Amber Alert stretched beyond its original purpose
By JOE MILICIAA
ssociated Press Writer
WAITE HILL, Ohio -- To illustrate what's happened to the Amber Alert program, police Chief Arnold Stanko slowly pulls his two hands apart as if stretching a piece of taffy.
Ten years after the missing child alerts began in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the system has been adopted in all 50 states. In some, it is being used for reasons beyond its original purpose of helping find children abducted by strangers.
Ohio, Texas and other states have opened Amber Alert to include abductions by noncustodial parents or family members if the child is in immediate danger of injury or death.
Although they don't advocate a narrower use of the system, some law enforcement officials are concerned that Amber Alerts will be overused and therefore become less effective. And in some cases, it's more difficult for authorities to decide when an alert should be issued because they have to weed out the noncustodial parent who isn't really a threat or the mother who falsely claims her runaway child has been abducted.
"You don't want to be in a position where you get Amber fatigue where people say, 'It never ends, another Amber Alert,' and they tune out," said Tela Mange, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Amber stands for America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response. The system was created in 1996 after Amber Hagerman, 9, was
kidnapped while riding her bicycle near her home in Arlington, and killed. Amber Alerts are broadcast on radio and television and appear on highway signs and, by request, on cell phones.
The criteria for issuing an alert varies slightly from state to state, but the U.S. Department of Justice recommends the following minimum standards: an abduction is confirmed; the child is at risk of serious injury or death; there is enough descriptive information about the child, captor or captor's vehicle; the child is 17 or younger.
"When it started out it was for stranger abductions," Stanko said. "Over time we learned that parents abduct their own children and kill them."
Of 17 alerts issued in northeast Ohio since 2002 through January, nine involved children abducted by parents, family members or a live-in boyfriend, according to police records reviewed by The Associated Press.
The statewide plan in Texas, which began in 2002, issued 20 alerts through February. Two were stranger abductions; the rest involved noncustodial parents or people who were known to the child or family, Mange said.
Beth Alberts, coordinator of the Houston Regional Amber Plan, began getting calls about parental abductions in the summer of 2003.
Realizing that a family member could pose just as deadly a threat as a stranger, the Houston plan expanded its criteria to include parental abductions, following the lead of the state plan.
Out of 52 Amber alerts over the last five years in Houston, only eight involved family abductions.
"It's not an overwhelming number for us," Alberts said. "I'm not hearing that there's a lot of Amber fatigue."
Stanko, who oversees the Northeast Ohio Amber Alert Plan from Waite Hill in suburban Cleveland, stresses in training classes for police that officers must verify a parent's claims about another parent before issuing an alert. The challenge is to get 200 police departments to follow the same guidelines.
Usually in law enforcement, officers err on the side of caution, he said, but that can't be done with Amber Alert.
"If you erred on the side of caution, this thing would be going off all the time," Stanko said.
No Amber Alert was issued the day Gina DeJesus, 14, of Cleveland, failed to return home from school in April 2004, because no one witnessed her abduction.
Gina is still missing. The lack of an Amber Alert angers her father, Felix DeJesus, who believes the public will listen even if the alerts become routine.
"The Amber Alert should work for any missing child," DeJesus said. "It doesn't have to be an abduction. Whether it's an abduction or a runaway, a child needs to be found. We need to change this law."
Cleveland police Lt. Thomas Stacho said the alerts must be reserved for cases where danger is imminent and the public can be of help in locating the suspect and child.
"You need credible, reliable and specific information, without that the Amber Alert would be reduced to a child on a milk carton," Stacho said.
Time is precious in child abduction cases. Statistics show the first three hours are the most critical to recovering the child alive, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
But law enforcement officials can't automatically issue an alert without an investigation, said Robert Hoever, deputy director of special operations at the center.
"It's a very, very difficult balancing act that these Amber coordinators face," he said. "Typically, across the country these Amber coordinators are put in a position where they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't."
As a former Amber coordinator in New Jersey, Hoever recalls the pressure to issue alerts from parents, including in cases where an investigation determined that no child was missing. He's also encountered people who tried to manipulate the system by falsely saying their ex-spouse took a child and was suicidal.
Children are found in most Amber Alert cases. Of 51 alerts issued in Ohio through May 2005, all but one child had been found. But alerts are credited with helping recover children in just 19 of the cases, records show.
Stanko, who advocates consistent use of the system, has helped start a review board to determine whether each alert issued by his nine-county region, one of 24 Amber plans statewide, met the criteria. He would like to see the rest of Ohio and Amber plans in other states do the same.
Of 16 alerts reviewed through Oct. 1, two failed to meet the criteria; a third alert was canceled minutes after it was issued because police realized there was no abduction.
"Even some of the ones that met the criteria were borderline," Stanko said.
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