15 years later, Amber Alert effectiveness debated

January 17, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Dallas Morning News

DALLAS

Fifteen years ago, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted as she rode her bicycle in the parking lot of an abandoned east Arlington grocery store. She was murdered.

Police say they are no closer to making an arrest than they were in 1996, but Amber’s legacy survives in the Amber Alert system operating in some form in 50 states and several foreign countries.

The notification system has been credited with saving 500 abducted or missing children since its inception and is widely praised by experts as an essential tool for quickly moving to rescue endangered children.

But some critics say the system isn’t nearly as prolific at saving the lives of children who are in real danger — primarily youngsters abducted by homicidal sexual predators who don’t know their victims — as its supporters claim.

“It’s not that the Amber Alert is bad; it’s just not as good as people think,” said Dr. Jack Levin, professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston.

Levin said there “might be a hundred cases a year where a child is actually abducted by a stranger, sexually abused and then killed. So you’re not going to see too many success stories. But even where there are apparent successes, and the Amber Alert is used, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the Amber Alert that caused the child to be returned home.”

That doesn’t matter to supporters who say that even if one life is saved, the system works.

Amber was snatched Jan. 13, 1996, as she and her younger brother rode their bicycles in a grocery-store parking lot. A witness — the only one ever to step forward — told police he saw a man in a black truck grab Amber from her bike, throw her into his truck and drive away.

A man walking his dog discovered Amber’s body four days later in a drainage ditch. Her throat had been cut, but police have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.

In the months after the horrific crime, radio and law-enforcement officials worked tirelessly with the girl’s family to create her lasting legacy: AMBER is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.

Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said more than 500 children have been recovered as a direct result of the Amber Alert.

Levin is not alone when he notes that the system and those it saves are but a drop in the bucket, and since most child abductions are domestic, most end with the child unharmed.

The result, said Dr. Timothy Griffin, a University of Nevada-Reno criminal justice professor who has done extensive research on the effectiveness of the Amber Alert, is little more than “crime-control theater” because the alerts create the false illusion of being helpful in the most egregious of child-abduction cases.