Driving back to Houston from Dallas, highway bulletins were flashing yet again with a new Amber Alert, this time for a missing 3-year-old boy.
Texas authorities issued the alert Oct. 16 after Mitchell Romero was reportedly abducted by his father in Denver City. Romero’s mother was found murdered at her home.
According to police, the father, Mario Romero, is their main suspect. Although the boy is yet to be found, the police deactivated the Amber Alert on Oct. 20, treating the boy as a missing person.
‘The search has not been dropped for the child. We need to do something different; the Amber Alert is not being effective anymore,’ Department of Public Safety representative John Gonzalez said.
So why isn’t the alert effective anymore?
The U.S. Department of Justice imposes certain criteria for an alert to be activated. Apart from the child being less than 17 years of age, there must be sufficient evidence suggesting an abduction, as well as information about the captor, the captor’s vehicle and a risk of injury to issue an alert.
Most people agree the Amber Alert can be effective in finding missing children; thus the debate turns to whether the criteria to activate an alert are too strict.
Marc Klaas, a child-safety advocate, criticized the fact that the criteria necessary to activate an alert include the suspect’s vehicle type and evidence of abduction.
Digging through reports of missing children in Texas, patterns of flaws and neglect can be found. One eye-opener, unfortunately, is that Texas is faced with a striking number of missing children each year.
Of the 800,000 missing children listed nationwide in 2008, approximately 5,000 were from Texas.
The Texas branch of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lacks a mechanism toward missing child prevention, search and identification.
An Amber Alert, or America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, is a highway bulletin alert issued for abducted children. It was originally named after Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old abduction victim, who was murdered in Arlington in 1996.
Even though the alert is free, it is not without flaws. Of all the requests to the Department of Public Safety for Amber Alerts, only about 18 percent are activated.
For Texas to improve on this number and better protect its children, the system has to change.
Bissan Rafe is a biology senior and may be reached at [email protected]
