Is the AMBER Alert System effective?
The AMBER Alert System is effective but it could be much more effective because the system that’s been created, the so called national system that’s been created has been created upon bureaucracy. What they’ve done is they’ve encompassed each alert within a state and created an AMBER alert coordinator that has to greenlight any kind of an AMBER alert, which I find odd, because it was conceived as local law enforcement, local media, and local public but now we have to go through various bureaucrats within a state in order to activate or authorize an AMBER alert. So if, in fact, a child is kidnapped in front of witnesses and one has trouble locating the AMBER alert coordinator, oftentimes many hours can go by before the information is imparted to the public. Since it’s a state based system that operates under letters of authorization between various states, it’s illegal to activate an AMBER alert in an adjoining state without going through that whole process with that state’s AMBER alert
