Popular social networking site Facebook has teamed up with The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Department of Justice to begin offering Amber alerts.
Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy communications at Facebook, says there will be a page for each state, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The announcement is planned today in Alexandria, Va.
“I think it’s really a logical and exciting use of the medium,” said Ernie Allen, president of the center for missing children.
“It’s one more avenue to reach the public and reach the younger generation,” added Laurie Robinson, assistant attorney general in the Office of Justice Programs for the Department of Justice and the national coordinator of the AMBER Alert program.
Facebook users will be able to opt-in to receive posts in their news feed when an AMBER Alert is issued in their area, Noyes says.
“It’s targeted geographically,” Allen stresses. “You’re not going to be inundated with them.”
The Dallas/Fort Worth Association of Radio Managers and local law enforcement created the first local AMBER Alert plan in 1997, according to the center for missing children. There are 120 AMBER Alert plans across the U.S. and others worldwide.
Each state or territory’s AMBER Alert coordinator initiates the alert through the Emergency Alert System, and then the center issues secondary alerts, such as messages on billboards, mobile phones and now, the new Facebook pages, Allen says.
From 2005 to 2009, 98.5% of the AMBER Alerts cases have been resolved, he says.
Facebook already has similar pages in four Canadian provinces, Noyes says.
The launch of the AMBER Alert pages comes at the 15th anniversary of the disappearance of the program’s 9-year-old namesake, Amber Hagerman, Allen said. Amber was kidnapped Jan. 13, 1996, in Arlington, Texas.
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