide and although usually not rocket surgeons, they’re working the don’t-get-caught problem as best they can.

So it stands to some reason that the success rate for silvers would be higher, perhaps far higher, than ambers.

Which still leaves me wondering how carefully the authorities tailor the geography of the alerts. Every geographically inappropriate alert amounts to a false alarm that incrementally conditions the public to ignore them. “Cry wolf” is a proverb for a reason.


As to the alerts on cable TV, around here they’re shown 3 times. In English. Then 3 times in Spanish / Español. Then 3 times in Haitian Creole / kreyòl ayisyen.

19

You also have to ask what the success rate is at recovering either sort of missing person, without the alerts. Senile old people wandering off isn’t a new problem, but throughout history, we’ve still mostly been able to help them, even without Silver Alerts.

20

Sometimes it’s not location but the timing that just seems odd to me. There was an Amber Alert that I got on my phone several weeks ago around 3 in the afternoon (Kansas City area). The abduction apparently occurred around 5 am and they gave a description of the vehicle to be on the lookout for. And my first thought was, hell they could be in Dallas or Denver by now!