TORONTO -- Ontarioâs Amber Alert system risks alienating the public by issuing alerts, sometimes late at night, that people perceive they canât usefully respond to, an expert argues.
York University professor pointed to two features of the system that in his view risk training people to ignore alerts: sending them to every phone in the province, and sending them potentially at any hour of the day or night.
âIf you irritate people unnecessarily, do it in various formats where they turn against it or somehow arenât open to the message and wonât comply, itâs not working in anyoneâs best interests,â he told CTVNews.ca.
McBey is an expert on disaster and emergency management.
He suggested issuing alerts at night only to people whose phones have been moving, which implies that they are awake, and sending the alert to everybody else when their phones start moving.
âIf it hasn't moved in hours, and you're not close to (the abduction), it really is a bit of a reach as to why those individuals need an audio audible alarm,â he said. âText? Yes. You can check in the morning.â
TRACKING PHONE MOVEMENT
Another change could involve issuing alerts only to areas of the province where a childâs abductor could plausibly have driven to, given the time since the abduction.
One problem with tracking phone movement, however, is that it risks a different kind of pushback -- this time based on privacy, said University of Toronto computer science professor .
âWe live in a country that values privacy quite a lot and respects privacy, so is that there's a tradeoff when it comes to that and implementing a system where that level of granularity of people's moving may offset any benefits you gain from that level of granularity,â he told CTVNews.ca.
However, he said that at some point the alerts lose value.
âAt some point, I'm going to start tuning them out. And when I hear something that's relevant to my area, I may not pay attention at all: âThere's another child abduction, there's nothing I can do, all of them are out of out of my area.ââ
On the other hand, he conceded, the rate of child abductions is something the police have no control over.
Police do have the ability to restrict Amber Alerts to a region of Ontario, but broadcast them to the whole province because a motivated abductor can travel a long distance in a short time, Ontario Provincial Police Insp. Stacey Whaley explained.
Whaley coordinates the Amber Alert program for Ontario.
He pointed to a 2020 case where a child was abducted in Sudbury and found in Toronto âbefore most people knew that there was an Amber Alert.â
âIt doesn't take long, even though we are a big province,â he said.
âI can tell you as the Amber Alert coordinator for the province that I don't want to be the guy to make a decision that a child was abducted in Simcoe County, and located in Kenora or Thunder Bay, 12 or 14 hours later, and that they could have helped but didnât know about it because they werenât part of the alert.â
âI wouldnât want to have to look at a parent and say âYeah, we could have included Thunder Bay and Kenora, but we didnât because we didnât think they would get that far.ââ
One problem, he explained, is that in a dispute between estranged parents, police need to investigate before agreeing that an abduction has happened, which adds time for the abductor to travel.
âIf you're with your child at a playground and a van pulls up and a stranger comes out in a mask and grabs the child and pulls him into the van and drives away, thereâs not a lot of investigating going on there,â he said. âThe Amber Alert is going to go out right away. But when itâs custodial in nature it sometimes does require more investigation.â
RISK OF OVERUSE
Unlike the United States, Canada chose to make the alerts mandatory. But with that, McBey argued, comes the risk of overusing them.
âWe donât want to alienate people. I fully support the approach to making these required, so you canât opt out of them. Thatâs pretty important. But we do have to be concerned about individuals, their own lives, we want them not to be, pardon the language, pissed off at the situation by unnecessarily alarming them when there isnât anything they can do about it.â
âThey figure: Why was I contacted? Iâm not in the close geographic area. What am I going to do? Iâm at home, I was sleeping, and Iâve been immobile for several hours.â
But Whaley rejected the idea that the alerts are overused.
âWe had one in 2018. We had seven or eight in 2019. We had four last year, we had one this year. These things arenât going off every week. Four a year â is that unreasonable, when youâre talking about the life of a child? I would say: absolutely not. We make no apologies for that at all.â
As well, Whaley said, one of the many people who gets the alert can be the actual abductor. The experience of seeing a provincewide alert with their vehicle description and licence plate is often enough to end the abduction.
âThere have been cases where the abductor will say, âOh, my gosh, I saw I saw that on the news,â and return the child, or say there was a big misunderstanding - or thatâs what they allege - so I brought the child back,â he says. âIt has had that effect.â
Munteanu compared the current system to a Cold War-era air raid siren: it doesnât have much nuance as a way of communicating, but itâs simple and gets everyoneâs attention.
âIn a way, it's not any different. It's a broadcast message thatâs simple that goes to everyone.â
âThere is a power in simplicity.â
For his part, however, McBey would like to see a much more sophisticated alert system, using features that already exist in our devices. For example, drivers on a highway going in one direction in a specific area could have an alert tailored for them to look for a certain vehicle.
âThose capabilities are there, location-wise, GPS-wise. Whether your phone is active, whether location is enabled. If youâre on the 401 west, between Winston Churchill and Guelph Line, this is what we want you to do.â
âI don't see why that couldn't be done.â