Ontario Amber Alert Program Gets Facebook Page
Posted October 8, 2010 12:05 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ontario’s Amber Alert program now has the potential reach millions of Facebook users as it tries to find abducted children.
The program has teamed up with Facebook to create a special Amber Alert Ontario page on the social networking site.
Authorities hope Canada’s 15 million Facebook users, including seven million in Ontario, can help them in those crucial three to five hours after a child is abducted.
“It’s extremely critical that we get information out to the public fast and there’s no time to waste,” said provincial police Commissioner Chris Lewis.
“Facebook is an ideal communication vehicle for achieving this.”
Lewis urged Ontario residents to subscribe to the page, saying police need as many people as possible assisting them.
It didn’t take long. By early afternoon, almost 5,000 users had clicked that they liked the page.
Canada is the first country to send Amber Alerts over the site, which has half a billion users worldwide, said Facebook Canada’s managing director Jordan Banks.
Ontario residents who like the page will automatically receive notification in their news feed when a child goes missing, said Banks, who has two children.
“They in turn can share that information with all their other friends, which creates a viral means of spreading the word that a child needs our help,” he said.
Ontario is the third province to create an Amber Alert Facebook page. New Brunswick launched its page in July and has almost 24,000 subscribers. Prince Edward Island’s page, which went up in August, has almost 9,400 fans.
Amber alerts are issued when a child under age 18 is abducted, police believe the child is in danger and police have a description of the child or the abductor or the vehicle.
The guidelines were broadened after a review last year prompted by the case of Tori Stafford, who was found slain in July 2009 north of Guelph, Ont. Oxford Community Police were criticized for not issuing an Amber Alert when the eight-year-old Woodstock girl disappeared three months earlier.
The alerts are broadcast on radio and television and Ministry of Transportation highway signs, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. terminals and LCD screens at Mac’s Convenience stores.
Since May, cellphone users have been able to subscribe to get free text messages.
John Durant, director of Child Find Ontario, called the partnership between police and Facebook a marvellous opportunity and way to get more people involved.
“Every second, every minute is extremely important in terms of a search for a missing child that’s been taken by someone,” Durant said in an interview.
Fifty children were abducted across Canada last year, Durant said.
In 1996, the kidnapping and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman caused her community of Arlington, Tex. to create the Amber Alert program.
Since the program launched in Ontario in 2003, the alert has gone out 19 times and 16 children have been found.
It’s difficult to know how great a role the program played but in certain cases it was significant, police said.
One success case was in March, when two boys ages three and five were allegedly abducted by their father in Kingston, Ont., and were believed headed to Saskatchewan, said Sgt. Steve Montpetit, the Ontario Amber Alert co-ordinator.
The boys were abducted at 9:30 a.m. They were found five hours later after an alert citizen in York Region called 911 after spotting a vehicle fitting the description and read the front licence plate.
The suspect had heard the alert and switched the back licence plate at a Canadian Tire store in a bid to avoid detection, said Montpetit.
