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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off."

To be honest I wonder if the people in charge were starting to get a kick at waking up so many people, or if they were engaging in some sort of malicious compliance, e.g., maybe the people responsible for sending the alerts out are also pretty pissed off at being woken up to send them out. The stated reason for them existing leaves no room for there to be any reason to be sending these out at 3am, if neither the abductee nor the putative abductor were known to be nocturnal.

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> To be honest I wonder if the people in charge were starting to get a kick at waking up so many people, or if they were engaging in some sort of malicious compliance

I doubt it. The messages were just incremental additions of information as it was added: First message had something about the area. Second message had the color of the vehicle. Third one added another detail or a correction or something, I can’t remember.

I just remember that everyone in my local office was visibly tired the next day and we all shared the information to turn the alerts off.

I suspect it's all automated, and since the vast majority are custody issues, there's probably something like "you were supposed to hand over your daughter by 10 PM, but we don't count it as late until after midnight, and THEN your ex-wife has to call and complain, and by the time it's in the system it's 3 AM, and the system automatically sends the alert".

And then they don't even send another alert saying she was found safe and sound sleeping at her dad's house.

There is nothing automated about originating those alerts. The actual procedure for transmitting the alert is manual. The incident has to meet state criteria including likelihood of harm to the child, criminal activity, information about the vehicle and other facts.

A missing child in a custody dispute alone is rarely enough to trigger an alert.

One of the leading types of child abductions leading to alerts is vehicle theft with a child in the vehicle. Not a custody dispute.

> One of the leading types of child abductions leading to alerts is vehicle theft with a child in the vehicle. Not a custody dispute.

"The vast majority of child abductions are carried out by a relative or close acquaintance of the victim, often a divorced parent who was not granted custody... about 20 percent involved a kidnapping by a stranger or slight acquaintance of the child. In the other 80 percent of cases, the youngsters were taken by a relative (most often a parent) or an acquaintance (frequently a babysitter)."

source: https://psmag.com/social-justice/amber-alerts-largely-ineffe...

Are there any stats available about the breakdown for the subset that get amber alerts?

Sorry, my fault for combining sentences! it was 80% of the amber alerts they studied.

"Presumably because of that need "to make an intuitive, rapid decision," as Griffin puts it, AMBER Alerts often turn out to be false alarms. Of the alerts the UNR team tracked, about 20 percent involved a kidnapping by a stranger or slight acquaintance of the child.

In the other 80 percent of cases, the youngsters were taken by a relative (most often a parent) or an acquaintance (frequently a babysitter). While such incidents can be traumatic to both the child and the custodial parent, they are routinely resolved peacefully."

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