Shortly after phones in Prince George’s County, Maryland, began buzzing about a SUV wanted in a suspected child abduction, a group of friends captured the moment they recognized the SUV from the AMBER Alert—and started recording. In a viral TikTok video posted by one of the friends, a gray Volkswagen SUV rolls up alongside them, and they elicit excited recognition. Deciding not to engage with the suspect (as law enforcement had instructed), the clip ends with a short view of the SUV surrounded by police vehicles farther up the road. “Thanks to a great community partnership, an alert citizen [in another vehicle] spotted the AMBER Alert car,” the Prince George’s County Police Department wrote on X. “That citizen contacted [dispatch] who relayed the locations to [us] through our interoperable radio system.” The missing girl was found safe.
TikTok is teaming up with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to bring critical, time-sensitive information directly to people’s “For You” feeds. The goal is to raise awareness of missing children and leverage the power of the U.S. TikTok community to help reunite missing children with their families. The project was piloted in Texas from January to December 2024, when AMBER Alerts were viewed more than 20 million times and contributed to 2.5 million visits to NCMEC’s website. The AMBER Alerts will now reach more than 170 million Americans.