AMBER Alert Partners With Facebook

wiredmikey writes "The AMBER Alert program, credited with the safe recovery of 525 children across the country, has a new ally today: Facebook. Facebook users are able to sign up to receive AMBER Alert bulletins for their state which will be sent to them through the Facebook 'News Feed' feature. An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing every year. AMBER Alert is a voluntary partnership involving law-enforcement agencies and broadcasters. The new Facebook AMBER Alert pages represent an important expansion of the secondary distribution system and will enable AMBER Alerts to dramatically increase the reach of and impact of these life-saving bulletins."

Comments

Re:Low success rate?

[orphiuchus]

Well, only about 30% of amber alerts are actually strangers, most are custody disputes, and according to wikipedia in 2004 there were only 233 alerts issued. I would write a bunch more stuff about this, but its all straight from wikipedia and you should all just read it yourselves anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#Retrieval_rate

Re:Low success rate?

[icebike]

800000 "children reported missing" includes anyone under the age of 18 who runs away. (This is about 1% of the Children in the US in the 0 thru 17 age group).

Amber Alerts are specifically for kidnapped or abducted children usually less than 16.

An Amber alert will not be issued for your 14 yro daughter when she runs off with that creep she met on line.

Its not the same thing.