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What is an "amber alert"? I've never encountered this before, and I don't see any option for it on my phone. I'm an Android user in the UK, if that helps.
It's when you destroy the attention span of anyone within driving distance of a custodial dispute. There's also silver alerts, where you do the same for a missing old person.
A plausible thing to say, but do you have any numbers to back this up?
It's probably just lazy development and testing practices. Maybe you could tweak something here?: https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/maste... (although it looks like there's some code that already intends to do this function)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.
> Why are they useless? I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state. I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night,…
Isn't part of the issue that when a child is taken, the assumption is that the kidnapper will immediately flee the area? I think hundreds, plural, might be excessive, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to notify people within a certain distance based on high speed and how much time has passed; maybe 50-100 miles?
I can see getting annoyed at multiple messages, but it's also important to remember that working with time sensitive emergency services is a extraordinarily difficult thing. It's like, everything is important all at once, and your mind can only process it all so fast. It's extremely time sensitive, and if you mess up any of the details, you are directly delaying the proceedings.
I haven't had to issue anything like an Amber Alert, thank God, but I did have to relay some information from a victims family to a supporting organization, and basically screwed it up the first time around. I ended up having to end the call with the family, call the organization to see what they needed, call the family back, then call them again with the relevant details. It was an incredibly brutal thing. You can feel the rawness of the emotion through the phone for the people. In my own experience, like, I could hear people crying and screaming in the background. It's this insanely personal moment for them, but you kind of have to force your way in the middle of it to make something happen. The person who I started off with had to hand the phone over because they thought they were about to pass out. It's really a very difficult to communicate in the midst of a crisis.
Anyway, I'm not sure which area you're in, but from my own experience, the very few times I've gotten one, it was always very succinct and clear. Child's name, description of their clothes, make/model/license plate of car, which direction they were headed, and when it happened.
I certainly don't blame you for turning off the alerts, or for being annoyed at the emergency services. The point wasn't to finger wag or whatever, it was just to say that it's extremely difficult to do, let alone do well.
What is an "amber alert"? I've never encountered this before, and I don't see any option for it on my phone. I'm an Android user in the UK, if that helps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are they useless? I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state. I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night,…
"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. Th…
And then they don't even send another alert saying she was found safe and sound sleeping at her dad's house.
> An Amber Alert (or child abduction emergency alert) is a message distributed by a child abduction alert system to ask the public for help in finding abducted children. The system originated in the United States. [1]
Alerts are distributed via "pagers, faxes, emails, and cell phones with the information immediately posted on the Internet for the general public to view" and have the aim of "ask(ing) the public for help in finding abducted children".
A report indicates around 200 Amber Alerts are issued per year in the US: https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/amb...
What is an "amber alert"? I've never encountered this before, and I don't see any option for it on my phone. I'm an Android user in the UK, if that helps.
It's a US-specific system for alerting people to missing children. It's named after Amber Hagerman⁰, a 9-year-old who was abducted and murdered in the '90s. On smartphones they can appear as (very loud) notifications with details about the missing child, potential abductors, vehicle, etc. You'll also see the same info on electronic message boards along the motorway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_alert#Names…
What is an "amber alert"? I've never encountered this before, and I don't see any option for it on my phone. I'm an Android user in the UK, if that helps.
It's a US-specific system for alerting people to missing children. It's named after Amber Hagerman⁰, a 9-year-old who was abducted and murdered in the '90s. On smartphones they can appear as (very loud) notifications with details about the missing child, potential abductors, vehicle, etc. You'll also see the same info on electronic message boards along the motorway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_alert#Names…