California Creates System to Prioritize Finding Missing Black Children Over Others
“Black missing children [who] are disproportionately classified as ‘runaways'” and excluded from the AMBER Alert system will qualify for the Ebony Alert system, according the the new legislation.
California created the “Ebony Alert” system, an analog of the AMBER Alert system used to locate missing children, on Sunday. The system prioritizes recovering missing black children who do not qualify for an AMBER Alert.
“The AMBER Alert system must fulfill strict criteria for the message to be broadcast,” according to the enacting legislation’s factual findings. “If these criteria are not met, an AMBER Alert cannot be issued, and the child is labeled as a runaway.”
Missing children classified as “runaways” are not eligible for an AMBER Alert.
“Black missing children are disproportionately classified as ‘runaways'” compared to white children, according to the law’s factual findings.
The law’s factual findings do not specify whether the runaway classification is disproportionate to population size or some other metric, such as the rate at which different groups of children run away from home.
Conservative commentator and Libs of TikTok founder criticized the system on Twitter: “Search for ALL missing kids regardless of their race!”
I have a radical idea but hear me out…
Search for ALL missing kids regardless of their race! https://t.co/Jdxl0fQ1wK
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) October 10, 2023
“Being identified as a runaway can also be a legal loophole for law enforcement,” the factual findings continue, “because when a child is listed as a runaway, the police are allowed to delay response and investigation time.”
The law circumvents this “loophole” by creating a system without the runaway exclusion found in the AMBER Alert system.
The Ebony Alert system allows law enforcement to request an alert “if that agency determines that an Ebony Alert would be an effective tool in the investigation of missing Black youth.”
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
CA has very few black people. Something like 7%. Mostly in South LA and the East Bay.
They considered an alert for missing black fathers but realized that doing so would cause mass confusion because the alert would go off constantly.
Quite frankly, I shut off my alerts on my phone and don’t usually read the alerts on the lit billboards. I prefer to concentrate on driving (mostly dodging poor drivers and maneuvering crowded roads) and avoiding accidents, not reading license plates and BOLOs for cars.
There are enough people on their cell phones on the roads to add one more distraction.
It’s not that I don’t care about kids. If I see something suspicious at a gas station or something catches my attention, then I act.
Indeed. I permanently disabled AMBER alerts on my phone because there is zero probability of some wayward kid from a blue city 60 miles away ending up in the middle of nowhere where I am, and kids from my area either never go missing or never get AMBERed.
If my phone begins transmitting Ebony alerts, I will double-secret-disable them.
This is the sort of nonsense the LIF files lawsuits over — preferential government services available to only one race. Does Newsom need a black eye this month?
Who could have standing? Who could say they’ve been denied a service, and what service would that be?
One possibility, as I hinted at in another comment below, would be for a civil rights organization to file suit on behalf of an anonymous black teenage runaway (as in Roe v Wade) who is in fear of being found and forcibly returned to the hostile and dangerous home situation she ran away from, while if she were white there’d be nobody looking for her.
There he is!…. We can always count on Milhouse to let us know that the law/legal progression will always steadfastly defend evil and wrong while refusing to stand up for what is right and good…. All the while pretending it’s really just about “the law” which has just become their perverted rules to make sure evil triumphs….
What the actual fuck are you talking about? We are discussing a suggestion that someone file a lawsuit, and you think it’s not appropriate to ask who could possibly have standing?! You think it’s somehow “evil and wrong” that you can’t just randomly sue whomever you feel like?!!!! That would be evil and wrong. It’s basic and fundamental to justice that you can’t sue people unless you have standing, so if you are going to suggest a lawsuit you have to identify who could bring it. How can you dispute that?
My reason was simpler, Sarge. Two in the morning, some lout alert tone and I am awakened. Amber Alert. And, the Do Not Disturb feature in my phone is bypassed for Amber Alerts.
Nuts to that.
Only missing white girls get news interest, aka Amber Alert.
If you want to find a black girl, a specialized alert makes sense, attracting a more focused audience. Something blacks might be more interested in.
It’s an efficiency thing, not wasting effort on something you won’t know anything about.
Nope, amber alerts are not press releases. They are often reported on by the press and there is a difference.
The rest of your crap falls apart right there.
Actually they are press releases.
There’s an effect, all Asians look alike to non-Asians, all blacks look alike to non-blacks, etc. A specialized channel makes sense.
Probably because you stop looking at features once you find the distinguishing one, if you’re surrounded mostly by your own race.
No, they are alerts….the press then reports on them. You have your steps mixed up.
Before turning off the Amber Alert on my phone I don’t recall the race of the missing child being mentioned. Was it?
“Acshually…,.segregation is good” ….smh
“Being identified as a runaway can also be a legal loophole for law enforcement,” the factual findings continue, “because when a child is listed as a runaway, the police are allowed to delay response and investigation time.”
….
The Ebony Alert system allows law enforcement to request an alert “if that agency determines that an Ebony Alert would be an effective tool in the investigation of missing Black youth.”
In one breath, the legislators claim LEOs are circumventing and slow-walking these cases. In another breath, the new law expects them to exert a new mechanism?
