Florida's Amber Alert Turns 12 Years Old
By: Stephen Crews
Updated: August 31, 2012
This year is the 12th anniversary of the inception of Florida's AMBER Alert Plan which gets the word out statewide when
a child is abducted.
The
plan was praised for its success by Florida Department of Law
Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey. "AMBER Alerts
save lives by putting information into the hands of Florida citizens. We
all should sign up for AMBER Alerts," said Bailey. "It's free and you
could be the one to provide critical information to law enforcement when
a child goes missing."
Of the 170 AMBER Alerts issued since the program began, 160 have been safely resolved, with 56 children recovered as a
direct result of the AMBER Alert.
FDLE,
in conjunction with the Division of Emergency Management and the
Florida Association of Broadcasters, Inc., established
the Florida AMBER Plan in 2000. Florida was the second state in the
nation to take the partnership for AMBER Alerts statewide. Since that
time, the plan has expanded to include billboards, dynamic highway
message signs, lottery machines and social media.
The first success of the AMBER Alert Plan came in December 2000, when a 10-year-old girl went missing in Melbourne. The
child, who was visiting from another country, was located by a citizen who heard the AMBER Alert broadcast over the radio.
In
2003, the Missing Child Alert was established as a complement to the
AMBER Alert as a standardized method to request
public assistance when a child is missing and that child's life is
believed to be endangered, but there is no indication of abduction.
Each
year, approximately 40,000 children are reported missing in Florida,
with the majority of those being reported as
runaways. The FDLE Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse
has issued five AMBER Alerts and 20 Missing Child Alerts so far this
year.
More than 20,000 citizens have signed up at www.missingchildrenalert.com
to receive Florida AMBER Alerts via email. FDLE encourages citizens to
sign up to receive these free alerts to help law enforcement quickly
recover children when they go missing.
For more information about Florida's AMBER Alert and to view unresolved alerts, visit our website at www.fdle.state.fl.us.
For back to school and cyber safety tips, visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/FDLEpage
and get more safety tips at http://www.secureflorida.org/
