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The child has been missing now for 24 hours - the time taken for the parent to notice they didn't come home from school, call the school, let the school search and check their records, call the police, have the police send an officer over to collect full details, organise a local search, and finally conclude that the child should be declared potentially abducted and an amber alert issued.

First of all, Amber alerts (the ones in California) are not used for parental abduction unless the kid's life is really in danger. Otherwise, we would be inundated with such alerts. https://www.amberalert.gov/gui...

Also, an amber alert would never be issued for the details you mentioned. Your example doesn't contain nearly enough actionable information. For an Amber alert to be issued, the kid would need to be in immediate danger. Either, it's a 5-year-old kid that was seen walking out at night during freezing weather, or it's a kid that was seen abducted by someone in a car and the plate number was written down or captured by video.

In other words, an amber alert is just a text alert. It's very limited in the kind of information it can convey and it has to be sent out almost immediately after an event occured. And the authorities are not going to send out generic physical descriptions, because probably, they do not want private citizens to take it upon themselves to set up roadblocks and ask passers-by to open the trunk of their car.

Amber Alert is still up and has been since the first reports of it being down went online.

Incidentally, since when does the internet suddenly support the nation wide manhunt program being operational?

The Amber alert is so-named because that's who it's for finding, little white girls who could be named Amber.

Where in holy hell do you go to get a list of Amber alerts anyway? You sure can't go to Amberalert.gov, they don't have any useful information there. You can get press releases there, but not amber alerts. Your tax dollars at rest! Oh wait, on the site index, I found a link to missingkids.com. Wait, that's just another informational page on amber alerts! If this program's goal were to find missing kids then the whole front page of amberalert.gov would be [the] current amber alert[s]. It isn't. It's to give the appearance of giving a shit. (Holy shit, the front page of missingkids.com has no missing kids on it, either.)

Amber alerts are bullshit from bullshit people.

Say what? Where are you getting those numbers? In all of 2011, there were a total of 158 amber alerts issued in the entire US. Of those alerts, 144 resulted in a successful recovery. 28 of the recoveries were a direct result of the alert

Not only was it stupid to send this alert to everyone's phones, it was yet another example of Amber Alert scope creep.

Amber Alerts are meant to be restricted to cases where "the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death."

This was just another case of a non-custodial parent running off with the kid. The child was not in any imminent danger. She lost custody because of violence in her home (none of which was ever directed at the child).

Interestingly, the statistics don't bear you out.

In 2010, there were 173 Amber Alerts nationwide. 80 alerts--46%--were for "Family Abductions," where the initial suspect was related by blood or marriage whereas 74 alerts--43%--were for "Non-Family Abductions." So they run about even.

That said, 12 of those Amber Alerts were determined to be hoaxes and 10 of those were determined to be "unfounded" (as in the child was never really missing).

Statistics found here: http://www.amberalert.gov/pdfs/10_amber_report.pdf

Have a look at http://www.amberalert.gov/pdfs/09_amber_report.pdf - it has all kinds of statistics. For instance, in 2009 there were 207 Amber Alerts issued. There were 166 recoveries in those cases. Of those, 45 were counted as 'success stories' directly attributable to the alert. 16 recoveries were because an individual or law enforcement recognized the vehicle from the alert. 12 were because the abductor heard the alert and released the child. 6 were because an individual knew the whereabouts of the abductor and called authorities, etc.

According to http://www.amberalert.gov/pdfs/09_amber_report.pdf there were 207 Amber alerts issued in 2009. 166 of those resulted in a recovery. 45 of the recoveries were a direct result of the alert (someone saw the alert and called it in).

If you can get by the terrible 3-D excel charts, the numbers are moderately interesting. 72% of the issued amber alerts in 2009 were for parental abductions (Table 9, pg 20), so your conclusion is wrong. See also table 15, pg 29.

http://www.amberalert.gov/pdfs/09_amber_report.pdf

A system is already in place for missing persons. It's called Amber Alert.

http://www.amberalert.gov/faqs.htm

At a Radio Shack yesterday I saw they had signs up offering people the ability to sign up to receive AMBER Alerts (a.k.a. Levi's Call, Maile Amber Alert, and Morgan Nick Amber Alert) on their cell phones.

It's here already.

They have never helped the authorities save a person.

I'm no Amber Alert cheerleader, but Amber Alerts have helped to save people.

Here are some success stories:
http://www.amberalert.gov/toolkit_stories.html/
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/Pag eServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=991/

More can be found with a Google search of "Amber Alert" success.