The benefits of Amber Alert phone calls in your community

I find myself sitting here at 2:49AM writing a blog that I would have never expected to write. In this day of modern technology, our community has the ability to send out calls for a missing child. While I do not think anyone can or would argue the benefits of such a system, the exact implementation of it might come under more scrutiny.

At a time when the overwhelming majority of people (except of course the night owls at ActiveRain, and the nighttime workers) are in bed asleep, I would think the benefits of placing automated calls is out of line with common sense. And I seriously question the decision making of the person that made the decision to make calls at 2AM. Maybe by 6-7AM, you might have the early morning worker getting out and could potentially see the missing child. Maybe up until 9-10PM, even pushing it, up to 11PM, there might be a person running to the local convenience store, where getting this information out could be worthwhile. But at two in the morning, getting a wake up call, it seems that would not be advantageous. How much will you retain about the requested search when you were just woken up? How likely are you to run out into your neighborhood in your PJ's and look for this missing child? I think very unlikely.

I called the local Charlotte County Sheriff's Department about the decision making and got the watch commander, Lt Ogden, who made the decision to make the calls at 1AM. I asked about how truly beneficial could those calls be. And my concern was, if that is the decision making skills of the watch commander, there would likely be other very poor decisions made by this commander! I also asked to speak to her boss, and get this, she did not want to call her supervisor because it was 2AM. Hmmm, what is wrong with this picture? It is acceptable to call me at 2AM, but not acceptable to talk to this commanders boss at this same time? My feeling is that if you can call me at 2AM, then I can talk to your supervisor at this same time......and your thoughts are?