Phil Keith nervously checks his watch and walks out of a large room packed full of people. He takes a short break from the National AMBER Alert Conference to take a call on another conference scheduled a few weeks later. Meanwhile, his Blackberry is buzzing with questions, requests and schedule changes.
The former Knoxville Police Chief has been moving like a man out of time, ever since he became the AMBER Alert Program Director for Fox Valley Technical College. The Department of Justice asked him to handle all training for its AMBER Alert initiative, at the same time, he is overseeing training for AMBER in Indian Country, Sex Offender Registries, and Forensics for Unidentified Missing Persons.
Keith learned children were fragile when he became the father of two girls, the youngest was born premature. But he says his real awakening occurred six months after he started as a Knoxville patrol officer in 1970. He answered a domestic disturbance call and found a man who had severely beaten his girlfriend and raped and beaten her 11-year-old daughter. “He hit her so many times,” he said. “I'll never forget it. The situation hit me like a ton of bricks.”
Keith soon became involved in child advocacy programs and began working with kids who had been abused at home. “Not every runaway is running to something. Most runaways are physically and sexually abused. They are running away from something, and no one is taking responsibility.”
When he became the police chief, he started a program called “Safety City,” a $4 million miniature city built with donations where thousands of kids can learn how to stay safe. He also secured $300 million in public safety grants, won some very prestigious awards and even made sure everyone was safe at the World's Fair before he retired in 2004. But something still gnaws at him about his watch as police chief: three stereotypical child kidnappings, two that were never solved. “It drives me absolutely crazy.”
Retirement has only accelerated Keith's schedule. The Department of Justice wants to train an unprecedented number of people about missing and abducted children. The numbers from the last two and a half years are impressive: 125 training sessions totaling 128,526 hours of training; 4,997 participants from every state and representatives from Canada and Mexico; seven national and regional conferences and three national roundtable discussions on missing, endangered and abducted children; and the training of more than 160 Child Abduction Response Teams (CART) in 43 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas.
After each training session, Keith meets with staff members and asks whether the training is prompting people to act. “Did you get a sense that people are ready to make something happen?” He says he learns a lot from participants and then tries to find ways to take those ideas to the next level. “I like the chase of getting things going.”
“We are making a difference,” says Keith. “We have a network of thousands of professionals who are second to none.” But Keith isn't satisfied. He's planning new courses for police recruits and dispatchers, advanced courses for missing and abducted child cases and expanding efforts to bring the AMBER Alert into Indian Country. He hopes one day every law enforcement officer will share his passion for protecting children. “There's never a shortage of kids who need a second chance,” he said.