I’v never heard of anyone getting an Amber Alert and wondering what race the missing child was. Yet for some reason, California saw a problem that didn’t exist and addressed it. On Sunday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 673 into law, which makes California the state to create a missing child alert system specifically for missing black children.
“The law, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, will allow the California Highway Patrol to activate the alert upon request from local law enforcement when a Black youth goes missing in the area,” reports NBC News. “The Ebony Alert will utilize electronic highway signs and encourage use of radio, TV, social media and other systems to spread information about the missing persons’ alert. The Ebony Alert will be used for missing Black people aged 12 to 25.”
“California is taking bold and needed action to locate missing black children and black women in California,” Democratic state Sen. Steven Bradford said in a press release. “Our black children and young women are disproportionately represented on the lists of missing persons. This is heartbreaking and painful for so many families and a public crisis for our entire state.”
Proponents claim there’s racial bias in the Amber Alert system and think that a separate system that is just for missing black children is the solution to this problem.
“Data shows that Black and brown, our indigenous brothers and sisters, when they go missing there’s very rarely the type of media attention, let alone AMBER alerts and police resources that we see with our white counterparts,” Bradford told NBC News earlier this year.
In order for authorities in California to issue an Amber Alert, the victim must be under 17 — or have a proven disability, — there must be reason to believe they’re in danger, and the alerts cannot be used for custodial disputes or runaway cases. Part of the problem is that missing Black children are usually classified as runaways and, as a result, don’t get an AMBER alert, according to the foundation. Since its inception in 1996, 1,127 children have been successfully recovered through the Amber Alert system, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Black and Missing Foundation also found that Amber alerts are inexplicably less effective when Black children are missing than for white children.
Does anyone else see a problem with this? If there was any such racial disparity with the existing Amber Alert system in California, why not fix it, instead of creating what sounds like an entirely separate system that deliberately treats children of different races differently? Perhaps I’m reading the language wrong, but this doesn’t appear to be a loosening of Amber Alert requirements to ensure that missing black children aren’t being excluded, but an entirely separate system with race-based requirements.
Related: Gov. Newsom Invites Classroom Chaos by Banning Suspensions for ‘Willful Defiance’
Will Amber Alerts in California now be exclusively for white kids and Ebony Alerts for non-white kids? That may not be the intention, but that is bound to be an unintended consequence.
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