New technology helps locate missing children
Lawmen now have an important tool to help find missing children, a tool which can recruit much of the county into one big search party within minutes of a child’s disappearance.
Warren County has joined a program called A Child is Missing, which means local officers can now use its services to look for missing children. The program can also be used for Alzheimer’s patients and mentally challenged individuals who are missing.
The A Child is Missing (ACIM) alert can be sounded by any investigating law enforcement officer by simply calling the ACIM alert center. The officer would then provide a description of the missing person along with any other helpful details and information on where the child was last seen.
The ACIM operator would then record a specialized message, and, using a satellite system, would program its telephone system to call 1,000 residences in the immediate area of the disappearance – all within one minute.
The calling radius, determined by the computer program, would include all homes where there is a listed phone number. ACIM says there has been a 98 percent answer rate.
The calls themselves use specific recordings to ask citizens to be on the lookout for the missing person. The recording provides a description and asks that they report any information to law enforcement.
ACIM has been around since 1997 but has just now been offered here. The technology comes at no charge to local law enforcement.
“I can’t begin to say how valuable this will be to us,” said Sheriff Jackie Matheny. “There’s nothing more horrifying than when a child goes missing. Something like this will be invaluable in helping us locate a missing child since it will get the word out quickly all around the community so we’ve got a lot of eyes out there.”
ACIM is different than the Amber Alert because it recruits private citizens by calling them at their homes to solicit help. Amber Alert also specializes in stranger abductions involving potential inter-jurisdictional flight.
“We want folks to know that if they’re called by these folks, it isn’t a hoax,” Matheny said.
More information on ACIM may be found on the Internet by going to www.achildismissing.org.