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August 14, 2007
A Child Is Missing
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| I sat through a lunch today with the Chief
of Police as the guest speaker. He talked about a non-profit organization
that the Chico Police would be working with to employ
a telephone alert system that could be used to locate missing children,
or adults. The
E-R covered
this
topic
a couple of weeks back but I think a lot of people missed it
(here's
the story).
The non-profit, A Child is Missing (www.achildismissing.org) will cost Chico nothing and provide a valuable service. When a local officer has determined that a missing person event has occurred they will forward information to the non-profit. At that time automated phone messages (1000 per minute) will be dialed out to a specific geographical area determined by the particulars of the incident. Amber Alerts require a higher threshold of evidence to enact. For an Amber Alert to occur you pretty much must know a kid was abducted. For this service a missing child or adult can trigger the messaging. The Chief said 70% of abducted children are killed within 3 hours of being taken. Okay, I threw out that last bit of fear bating, now I should reel it back in. Rarely are children abducted. Even more rare would be the occurrence in Chico. We don't need to be afraid of our kids getting swiped. It can happen, but it's rare, like school shootings. But this is a free service, and if a kid or adult goes missing and this system helps we should use it. At the meeting I asked the Chief if there was any consideration of doing the same with email. He said no, but he'd look into it. The city has an emergency phone alert system already in place. I received a gas leak notification a while back and was afraid to leave my house for a week. I even wrote a blog about it. I would like to see Chico expand their emergency notifications to include email. Many people carry cell phones that accept email, and fewer people are paying attention to recorded messages at home. The Chico Police could then coordinate the non-profit "missing child" message with a city email broadcast and improve the canvassing of the community. The city already has all of the technology and skill to create an opt-in email emergency notice system. It could help in the event of other emergencys and would hit people at work, where they are for half their waking lives. If there was an emergency you'd want to know wouldn't you? What if something awful happened, like the liberals took over city government? Oh, that already happened, and it might not scare some of you. Okay, what if the conservatives took it back? Oh, that'll never happen, and again, not scaring everyone. Just imagine an emegency you'd like to know about. Would you want to know about it at work, or wait until you get home have dinner and then check the messages? Somewhere in all this is my proposal. We should build a Chico Child is Missing email alert system and couple it with the new non-profit system the Chico PD have adopted. Then use that email broadcast ability in the event of some other emergency. I could even write the code for it. Unless of course you want it to work. |
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CI Challenge: Can you guess what it is? Winner:TJ Glenn, see comments below. Actually see first comment, it didn't take long for someone to beat this challenge! |
Posted by Lon at August 14, 2007 09:59 PM
Comments
E-mail could send photos too. Especially if police and schools had a photo record of kids.
Stan Marshes hat.
Posted by: tj glenn at August 14, 2007 10:26 PM
TJ,
Good point on the photo attachments.
Better point on the CI challenge. You win. As a prize I'll call you and let you listen to the South Park episode "Die Hippie Die" through my cell phone.
Lon
Posted by: Lon at August 14, 2007 10:31 PM
The red thing looks like a toilet scrub brush.
You know how us gals look at things. The work is never done, there is always plenty of scrubbing to do.
I just love the CI Challenge, it is almost as good as "The Price is Right" and "American Idol."
Thanks Lon for keeping it real!
Posted by: L.A. Simpson at August 14, 2007 10:37 PM
27 minutes has got to be the CI Challenge record.
The "My Face" Post a Child site could get updated by the parents or even the kids themselves to keep up with their rapid appearance changes, hair colors, nose rings, etc. If they could all see each other on the site, they would definitely keep it up to date.
Might as well get the dogs and cats faces up on there too.
Posted by: Gregg Payne at August 15, 2007 10:00 AM