Call me an old
curmudgeon. Fault me for insensitivity
to the distress of little children.
Perhaps I am a mean-spirited antique.
Nevertheless, I am fed up with being assaulted by the sound pollution caused
by those ubiquitous Amber Alerts. They
strike me as both unnecessary and offensive.
On far too many evenings,
just as the television show I am watching reaches a climax, a terrible noise erupts
in my living room. Then, for what seems
an eternity, I am subjected to information about the abduction of a youngster I
do not know.
On these occasions, I am
presented with the details of who did what to whom and the color of the car
they were driving at the time. Then,
because the announcer must know I was not paying attention, the information is
repeated. Only after this, accompanied with
another flourish of earsplitting buzzers, am I allowed to return to my program.
Needless to say, I am
annoyed at having missed the crux of the story in which I was immersed. But my wife has it worse. Oftentimes, when that unwelcome alarm sounds,
our cat is sitting on her lap. And
because Little Dickens is even more frightened than we are, it digs its claws
into her flesh.
Or consider what happened
just the other day. I was driving to
work when the alarm blared out of my i-phone.
This instrument was in my shirt pocket, so it gave me a jolt. But what was I to do? Was I to take it out and read about some
alleged criminal activity? If I did,
wouldn’t this be the equivalent of texting while driving?
But let us say I was not
distracted by this intrusive sound.
Really, what was I to do? What
are the chances that I would notice the offending vehicle? At home, there would be zero
opportunity. Yet even on the road,
wouldn’t sizing up every passing car be a dangerous waste of my time?
I have also had that darned
alarm wake me from a sound sleep.
Because those who decide to send it know nothing about what the
recipients are doing, of course, it frequently arrives at inopportune moments.
So here we have it. Millions of Georgians are inconvenienced so
that they can help solve a crime where the overwhelming majority has not the
slightest ability to assist in the endeavor.
Their lives are gratuitously interrupted so that some self-centered politicians
can give the impression of being compassionate.
But I ask you, why this
particular emergency? Why doesn’t the
state send out alarms for other crimes?
There could be robbery alerts. Or
murder alerts. Or rape alerts. The English Bobbies used to blow whistles so
that the public could help catch offenders.
Couldn’t this be considered a high tech version of the same?
The problem with this
approach is that in a world where we are already assaulted by too many
extraneous interruptions, this adds another.
There are limits to which we ought to intrude into each other’s personal
realms. With our privacy at a premium,
there has to be a good reason to deprive us of it.
I submit that the level of
assistance the public is able to supply in search of abducted children it too
limited to justify society-wide disruptions.
We would not do this for rapes, so why for abductions? Is it that there are too many of the former
or that the latter are more heinous?
Why, I also ask, are BOLO’s
not enough? The police should be on the lookout for these lawbreakers. Yet how much does broadening the search actually
help? A Google search told me that
nationwide Amber Alerts worked 816 times after many years of operation. Still, who knows how many wrongdoers would
have been apprehended without this assist.
When I was a kid, I asked my
father why there was a law against blowing automobile horns in New York
City. Since cars had horns, why not use
them. It did not occur to me that the
unlimited utilization of these devices would create a painful cacophony. Isn’t it the same with Amber Alerts?
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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