Today is Amber Alert Awareness Day, marking the 18 year anniversary of the day Amber Hagerman was abducted while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, and later found murdered. In April of 2003, in her honor, President Bush signed into law the PROTECT Act, which statutorily established the national AMBER Alert coordinator role. Since, the AMBER Alert™ program has been credited with more than 675 successful recoveries of missing or abducted children. The AMBER Alert Program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies and the wireless industry to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases.
In honor of this day, the City of Decatur is encouraging parents to create a Safety Profile for their household at www.smart911.com which can include current photos and physical descriptions of their children. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the first three hours are the most critical when trying to locate a missing child. When a child is reported missing it can take up to an hour or more to have a current photo distributed to law enforcement officers in the field. If the family has a Smart911 Safety Profile and dials 9-1-1, their child’s photo and description will be immediately available to call-takers and can be passed on to law enforcement officials in the field, launching a search in seconds or minutes as opposed to hours.
Smart911 allows citizens to create a free Safety Profile for their household with information they want 9-1-1 and emergency responders to have during an emergency. When a citizen makes an emergency call, their Safety Profile is automatically displayed to the 9-1-1 call-taker, allowing them to send the right response teams to the right location with the right information.
For more information about Smart911, contact Fire Chief Toni Washington at toni.washington@decaturga.com or 404-373-5092.
