It’s midnight, and suddenly your cellphone starts to quake violently. Its shrill tone sounds like a foghorn blaring into the night, as ominous as the message it carries: five hundred miles away, a child’s been abducted.
If you live in Texas, Amber Alerts can feel like a fairly common occurrence. Relative to the rest of the country, they are: Texas issues the most alerts of any state. Last year, a total of 181 alerts were broadcast across the United States, and Texas accounted for 17 percent of them, or 31 alerts. Yet only a tiny fraction of the children reported missing actually receive an Amber Alert, since the system is reserved for only the most serious cases of child abduction; 34,828 missing-child reports were filed in Texas just last year.
John Bischoff, the vice president of the Missing Children Division at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit that functions as a nationwide clearinghouse to assist in locating missing children, doesn’t see Texas’s high number of Amber Alerts as a problem. “I see high numbers as a sign of good reporting,” Bischoff said. Bischoff and the Department of Justice maintain that the Amber Alert system has been a real boon in recovering missing and abducted children. According to Bischoff, 3,540 Amber Alerts have been sent out nationwide since 2005, and 1,140 missing children were recovered as a result; 136 of those were specifically recovered because of the wireless emergency alert (the one that...
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