Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Amber Alerts

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Learn all about the saddest phone notification in today's episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For so many people living with an autoimmune condition like myasthenia gravis or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, the emotional toll can be as real as the physical symptoms. That's why in an all new season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenics, host Martine Hackett gets to the heart of the emotional journey for individuals living with these conditions. To find community and inspiration on your journey, listen now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave, which makes everything normal. That's right. Uh, Chuck. Yes? We're gonna do this like an old school stuff you should know episode.

Oh, I have a feeling I know what's coming. Have you ever gotten an amber alert? Yes, I have. There's nothing more sort of ear splitting and troublesome, immediately troublesome and upsetting, then getting that clack-sign, amber alert all of a sudden at your nightstand coming through your smartphone. Yeah, that's actually a little older than I thought. I think those started in 2012, wireless emergency alerts. Yeah.

And yes, you can turn them off, but if you turn them off, you are shedding a slight amount of your humanity perhaps, although there's a debate about whether they're being overused or not. But one of the wireless emergency alerts that you can get is an amber alert specifically. There's other ones we'll mention at the end of the episode, but the amber alert is like the OG, and it has a terrible tragic origin story to it. Amber actually is an acronym for America's Missing, colon of all things, Broadcast Emergency Response, Amber. But it's also the namesake of a girl, I think a nine-year-old, named Amber Hagerman, who lived in Arlington, Texas in 1996.

That's right. And we should probably tell you what an Amber Alert is before we get into that sad story, because if you're from abroad, you don't know that an Amber Warning is when a child has gone missing and they send out basically, we'll see it's operated by the state, but essentially almost always ends up being a nationwide alert sent to highway billboards that are digital, sometimes lottery signs that are digital and can be changed, your cell phone, on the television. And they just, they get it out in all these ways that, hey, we're issuing this now because, you know, usually

it's like this child is in this kind of car and on a highway, and if everyone keeps their eyes open, we may get lucky here if everyone really pays attention for the next few hours. That was a great definition of the amber alert. Yeah. I mean, I sort of went off on my own thing, but I think everyone knows that the likelihood of finding an abducted person or a missing person gets less and less as time goes on. So that first hour is just so critical even if they can get out a warning that says there's a Ford Taurus with this license plate and this kid is in it.

So keep your eyes peeled. Exactly. All right. Well, thanks for setting me up for telling the tragic story of Amber Hagerman, but I kind of have to now. Back in January of 1996, Amber, who was, like I said, a nine-year-old from Arlington, Texas, had gotten a bike for Christmas and was riding it around near her grandmother's house.

And there was an abandoned Winn-Dixie grocery store, the parking lot of which she was riding around, riding her bike around. And there was a local man, a 78-year-old man named Jimmy Keville, who was watching her ride her bike. And Jimmy Keville apparently is the lone witness to Amber's abduction. He said that a black pickup truck showed up,

and a white or Hispanic man in his 20s or 30s got out and took Amber forcibly with him. And there was a nationwide search for Amber. I'm not exactly sure what it was about that case that got everybody, but her disappearance launched a nationwide search pre-Amber alert. And tragically, I think three days later, a dog walker found her body in a creek. Because of the need it showed to coordinate, to get the word out, the Dallas, Fort Worth area

police department's law enforcement got together with the broadcasters from the area and said, hey, let's figure out a basic way to get the word out for abducted children like ASAP. Let's figure out a standardized way to do that. And they came up with the Amber Alert. I think within 10 months they had the system up and running.

Yeah, which is a great thing. Sadly, it is a case that remains unsolved, but let's take a break and we can get back and talk a little bit about the specifics of how they work right after this. Hey there. I'm Dr. Maya Shankar and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything. A moment that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I talk to people about navigating these very

moments. The last couple of years has been the hardest season of our marriage for sure. I'm surprised our marriage survived it. I think we both are. I think we both were barely holding on. Nothing compares to how hard this is. Their stories are full of candor, awe, and hard-won wisdom. And you'll hear from scientists who teach us how we can be more resilient in the face of change. True behavior change is really identity change. Every action you take is a vote for the

type of person you wish to become. Listen to a slight change of plans on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence. Radios were smashed, cassettes burned. You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules. And yet Afghans did it anyway. This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan

by creating their own version of American Idol. The danger they endured. They said my head should be cut off. The joy they brought to the nation. You're free completely. No one is there to destroy you I'm John legend listen to afghan star on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast All right.

