The abduction and suspected murder of 8 year-old Woodstock (Ontario) resident Victoria (Tori) Stafford has reignited the debate over whether restrictions should be loosened on the use of Amber Alerts. Tori was last seen on April 8, 2009, walking away from her school with an unidentified woman. An extensive police search and persistent media attention turned up little evidence and suspicion quickly fell on the mother. These suspicions were eventually disproved as 28 year old Michael Rafferty and 18 year old Terri-Lynne McClintic, also residents of Woodstock, were eventually charged with Tori’s abduction and murder.
Woodstock police came under heavy fire for not issuing an Amber Alert. Officially an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, The Amber Alert is a child abduction bulletin board system used by police across the United States and Canada. Once the criteria (which vary between states and provinces) have been met, an alert for a suspected abduction can be issued to commercial radio stations, television stations and LED billboards. Email and wireless Amber alerts have also become common. According to its website, the Amber Plan has led to 443 successful recoveries, each involving one or more children. Woodstock police explained that an Amber Alert was not originally issued for Tori Stafford’s disappearance because the case did not meet OPP criteria – specifically, there was no description for a suspect or vehicle.
Following the arrest of Raffery and McClintic, an online petition was launched urging changes to the Amber Alert System. “Tori’s Law” (boasting over 50,000 signatures as or writing) proposes that an Amber Alert should be issued for any person under 16 if a parent deems a child’s absence to be out of character relative to their daily routine. Police would no longer require a description of the suspect or the vehicle. The petition rationalizes that had an Amber alert been issued shortly after Stafford’s disappearance, a passerby may have noticed the blue Honda civic that was caught on tape mere minutes after the abduction and in turn alerted police – possibly preventing Tori’s assumed murder.
Indeed, Tori’s case has similarities to the abduction and murder from which the Amber Alert was born. Nine year old Amber Hagerman was abducted while riding her bike near her grandparents’ Texas home and murdered. While the killer was never found, an autopsy on Hagerman’s body determined she had been alive for two days. Had an emergency alert system been in place at the time of the abduction, there may have been ample opportunity for a member of the public to spot the suspect or the getaway vehicle (both known via eyewitness accounts) before Amber’s murder. Loosening the criteria for issuing an Amber Alert could also aid the helplessness parents feel during the first hours of abduction.
However, some serious doubts have also been raised concerning the effectiveness of an extended Amber Alert system. If Tori’s Law were to be enacted in its proposed form, parents could have a no-questions Amber alert issued every time their children missed a commuter train or visited a forbidden boyfriend/girlfriend. The public could soon become fatigued by the paranoia resulting from over-saturation of Amber alerts – many of which will amount to little more than over-protective parents. Police resources would be similarly stretched, taking away attention from actual emergencies.
The Amber Alert Plan in its present form has also been criticized as ineffective. A team at the University of Nevada conducted a study on hundreds of American Amber alert cases between 2003 and 2006. The study determined that Amber Alerts played little to no role in the eventual return of abducted children:
- Of cases where the child was returned safely, only 13.8% were directly attributable to tips obtained via the Amber emergency alert system.
- Only 10.5% of the cases involved rescue from clearly dangerous situations
Furthermore, the alerts were rarely issued for the nightmare scenarios characterized by the Tori Stafford case:
- Only 30% of the amber alerts covered cases where a child was abducted by a stranger. 20% of the cases involved runaways, lost children or hoaxes, while the remaining half of cases resulted from abduction from a parent or other family member
- 45% of the abductions were committed by a parent
Finally, Amber Alerts were shown to do very little to prevent nightmare scenarios from ending negatively:
- Based on earlier data, the average child that is kidnapped and murdered dies within 3 hours. In U. Nevada’s study, only 36.7% of Amber alerts were issued within 3 hours of the actual abduction.
- Merely 16% of victims were recovered within double of the target duration (i.e. 6 hours).
Despite the damning evidence presented in this study, parental fears of child abduction will persist and cases like Tori Stafford’s –however rare and unpreventable- will continue to provoke public outrage. The worst outcome would be that the public no longer feels safe and resorts to vigilantism, which could lead be many innocent people being tried and convicted in the court of public fear. Due to this risk, the legal system must continue to develop measures that reduce the number of abductions and more importantly increase public confidence that the system is working for the most helpless among us.
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This is a common dilemma on the subject of “missing children.” It turns out a large proportion of them are abducted not by strangers and/or sexual offenders but by non-custodial parents. On the other hand a minority are indeed kidnapped by individuals who would indeed harm them. So should we issue Amber Alerts for every missing child in case they are truly in the danger Victoria Stafford was, or would it be like crying wolf (and making the public less likely to pay any attention to such alerts)? Therein lies the problem…