If TPTB don’t trust LEOs to use an unbiased system, why would you trust them to use a racist alert system instead?
How many Amber Alerts are for fathers who finally managed to sneak some time with their children because the ex-wife cut off his court-awarded visitation?
Of the few I saw before disabling them, a surprising number did include “reported to be with the father…”
Note all the scare quotes around “runaway”, as if it were not a real thing, as if teenagers don’t run away from home all the time.
Of course not. Why would you want them to be?
Are they only “classified as ‘runaways'”, or are they actually runaways? The “findings” imply that it’s just an arbitrary classification, much like the way most doctors arbitrarily assign babies a gender at birth, and then have to deal with the mess when they guessed wrong.
It’s not a “loophole” that the police don’t waste their time looking for kids who don’t want to be found, and don’t want to be forcibly returned to the parents they ran away from.
Oh, so it’s a slave catcher law. It discriminates against black runaways by assigning state officers to hunt them down, while white runaways go free. I understand now. This must be a MAGA Republican bill, enacted by those slavering white supremacists from the deep south where they’re all yokels, right?
I’m cynically thinking they just want to create more BLM riots.
If you turn runaways into alleged kidnapping victims, you create a lot of situations for someone to get maimed or shot as an alleged kidnapper of the runaway child.
I will be a large amount of money that this is going to result in a 3rd party app/program to block this alert specifically.
Because after all, they’ve already admitted that this is ones that DO NOT QUALIFY for actual Amber alerts.
CA gov newscum is woke joke. No money for reparations. So he does this?
Note that “ebony alerts” also include Black adults, albeit only women. Missing black men are apparently not important enough to publish alerts for. This is not surprising, men generally are treated poorly when they are alleged victims of crime.
You don’t understand. Missing adult men are presumed to be missing because they want to be. Women, however, lack agency, and if they’re missing it must be because they’ve been kidnapped, or they’ve lost their minds and wandered off or something.
Or maybe it’s that men belong to themselves and if they want to go off somewhere that’s their business, whereas women who run off need to be found and brought back to their masters.
so you’re saying the soft bigotry of “big brother knows best” for the lessers.
So, some California politicians think that it makes more sense to have an entirely new alert system rather than, oh, I don’t know, enforce better criteria for who is a runaway and who isn’t.
It must be terribly difficult and stressful to be so illogical.
What do you mean by “better criteria”? As far as I can tell they’re not disputing the criteria’s validity, they’re just saying they produce too many black positives (not false positives, just positives), and the only way they could be improved would be to add a fudge factor for race. And they correctly don’t want to spoil the real alert system, so instead they’re adding a parallel system for fake alerts.
Here’s an idea: how about ordering an investigation into why so many more black kids than white kids run away, and trying to fix whatever that is. But we can easily predict what answers such an investigation is likely to come up with, and we don’t know how to fix that and most don’t even want to try.
We do know how to fix that.
Hold cultures accountable…but you’re right that most don’t want to try because of the aforementioned soft bigotry of thinking that the lessers can’t change so why try to stimulate change.
So…what happens when the black person, who has been told over and over how much cops want to hurt or kill them, decides that they don’t want to go with the police and fights them? Goes for their firearm?
How about when the police, looking for someone on this alert list, come into contact with someone matching the description engaged in criminal activity?
yep see my post above….
When little black girl runs away with daddy and he is treated as a kidnapper by LEO because of this new system, how might he react when confronted? I would say that some statistics bear out a poorer response than from other races based on cultural beliefs.
If the mother has custody he will be treated as an abductor and treated like any other abductor.
Unless there’s a custody dispute and he actually had his portion illegally withheld by the other parent. Do you trust the system will act with accurate information when it’s designed to circumvent the typical process.
Jim Crow.
1) If someone runs away, they are by definition not missing since they left of their own accord.
2) I was told a system which prioritizes one race over another as racist.
3) This is another example of black privilege.
4) Black privilege can only exist if white people allow it.
5) Since white people allow black privilege and support a system that prioritizes blacks over whites, not only are they racist, but they are stupid.
6) Stupid is as stupid does.
Missing: not present, absent
Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned to anticipate from the communist it is blatant and direct racism. This doesn’t disappoint
So … it’s a “Runaway Alert” system. But why the “ebony” stuff? I think they just like that word. Leftists can’t bring themselves to say “black” anything – not unless it’s in writing and is capitalized) but they love “ebony” because they can say that all day long, and it sounds classier.
So … Cali folks are going to be bombarded with runaway alerts all day every day, now. Progress.
Why is California twisting itself in knots and tearing itself apart over its black population when it was never a slave state, never had Jim Crow laws, and probably no state with a large black population had a less repressive history toward them?
This all sounds rather ridiculous, however, leave it to government to pile one bad program on top of another. Amber Alerts don’t work.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/amber-alerts-largely-ineffective-study-shows-4792
Is there going to be brown alerts for missing Latino children? How about yellow alerts for missing Asian children? or Red alerts for missing Native American children?
California is off the deep end.
The Ebony Alert System: “Get yo’ ass back in here! Get yo’ ass back in here!…”