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Hi Morrissa,
We have a few things that deter those type of requests here in Montana. The first and I imagine you guys have it as well, as that AMBER Alert requests must come from law enforcement. They cannot come from CPS/DPHHS, they can’t come from prosecutors or judges. They must come from an investigating agency.
The second is that we’ve had some education of our CPS/DPHHS type folks on AMBER Alerts. We’ve met with our state’s Health & Human Services Centralized Intake and spoke with their personnel on the difference between a «status change» «mom had custody two weeks ago but no longer is allowed to have custody» versus the «kick the door in and take the child.» We remind DPHHS they must reiterate what is the imminent endangerment the child is facing where the believe the life of that child is at risk.
That usually helps, especially because they unfortunately deal with these situations on a regular basis. I usually ask them how often do they deal with this and reiterate that if we launched an alert for every custodial interference case, people would tune out very quickly. That has helped tremendously.
As far as documentation, I created reference cards for those social service personnel simplifying our criteria just to say «Child (under 18) has been abducted under life-threatening circumstances and enough information exists to request public assistance in searching for the child/suspect.» Unlike the reference cards we give to law enforcement, I did purposefully remove our contact information on those cards.
I also occasionally recommend our lesser alert (Missing Endangered Person Advisory) for situations like this where the abductions murky but they’ve got a relative credible threat to the child. More than «dad failed a drug test 45 days ago.»
Brian
Hi Julie,
We are obtaining some missing persons photos directly from law enforcement agencies who have been publishing some of their missing persons via Facebook. We have one agency here in Montana who is terrible at entering photos into NCIC BUT they post every photo of every missing person case on their Facebook. We’ll grab those images and put them in NCIC and on our website. We believe if they’re putting it on their social media pages – it has been vetted/verified.
On the flip side, a few years ago, we had an agency ask for a public alert using a Facebook photo when it turned out to be the kid’s cousin. So we encourage agencies to verify prior to entering social media images into NCIC.
Brian
Hi Melissa,
We do have plenty of places in Montana without good cell phone/data coverage as well, especially on our reservations. We have run into this before. One of the ways we try to help with notifications is encouraging folks to sign up to our mass notifications through our alerting vendor. That way even if the WEA doesn’t hit their phone, our emails, phone calls, texts, and vendor app all pass along the same information (only in different ways.) The nice part is that hopefully their TV’s and radio’s were also interrupted with an EAS warning for your AMBER Alert.
I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the Wi-Fi splash screen.
Good Morning Julie,
I know we’ve talked a bit about it but for Montana, here goes:
1) We do have photos on our website. On average, we see about 80-90% of persons missing persons having photos on our website. We automated our process through our state’s message switch to automatically send information and photos into our own state-held database whenever a law enforcement agency enters a missing person or missing person image into NCIC. We then have a call from our website to our state database every 15 minutes to check for updates, clears, cancels, etc.
2) We do not require a waiver and most of the photos come directly from law enforcement. A majority of our photos are DL photos BUT our lawmakers felt strongly enough about our website that back in 2019, they passed an opt-in child photo law. This law grants access for MT DOJ employees to our Office of Public Instruction (OPI)’s database of school children. Each fall, children have their photos taken. Schools are supposed to send a mailer in with their picture packets that enables parents opt-in to having their child’s photo shared with DOJ for the express purpose of use if their child goes missing. If its filled out and signed by a parent/guardian, the image is uploaded into OPI’s database. Since its opt-in, we do have about 25% of all school-aged Montana children having photos in that database. Every week I check OPI’s database for children without photos and add them if I find them.
3) For implementation of our automated process, mostly getting all the moving parts on the same page and having meetings about the work flow. We changed our State’s Switch 2 years ago and it took a while to get all the moving pieces on board to «reconnect» things. Otherwise our biggest hurdle for photos is the marginalized youth – those in either some sort of government care or those coming from broken homes. Most parents I talk to have hundreds if not thousands of photos of their children on their cell phones. But the kids in care or those that are in and out of youth homes? Those are the ones I have a difficult time getting photos for.
I hope that helps!
BrianYikes! That’s an interesting predicament. In Montana, we have a Missing Endangered Person Advisory (MEPA) at the state level which serves as a «catch all» for Silver/Ashanti/etc. We DO NOT utilize WEA for MEPAs but we do use WEA for AMBER and Blue Alerts. For dissemination, we leave it up to our AMBER Alert partners on whether or not they will share our MEPAs. Most of our partners choose not to share MEPAs (like the Lottery and Department of Transportation) but the Weather Service and the Montana Public Broadcasters Association are probably the largest distributors of the information in the event of a MEPA activation.
My personal opinion, we’re on track to have nearly 100 MEPA’s this year. I strongly believe if we were using WEA for these, alert fatigue would certainly be an issue. I believe, at the national level, Ashanti Alerts are not supposed to be utilizing WEA.
We do enter long term (90 days or more) missing persons cases into NamUs. We have had DNA submitted to and processed by UNT through NamUs in the past. As Henry mentioned, with NamUs’ status being in a strange predicament, I’m not sure how things will proceed. I see that NamUS went from having numerous Regional Program Specialists (RPS) to only one. We used to communicate with our RPS and she would communicate with family members wishing to submit DNA and that’s how the ball started rolling here in Montana. Things are definitely up in the air now.
Hi Ben. Montana does not have any time restrictions on WEA messages. We have gotten a little flak when we have issued late night AMBER Alerts but we prefer to err on the safe side and broadcast the information when we have it. We’re similar to our neighbors in Idaho and Wyoming in that we don’t issue very many and don’t have nearly the population that Texas has.
Hi Nona,
To my knowledge we have not received this request as of this date – at least not here in our office. It could have come in to someone in our DCI office and just hasn’t been passed on to us yet. I will let you know if we are contacted by them. Please let me know if you have any interaction with them, I’d be curious to hear your take on it.
Thank you
Joni Turpin
MT Missing Person Clearinghouse
406/443-3177This would be covered under our MEPA alert criteria in Montana. We only have 2 alerts: AMBER and MEPA (Missing Endangered Person Advisory)
