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Amber Alert History

Amber Alert's History and the Role of the Media

Amber Alerts Recover Missing Kids With Help From the Media

The AMBER Alert Program (America's Missing Broadcast Emergency Response), named for 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in 1996 in Arlington, TX, is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies and local networks to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious missing kids or child-abduction cases.
 
Amber Alert's history was kick-started in January 1996 when citizens of Hagerman’s community learned that local law enforcement had information that might have helped locate her shortly after she was abducted, but had no means to distribute this information.
 
The first Amber Alert plan was focused entirely on radio media and used for stranger abductions where, during an alert, the police were instructed to fax the information to two primary radio stations. Those two primary contacts would in turn verify the receipt and accuracy of the fax and then alert other participating radio stations through subsequent fax transmissions.
 
Moving towards a quicker more effective alert plan, the first automated implementation of the Amber Alert was created by the Child Alert Foundation in 1998. This non-profit charity created a fully automated Alert Notification System (ANS) to notify surrounding communities when a kid was reported missing or abducted. Amber Alerts were sent to a variety of media, including radio stations, television stations, surrounding law enforcement agencies, newspapers and local support organizations. These alerts were sent all at once via pagers, faxes, emails, and cell phones with the information immediately posted on the Internet for the general public to view.
 
Following the automation of the Amber Alert with ANS technology, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2002 expanded its role to promote the Amber Alert and has worked persistently to see alerts distributed using the nation's existing emergency radio and TV response network.