Last week in Ontario, an Amber Alert was issued in the middle of the night for a missing two-year-old girl.
Phones across the province sounded off at 3 a.m. telling people the 37-year-old suspect and child were last seen leaving Brantford around midnight.
Due to the time, 911 operators received angry calls from people that had been woken up. There were also anonymous comments posted online, likely because they knew the backlash they would face if they attached their name to the complaint.
As I’ve written about previously, I don’t mind being woken up if it means an abducted child makes it home safe and sound. I find it despicable for people to complain about being woken up or having their favourite show disrupted for a few moments.
Issuing an alert isn’t a decision made lightly, and could be the difference between life and death.
Robynne Henry The Henry Hype
While I was reading up on the most recent Amber Alert, I came across a call for the system to be changed. Annoyance at being woken up was among the reasons, but another was the system is run poorly or is ineffective.
This made me pause and wonder how it’s not working.
According to the provincial government, there were two Amber Alerts since January 2019. The children were found safe in both situations, and their abductors faced charges as a result.
I’m not sure if those cases would have had the same endings if the public hadn’t been aware of what was happening. The police can only go so far, and sometimes releasing information is the best way to prevent a dangerous situation from getting worse.
What I didn’t find when I was doing research was a suggestion on how to make the Amber Alert system better. For all the people demanding it be changed and made better, none seemed to have any idea how to do that.
Honestly, I can’t think of a way to improve it. Sending the message out the media is great, and we get it out there to all of our readers as quickly as we can, but people may not be on social media when it’s happening. They could cross paths with the abductor and not know until hours later when it could be too late.
Sending it directly to a person’s cellphone seems like an amazing idea to me, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t been happening for longer. People normally have their phones on them, and it’s the quickest way to get information out about a time-sensitive issue.
If the Amber Alert system is rehauled, I really hope it’s to make it work better and not to prevent people from getting woken up in the middle of the night.
