Careful with that alarm

Earlier this week, we hosted a training session for A Child is Missing, a non-profit organization that essentially provides automated calling services to police departments at no cost--outbound phone calls with automated alerts to certain geographic areas, such as zip codes or area codes. The basic application is for certain high-risk missing children and adults, but the organization can also send alerts to calls lists that are custom-created by a police department, such as emergency call-out lists. This same functionality has been available on the market for several years, but the key difference is that this service is offered without cost to police agencies.

Outbound automated phone calls do not take the place of the Amber Alert system, designed to get information out very quickly to the general public in the event of an apparent child kidnapping when there is a description sufficient to suggest that the public can help.

We're reasonably interested in the more targeted direct phone capabilities of achildismissing.org, and those who attended the training session were impressed. An article in the Lincoln Journal Star spurred both some comments on their site, and some direct emails to me, suggesting that this kind of notification be expanded from just missing persons to include serious crimes that have just occurred.

I don't think these well-meaning comments advocating breaking into TV programming every time a crime occurs or a child is reported missing in Lincoln have any idea how often this happens. As I told one correspondent, we've investigated 1,800 missing persons on the nose so far this year, 1,354 of whom were children. That's just our little police department, and that's not to mention the 133 robberies, 785 assaults, and so forth. If everyone of those missing children resulted in an alert of some sort, it would be the equivalent of the tornado siren sounding every time a cloud rolled through the sky. People would simply ignore it in short order, not the mention the fact that the media outlets are just not going to break into broadcasts a couple thousand times a year.

Right now, when we have a particularly high risk case--a very young child missing, an adult with dementia who has walked away from a care facility, suspicious circumstances suggesting foul play, we get that information to the local media quickly, and they are very good about including this in their news casts. Automated direct calling might further help spreading the word in such cases. This is a powerful capability, but it needs to be used judiciously, in those cases where foul play or grave imminent harm appears to be involved, and when immediate direct notification to phone subscribers in a targeted area would be most likely to yield results.