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What, no Amber Alerts?
By Brett on Thu, 08/21/2008 - 4:09pm
Boy, 5, missing since Sunday.
Why no Amber alert? Well, for starters, the kid isn't a rich blond, blue eyed white girl.
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Comments
Your ignorance knows no bounds
Yet again you flaunt your ignorance of reality to passive-aggressively crap on law enforcement officials.
The first 3 criteria for an Amber Alert are:
# There is reasonable belief by law enforcement that an abduction has occurred.
# The law enforcement agency believes that the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death.
# There is enough descriptive information about the victim and the abduction for law enforcement to issue an AMBER Alert to assist in the recovery of the child.
Other than the kid not being returned to the mother, they have nothing to go on regarding it being an actual abduction. They have absolutely no evidence for imminence of bodily injury or death. Since they have no foundation for abduction, they certainly don't have descriptive information about the abduction itself (like getaway vehicle, etc). In fact, they are in contact with the father but he's just being completely useless in helping them by remaining silent.
The fourth criteria is that the kid is 17 years old or younger. That's the only one this case passes.
The Amber Alert system is for the recovery of a child abducted and at risk of harm based on the information available at the time of abduction. A kid ripped from the mother's hands and tossed into a waiting car, for example. So, your insinuation that police haven't started the Amber Alert system in this case simply because the kid isn't a "rich, blonde, blue-eyed, white girl" are completely unfounded and are demonstrably incorrect. This is another example of how your bias against law enforcement is downright offensive (and I'm not even a cop or related to any).
Your sarcasm meter still needs batteries
I was being sarcastic about law enforcement not issuing an Amber Alert because of race and cuteness.
However, I do firmly believe that in the media there is a definite bias, and the missing-kid organizations agree. It's not just white vs. non-white; it's class, cuteness, etc. They're the ones trying to get *all* abductions mentioned, and they're not stupid- they see a clear pattern in the interest level of media, and so do a lot of other people.
http://www.google.com/search?q=missing+white+woman...
http://crockerchronicle.blogspot.com/2008/08/media...
That's rather disingenuous;
That's rather disingenuous; most of them aren't. Amber alerts are for kidnapping- they already contacted the father, who isn't providing any information. Since they know where he is, what would they put in an Amber alert? No car, no kidnapper, no report of a kidnapping...
Brett, you need to deal with
Brett, you need to deal with your deeply ingrained racism.
Isn't a missing child enough to presume that he or she may have
been kidnapped? An "uncooperative father" means conculsively that the child is not in danger, or in a vehicle with somebody? I don't follow that logic.
However, I can't say that Brett's logic quite holds together completely either, as there was an amber alert for some non WASP-y children issued around the same time as the Rockefeller incident- the father (or mother-it's a little murky) had killed someone in Lynn and had fled to New York with his children and wife- there was definitely an Amber alert, and none of the children had blond hair and blue eyes.
Wrong way around
The logic isn't that it's proven the child is not in danger. Just the opposite, it's *not* proven that the child *is* in danger. The uncooperative father means they can't determine the child to be in imminent danger or in a vehicle heading somewhere. There's no evidence of imminent danger or an abduction in progress for them to start an alert.
What would they put on the traffic signs? "We don't know where this kid is, what you should be looking for, or even if the kid is still alive or not. Please be advised if you see any children to report them so we can investigate."
Amber alerts are based on being able to start people looking for a very specific description based on evidence in hand. They don't have that in this case. Hell, that evidence might develop tomorrow and THEN there'd probably be an alert started. But given what they can possibly know about this case, there's no reason to believe they should start an Amber alert.
Wasn't the original Amber white?
I don't know if she was rich, I don't think she was blond or blue-eyed, but crying racism in this case is a bit presumptious.
too many amber alerts
While I don't agree with Kaz hook, line, and sinker, he has a point. Kind of. The Amber Alert system is used all the time in MA, even when there's no apparent risk of harm to the kids. Based on the letter of the law, there shouldn't be an amber alert, but since it's used all the time for family abductions of white kids (or so it seems to me), it's worth asking why it's not being used here.
Can anyone read?
Kaz's 4:29pm comment explained it perfectly well. An Amber Alert is a narrowly-tailored alert designed to get specific descriptive information, usually if not always including vehicle information, in front of the public in a hurry. It is not merely another method for notifying the public that a child is missing.