So I mentioned that it was up to the state, which is true. Every state has their own criteria for issuing AMBER alerts and how it goes down. But the DOJ, the Department of Justice, did issue guidelines about recommendations that kind of break down into five categories for different reasons. The first one is law enforcement has a reasonable belief that a child was abducted. This one's pretty obvious on what that means. The second one is law enforcement believes the child will suffer serious bodily harm

or worse. And the reason they have these criteria is because there are missing children all the time and not all of them, in fact, very few of them get the actual amber alert. So this is to sort of qualify for that specific case. And the bodily harm one is the need for just a timely response if they have information where they believe, you know, and a lot of times it could be

like a relative that has them that's, you know, very upset or has made threats and things like that. Yeah, but I think the crux or the underlying gist of amber alerts is abduction by a stranger because that's the greatest danger typically that an abducted child can be in. There's also a standard that most states have adopted, 17 or younger, they're like, let's not put pronouncements on what's a child or not, we can all just basically agree anybody under 18 is a child, and if they meet this criteria

then we're gonna issue an AMBER alert. And then the last part is, and this is a step that not everybody takes, but it seems very critical, you want to take that information that you send out on the AMBER Alert and enter it in the National Crime Information Center system, flag it as a child abduction, and all of a sudden the AMBER Alert will go from a local

or a state or a regional thing all the way out to national. Like nationwide, law enforcement all around the country will have an alert that this kid has been abducted, so be on the lookout for him. But not all states have that as part of their criteria or contingency plan, which is surprising. Yeah, for sure. There was one we missed. The other criteria is there's enough detail about the appearance and the abduction of the child.

So they won't issue an Amber alert if it's just like, I don't know what my kid was wearing, I don't know where she last was, I really have no information. They have to have pretty concrete information about what the child was wearing at the time, what they looked like at the time, and where they might have been abducted. And especially if there's anything like, you know, it was a black pickup truck, or it was definitely my brother-in-law and this is his car and license plate number. And on the 17 and younger thing, because it's different states,

some states may have a guideline that it's, let's say 15, but they agree to honor the rule of the state that the abduction took place in. Yeah, if the Amber Alert makes it across state lines. Yeah. So there's, I said that some people are critical of not necessarily amber alerts, but just alerts in general.

Because if you're woken up at 3 a.m., whether it's an amber alert, a silver alert, which is used to alert people of a missing person with like dementia or Alzheimer's. Purple alert is one for an adult with cognitive impairment who's gone missing. It's all the same to you. So there's a part of issuing amber alerts.

And one of the reasons why the criteria is so strict is you don't wanna get people used to those alerts. You want it to be a big deal when your phone goes off with an amber alert at three in the morning that everybody takes the time to wake up and look. That's that's crucial. It's a crucial part of it, because if everybody becomes desensitized to it, that's a problem. On the other hand, there are people who are like, there's a lot of people who need to have their, the fact that they're missing be alerted out to everybody

that just don't meet the criteria of the Amber Alert. And so there's other kinds of alerts. Someone's Everbridge Alert, which is it's cases where children have been targeted or abducted or gone missing, but they don't meet the criteria of the Amber Alert. Like say you know for a fact the child was abducted and that they're probably in danger,

but you don't have, like you said, the description of what they were wearing or what kind of car they were forced into. You might not issue an Amber Alert. And in fact, in 2020, there were 365,000 entries that year in the National Crime Information Center system for missing kids, but 200 of them met the criteria for Amber Alerts to be issued.

So there's a weird balancing act that you have to go through that I don't think anybody's figured out yet, but that's why that criteria is supposed to be so rigidly adhered to. Yeah, and from what I've read, it's not like there's any, it's just about the alert, not like necessarily how hard the cops may be working

to try and find this missing kid. It's just a very specific criteria because I think when it meets that criteria, that means there's a decent likelihood that if you act fast in the next few hours, like I said at the very beginning, then somebody might see something that could really help because we have all this information. I feel like most of the ones I've seen have been family members, which is interesting. I had no idea that it was supposedly for stranger abduction, but

they've done a lot of good work from 1996 to 2023. AMBER, specifically AMBER Alerts have contributed to the recovery of 1,186 children, and then other wireless emergency alerts rescued 165. And, you know, over that, that may not seem like a high number over that period of time, but if it's literally the success of a single signal being sent out finding 1,186 children, that's amazing. Yeah, one of the stories I've seen bandied about by pro-AMBER Alert people,

just basically everybody, that there was like a kid who had an AMBER Alert issued and was recovered within like less than 30 minutes because of the AMBER Alert. So it definitely does work. I mean, if they're only issuing 200 a year, and in seven years, they manage to recover almost 1,200 or 1,300 children, that's a pretty good track record, really. Yeah, for sure. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

Keep that alert on. It's distressing, but, and if you're, you know, if you're on the road at the time and you see something like that, like, do your part. That's what they're looking for, is people to really keep their eyes peeled and be vigilant. Yeah, and if you're, you know, if you're on the road at the time and you see something like that, like, do your part. That's what they're looking for is people to really keep their eyes peeled and be vigilant. Yeah.

And if you're a state legislator, maybe take the time to really sit there and see if your state has too many or is issuing too many of these things and is in danger of desensitizing the public because you do not want to do that. And of course, since I just spoke directly to state legislators, that means short stuff is apt. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.