Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 673 into law. The measure will create a missing child alert system for black children only. This is the guy who wants to be President.
NBC News reports, “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.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.”
If a white child is missing, well, too bad, honky’s got their own alert. “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.”
Perhaps some remedial programs for black parents and efforts to reform the societal structure in black communities might be a more effective and less divisive approach. Nah, never mind. California’s woke racists think it’s more equitable and inclusive to have two missing children alerts, one for all races, and one just for the benefit of blacks. I’m particularly fond of the cynical naming of the apartheid service the “Ebony Alert,” which suggests that “Amber Alert” referenced skin color…you know, it’s a microaggression. “Amber” is, in fact, a reference to Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, and brutally murdered.
Under Newsom, California has become the epicenter of “The Great Stupid.”
Ethics Alarms 
Who gives a rat’s ass about black “children” (why stop at 25?)? Certainly not all the abortion fanatics who insist anti-abortion people are white supremacists intent on oppressing black women who need the unfettered right to abort their black children early and often so as to have a more just society.
So many questions.
Will there be a corresponding Ivory alert. We should leave the amber alert for when a Simpsons character is kidnapped.
How can we know if someone qualifies for the Ebony alert, is it the one drop rule or do we have some color cards that we can compare skin tone to?
Do these clowns realize how racist they are? It seems with each intervening policy they get closer to the KKK.
It reminds me of this Ryan Long video:
I sometimes wonder about the origins of terms or programs… Why we call things the things that we do is often fascinating. I didn’t know about the story of Amber Hagerman.
As for this… I wonder who thought this was a good idea, or what need it filled? Was there some kind of grassroots movement looking for improvements on missing children files?
I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me. There is a massive issue with missing and murdered black children, particularly in large urban centers, and this issue does disproportionately effect black children for all the obvious reasons around family structure and financial means, even before attempting to touch the third rail of race. There is probably a legitimate need for resourcing.
But as with all things, why racialize it? If there is an issue around resourcing to look for missing and murdered children, and black children are disproportionately effected, then in theory, any resourcing going towards the issue should also disproportionately effect black children. This is true of most issues stemming from poverty: If you want to target poverty, you target poverty. If you want to target missing children, you target missing children.
Could you imagine what this would look like in any other situation? Fentanyl abuse is disproportionately effecting black men. In order to deal with that, we’re going to organize a police squad that does nothing but arrest black fentanyl zombies in San Francisco and shunt them into detox. That would be equity, right?
Meanwhile: What does anyone think we’re doing here? I’d say it’s all performative optics, but this isn’t even good optics for a Governor seriously considering 2024, and yet, this still hits me as being similar to all the studies that New York does regarding black kids in school where they’ve realized that they never have to fix the problems or address the issue if they say they’re in the studying phase: “What do you mean that we consistently fail black families when their children go missing? Don’t you know: We named an alert after them!”
“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.”
So I’m trying to understand this logic here and I thought perhaps I don’t understand how the system works. Therefore, I did some research. According to the Office of Justice Programs an Amber Alert only goes into effect when law enforcement has determined that a child has been abducted and the abduction meets AMBER Alert criteria. When that happens, law enforcement notifies broadcasters and state transportation officials. AMBER Alerts interrupt regular programming and are broadcast on radio and television and on highway signs.
Criteria is seen as being strict but is boiled down to the following items:
• Law enforcement must confirm that an abduction has taken place
• The child is at risk of serious injury or death
• There is sufficient descriptive information of child, captor or captor’s vehicle to
issue an Alert
• The child must be 17 years old or younger
• It is recommended that immediate entry of AMBER Alert data be entered into the
FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Text information describing the
circumstances surrounding the abduction of the child should be entered, and the
case flagged as Child Abduction.
According to SB-673 the Ebony Alert shares a lot of these traits, but seems to have less strict requires. In section 8594.14. It list: Ebony Alert” means a notification system, activated pursuant to subdivision designed to issue and coordinate alerts with respect to Black youth, including young women and girls, who are reported missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances, at risk, developmentally disabled, or cognitively impaired, or who have been abducted. If a person is reported missing to a law enforcement agency and that agency determines that the requirements of subdivision are met, the law enforcement agency may request the Department of the California Highway Patrol to activate an Ebony Alert. If the Department of the California Highway Patrol concurs that the requirements of subdivision have been met, it may activate an Ebony Alert within the appropriate geographical area requested by the investigating law enforcement agency.
