A bizarre and interesting insight into contemporary American culture

Sandy Levinson

I strongly recommend an article  in the NYTimes on an "Amber Alert" that apparently work up thousands of New Yorkers at 3:51 AM.   Among other things revealed in the article is that cell phones sold in the past couple of years are automatically configured to receive such alerts (though, apparently, there's a way to disable that feature).  But what's really interesting are the "comments" following the article.  I am struck by the number of people who insist that waking up thousands of people in the middle of the night is a small price to pay for getting the word out that there's a child in distress.  They condemn as "heartless" and "selfish" the (altogether reasonable) response that, as a practical matter, there is absolutely nothing that anyone can really do and it can be very disruptive to be awakened in the middle of the night.  There are comments about what such a response says about American society..... 

So let me suggest the following perhaps bizarre hypothetical:  Imagine a George Zimmerman type who has become hyper-concerned about child-snatching and responds to every Amber Alert (with whatever consequences one wishes to imagine).  Why isn't it sufficient to rely on presumptively trained and capable police forces in such situations?  Is there evidence that alerts "work"?  Are there no costs beyond interrupted radio programs and cell phone texts or rings?   And is there any particularly good reason to  focus obsessively on children who are, as in the present instance, snatched by non-custodial parents, as against the millions of other children who, as in Texas, are increasingly being deprived of basic access to health care or access to information that Planned Parenthood could provide about preventing teen-age pregnancies, etc?   Don't get me wrong:  If one of my grandchildren were kidnapped, I'm sure I'd want everyone in the country to be informed and the perpetrator, if caught without the child, tortured until he/she gave the police relevant information about the location of my grandchild.  But is this a sound way of making public policy, whether we're talking about phones going off in the middle of the night or deciding whether to adopt torture as a public policy? 

UPDATE:  According to the Times, the young boy was in fact found.  "And, the police later said, [the Amber alert] directly led to the child’s being located....  The police said she [I.e., the abducting mother who had taken the child from a foster-care facility] was found after the Amber Alert led to a tip to the department’s Crime Stoppers hot line."  So the question is this:  Does this presumably happy ending lead one to say that the disruptions caused by the 3:51 AM alert were in fact justifiable, or is this like assessing the validity of a warrantless search by pointing to the fact that it actually found relevant evidence? 
Posted 12:41 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]