Child missing notifications go out in the media and on milk cartons, among others.
I'm not saying there's no societal racism in the public's attention or lack of attention to certain crimes. I just don't see it here. And the absence of an Amber alert says only that the police didn't know what the public should be looking for.
BTW, from reading the papers, this may not be a kidnap case anyway.
Was July 30 really so long
Was July 30 really so long ago?
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/...
Posts like this spoil the site.
Spoil the website? Not so much.
Spoil the website? Not so much. It brings out the best and worst arguments. In this case we learned precisely the three criteria used to deterine if an amber alert is founded. That'll be our measuring stick next time.
In the case of Snooks Rockefeller Boss, authorities fudged the criteria - said she was in danger and qualified it by saying Clark had no history of using force - claiming she was in danger just to use the mechanism. New York State cops would NOT follow suit.
NY
I was led to believe that NY State cops would not follow suit with the Snooks amber alert because in NY they specifically do not issue amber alerts in cases involving parental abductions.
custodial kidnapping vs. child in danger?
NY assumes a parent wouldn't kidnap then harm his/her daughter.
Tenuous Assumption
That's a pretty tenuous assumption that custody abduction cases NEVER involve endangerment.
Not that "Snooks" was in danger, but there are other situations where it would be unwise to make this assumption - e.g. where the non-custodial parent kidnapper has a history of violence, violent crime, physical/sexual abuse, serious drug involvement, etc. or has threatened something nasty.
Biggest concern
The biggest concern for most of the agencies responsible for the alert system is false alarms. False alarms do a ton of damage to completely desensitize the public and destroy the wide-reaching dragnet effect that the system is put in place to create. Nearly all of the false positives come from custodial arguments because someone came to get their weekend with the kid and the other person didn't like their attitude and calls it in like the kid was "taken" from them in a "harmful" manner...and after some investigation it turns out everything is fine and the person was trying to abuse the system to strike back at their ex-partner.
This does not mean that all custodial arrangements are never cause for an alert. It usually means that a bigger burden is required to trigger the system.
just a few quick notes...
The father is charged with reckless endangerment of a child, meaning police believe the father somehow put the kid in some sort of danger. Now, whether or not the kid is still in danger, I don't know, (sounds like police think he's dead) but in my opinion, it at least fits that part of the criteria.
Description is there, but the abduction part, not so much. The father had custody/visitation rights.
does anyone remember Jesus De Le Cruz?
this was another young lynn boy that vanished in 1996. he had a very similar look to the child the is missing now,even the scar over his left eye.pretty weird. i wonder if the lynn cops have tried to look at these two cases to see if anything might be related.
http://www.nampn.org/cases/delacruz.html
I think alot of the cases
I think alot of the cases surrounding rich little blue eyes children are more sensational then those cases involving poor people of any race. Look at the absolute treasure throve we got out of our last blue eyed little white girl abduction, its still going strong, false names and the whole nine yards. Its not that amber alerts on poorer, darker people dont get put on these signs, rather its just not reported as widely because its not as interesting (which means less money from ads ect.) We have a problem with our news, its not racism, its sensationalism.
Rich white people seem to be really crazy and their lives somehow tend to be alot more complicated. Plus they always seem to kidnapping their kids.
Rich white people seem to be
Um, you pretty much had me right until here. Was this meant to be sarcastic?
And Kaz, you made a very good point vis-a-vis the "boy crying wolf"-type argument. Pretty soon, people are going to see/hear an Amber alert and think to themselves "ah, whatever. Probably just some kid wandered off from his Mom in the mall."
Reminds me of an Onion article from way back in the days, about a black delivery guy who was gunned down by a bunch of police for pulling out what the police thought was a gun. It was his wallet.
Um, you pretty much had me
Sarcasm mixed with a little bit of truth. Of course not all rich white people are crazy, but you have to admit rich people always have the craziest court cases. For a non white example look at OJ Simpson. If OJ didnt have tons of money I dont think things would have been half as interesting.
Well...
True enough. But via that response, couldn't you have just have said "rich people" instead of "rich white people?"
Really not a big deal, I just get tired of people bringing race into every issue, even though every now and then it's justified.
Understood, my use of the
Understood, my use of the moniker "white people" was in responce to many people claiming, and what was the overall feel of the original post, that rich white blue eyed girls dominated the amber alerts , alerts.