Arizona lawmakers have unanimously passed “Emily’s Law,” a bill named for 14-year-old Emily Pike that would create a turquoise alert system for missing Indigenous people.
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t understand why create a new alert. Are indigenous people not worthy of the amber alert? A missing person is a missing person.
Excuse my ignorance but how is this different than an amber alert?
It seems to me, that it allows bigots to silence the turquoise alert, but keep the amber alert on. That way, they’re not bothered by missing “less-than-human” alerts. It makes no sense to me to make another alert type. Either we treat all people groups as equal humans, or we don’t deserve to be part of society. There is no in between. But… maybe I missed something in the linked site.
My limited searching found that Amber alerts are generally controlled by regional police organizations. Indigenous tribes tend to not mesh well with local law enforcement, and as a result indigenous-related crimes tends to fall through the cracks due to lack of coordination / jurisdiction issues.
This sounds like an effort to allow alerts to be more (?) controlled by indigenous tribes, but still distributed in the manner that Amber alerts are.
Pretty much.
- The amber alert system focuses mostly on children. This expands alerts to potential MMIW.
- This would provide a little more visibility for disappeared native women, in particular, which is a crime that local police forces wash their hands of.
Day one, and Arizonans discover that someone has gone and backlisted all prior disappearances from the last 20 years, and scheduled them for daytime broadcast over the following year.
NGL that would absolutely make my day, as people’s faces are crammed bodily into the sheer enormity of the problem.
And unfortunately it would be met by the majority of the population disabling the alert on their phone.
Don’t know what it’s like in America, but in Canada those alerts can be neither silenced nor turned off. Don’t want them? Turn the phone entirely off, and at least it won’t fire off at that time. It’ll still crop up as soon as the phone turns back on, because it’s a push notification that the system holds in a queue until the phone is back online to pick it up, just like SMS or voice mail.
