Florida generally issues WEAs in a 0700 to 2200 window. We can expand that time frame if, we have a WEA that is targeted to a smaller area, or the investigation of the missing incident indicates the child or children are in an extreme amount of danger. If the time window is extended, we will notify our sworn command chain.
There was a large amount of push back when the first Florida CAE WEA was sent out at 3am. There was a concern about protecting the WEA as a resource and those timeframes were decided upon.
Our current WEA’s include a clickable hyperlink that we can generate stats from. It appears that somewhere in the vicinity of 60% of smartphone users have opted out of the AMBER WEA. This number is extremely fuzzy. Because of the high number of visitors to Florida we have no way of knowing how many visitors are hitting off of our cell towers and skewing the numbers. If we hadn’t instituted those timeframes, we expect that opt out percentage to be even higher.
We have a program that allows us to issue WEA for children who wander on foot and whose life is threatened by the local geography (water, busy highways, etc.) These WEAs will usually be a circle with a radius of a few miles or a polygon that defines a neighborhood and a few geographic features. We’ve had huge public buy in, literally zero complaints, and a lot of direct recoveries from the program, even if we sent the WEA outside of our usual hours.