Today marks day four of the search for missing Iowa girls Lyric Cook Morrissey and Elizabeth Collins. The cousins, ages 10 and 8, were supposed to be on a bike ride when they went missing on Friday, and no one has seen them since. So why hasn't an Amber Alert been issued?
Well, because their case doesn't fit the "profile." Cops in Evansdale, Iowa say they don't have a car or person associated with Lyric and Elizabeth's disappearance. So they can't put their information out in the form of an Amber Alert.
Basically that means police are working with very little information in a search that's brought out almost 1,000 volunteers to help the family of these little girls get them back. Wouldn't you think they'd want more info? The kind you'd get from, say, an alert that goes out to thousands upon thousands of people?
I'm not in law enforcement. I don't know why it's built this way. But I will say this is what makes the Amber Alert system so confusing to me.
The Department of Justice has worked long and hard to make us aware that it works and convince Americans to pay attention. They now have an enormous reach, from apps that help reach out to wireless users to traffic signs.
Amber Alert has become, for all intents and purposes, synonymous with missing children ... to the point where I know more than one person who checks the site each time they see a "missing kid" warning come across Facebook to fact check before they pass it along. It's like the Snopes of the missing kid world.
So why don't they use it more?
If you go to the Amber Alert website today and click on the link for "active" alerts, it says there are none. The girls are listed on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children site (which also hosts Amber Alerts). That's a wonderful and helpful thing, and I don't mean to denigrate the work they do.
But if you're using the site to fact check the missing report to help some kids, you're going to be steered wrong. And if you depend on Amber Alerts to alert you so you can help some kids, well, you won't be able to do a thing for Lyric or Elizabeth.
As a parent and an American both, I'm glad we have this system. It has saved a lot of kids!
But as Iowa police struggle with only the girls' bikes and Elizabeth's purse, found by a firefighter on a bike trail near Meyers Lake, I can't help wondering if it's time to revamp it so we can help more kids.
In the meantime, will you pass along the missing poster for these girls? Did you know Amber Alert doesn't cover every missing kid?
Image via Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office
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Comments 68
Sending prayers out for these 2 little girls to be found.
everything confuses you Jeanne. What would the amber alert say exactly "look for two missing girls" ummmm okay? I'll be sure to do that.
The point is two fold:
2 girls are missing AND one of the best resources for finding them is not being utilized. It is not that we don't get what the system has been used for and was designed for. it is that we disagree with both of those things. It is a nationwide resource that should be able to be utilized for every picture of every missing child. I do not need to know what car to look for I nneed to know what the child looks like. I do not need to know if the suspect is white, green, polkadot - I need to know what the child was wearing. So what if they do not have the ionfo on the car, the suspect or any of that. they have pictures of those girls and they have a "last seen" location. It is not a misunderstanding on the part of the author or the respondents - we simply disagree with the limitations that the AA system is posing in the search and rescue of these two girls.
I thought everyone knew that amber alerts are for ABDUCTED children.
Its commen sense that says an Amber Alert is used to describe who has taken the child and for people to be on the lookout for that and the child together. We don't even know if the girls have been taken. All we know is they are gone, their bikes were found near the lake and a purse from one of them was found a little ways away. They started draining the lake either yesterday or today, they can't rule out that they fell in and drowned. You can't issue a kidnapped child alert when you don't even know if they are kidnapped.