Research reveals Amber Alerts are mostly ineffective

quote:

---

ResearchGate: How do you view the success of AMBER Alert since its inception in 1996?

Timothy Griffin: AMBER Alerts do certainly, in a sense, work. A minority of them assist in the recovery of abducted children. My latest dataset isn’t complete yet, but the success rate among all Alerts issued, as my colleagues and I measure it, will be, I estimate, around 20 percent.

There is always an element of uncertainty, of course, because it is impossible to know what “would have” happened in any given AMBER Alert case, had no Alert been issued. However, in my reading of the data, the number of children whose lives have been saved by AMBER Alert ranges from zero to something very close to zero.

RG: How did you reach this conclusion and what patterns emerged?

Griffin: I’ve personally examined media accounts of roughly 1,500 to 1,800 AMBER Alert cases and a number of patterns emerge:

These cases do not appear to typically involve apparently life-threatening abductors. Rather, they are far more often deployed in familial/custodial disputes and other cases not suggestive of life-threatening peril to the abducted child(ren).

Second, AMBER Alerts are most likely to end in a safe recovery when the abductor is related to the child(ren) and not likely to cause them harm.

RG: Doesn’t every child saved make the system worthwhile?

Griffin: In my reading of the data, there is very little evidence that AMBER Alerts have “life-saving” effects. The distinction between an AMBER Alert that assisted in recovering an abducted child or children, and an AMBER Alert that assisted in recovering a child/children from life-threatening circumstances, must be clear in the minds of those evaluating the system.

The vague and unprovable aphorism that the system is “worth it if it saves just one life” raises a number of questions, which my colleagues and I have explored in our research.

Normal police investigation resolves the overwhelming majority of child abduction cases. Anything—including an AMBER Alert and the flurry of subsequent calls made by the public — which could inhibit that investigative process needs to be evaluated objectively, based on evidence. Also, we need to verify that publicly disseminating the progress of a missing person search does not potentially assist the abductor, or even push them over the edge.

---