To activate the alert this is the requirements listed:
(1) The missing person is between 12 to 25 years of age, inclusive.
(2) The missing person suffers from a mental or physical disability.
(3) The person is missing under circumstances that indicate any of the following:
(A) The missing person’s physical safety may be endangered.
(B) The missing person may be subject to trafficking.
(4) The law enforcement agency determines that the person has gone missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances.
(5) The law enforcement agency believes that the person is in danger because of age, health, mental or physical disability, or environment or weather conditions, that the person is in the company of a potentially dangerous person, or that there are other factors indicating that the person may be in peril.
(6) The investigating law enforcement agency has utilized available local resources.
(7) There is information available that, if disseminated to the public, could assist in the safe recovery of the missing person.
A few observations on these two list. First, why start at 12 years old and go to 25? Between the ages of 18-25 these people are adults and free to make there own choices in most of the United States. It largely ignores the helpless age of children and focuses on the ages were kids are likely to run away on there own. Unlike the specific nature of the Amber alert, the ebony alert could be activated for this purpose.
Second, there is some support that black children are recovered at a lesser rate than white or Hispanics. Data shows that nearly 37% of Amber Alerts were issued for missing Black children from 2017 to 2021. A similar proportion of missing reports police sent to the FBI were for Black children.
Most children who receive Amber Alerts are found safe, police told USA TODAY, but the alert itself was credited in just 1 in 4 Amber Alerts across the country over six months last year. The alerts worked best for white and Hispanic children, helping in about 1 in 3 cases, compared with 1 in 7 involving Black children.
Though no one really knows why less black children are recovered experts believe it is because less media attention is given to black children, fear, or bias. If this is the case, how is a separate system going to fix it? Which brings me to my main problem with the ebony alert.
Without the description requirement of where they might be (person, car, etc) and by allowing the vague ‘missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances’ this system is going to be activated more frequently not less. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but people will start to get annoyed with the alerts. If people already are not responding to amber alerts because of fear, bias, or racism (that’s the message here isn’t it?) then why do they think this will automatically be more effective?
Though, I could be wrong. While reading the Bill I learned that CA has something called a ‘feather alert” relating to an endangered indigenous person who has been reported missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances. When I went to see what a feather alert was, I learned they also have a silver alert (persons of 65), yellow alert (persons involved in a hit and run) and blue alert (persons involved in the beating or killing of an officer). Perhaps they have scene success in these alert systems that would justify there usage.
As luck would have it, they even have a success stories link. On the CA patrol website going back at least three years they have a whooping total of four stories. While I’m sure there’s more, it doesn’t really breed confidence in the different alert systems.
Frankly, there isn’t confidence in the Alert system. About 2/3 way through the article Jack posted there was this bit of information:
Timothy Griffin, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada, Reno, said he believes the Amber Alert is not effective and, therefore, it may not be worth it to replicate the service. Griffin, who has spent years studying the Amber Alert, said it is rare for a citizen to see the alert and spot the missing child, or for the alert to scare an abductor into returning the child. “There’s just not a lot of reason to believe that when there’s an Amber Alert success it’s successfully rescuing children from threatening situations,” Griffin explained. “Thus, I would strongly suspect that that would be the experience of any implemented Ebony AAlert in California.”
I’m not sure what would fix the problem here (assuming there is one), but it largely seems like this bill is a combination of the we must do something rationalization and the think of the children rationalization. At the end of the Bard told NBC news “Whether the Amber alert or an Ebony Alert is going to be 100% effective, we don’t go with that false illusion or belief. But it’s better than not doing anything at all.”
I get that, especially when it comes to kids, but based on what I’ve already explained above, I see this ‘something’ as making a situation a whole lot worse.
Whew! Nice work, J.P. Thanks. Great context. Sounds like, “The more government programs and employees to staff them up and buy equipment for, the better.”
I don’t doubt that black Californians suffer from higher rates of missing children. I affirm they have as much right to justice for those children and their families as any other American. But has Newsom considered the secondary effects of creating a separate system? Imagine creating a new, separate network of water fountains exclusively for black people, in the name of improving black access to water fountains. Imagine the government creating separate black schools to improve black access to education. The lesson of segregation is that “separate but equal” is a lie. What is separately established can be separately ignored, neglected, and abused.