<p>Hours after 14-month-old Jayton Dentler disappeared, police in Lafayette, Colo., called the media and activated an Amber Alert that plastered Jayton's face over television and the Internet.</p><p>The next day, his father dropped him off with relatives in Iowa, pressured by the Amber Alert's spotlight, according to police.</p><p>The same thing happened after Hunter Thompson was snatched from a store in Anderson, S.C. The 7-year-old was left at a nearby grocery store a half-day later, his abductor's hand forced by the media attention, police say.</p><p>Missing children's advocates hope this will become standard operating procedure now that Amber Alert systems are active across the United States a year after Congress expanded the program.</p><p>Critics point to the case of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia of Sarasota, Fla. Carlie's parents called police within minutes of her highly publicized disappearance in February. But a full day passed before police decided the case fit the Amber Alert profile. Carlie's body was found several days later.</p><p>One problem is that each state has different rules about case specifics that qualify for Amber Alerts. Also, police and families sometimes face layers of bureaucracy before local Amber Alert officials will agree to issue statewide alerts. In addition, states must negotiate the broadcasting of alerts across state lines.</p><p>"You've got something that kind of works sometimes, but it's inhibited by bad policy, by inadequate funding and by an inability to create a uniform system," said Mark Klaas, who became an advocate for missing children when his 12-year-old daughter Polly was kidnapped from her home in 1993 and killed.</p><p>There is wide agreement that kidnapped children are better off with Amber Alert systems than without.</p><p>Authorities link the recovery of at least 134 children since 1999 to the AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alert's system of notifying the public of child kidnappings using television, radio and Internet broadcasts, as well as flashing highway signs. Numbers are not kept on how many Amber Alerts are issued.</p><p>"Every year nearly 800,000 children are reported missing," Attorney General John Ashcroft said last week. "While most of these children return home safely, the death or disappearance of a single life carries a loss that cannot be measured."</p><p>Supporters praise Amber Alert and the people who make the program work: police, broadcasters and citizens who make it their business to keep eyes open for missing kids.</p><p>When an Amber Alert is sounded, case details are flashed to media outlets and lottery retailers describing the missing child and the suspected kidnappers and providing other information. Highway traffic advisory signs are activated, and a special telephone number is distributed for people to call if they see the child or have any information.</p><p>Under the program _ named after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in Texas and killed in 1996 _ police also get immediate faxes, telephone text messages and e-mails describing the child and possible kidnappers.</p><p>"Every person who would think of abducting a child can know that a wide net will be cast," President Bush said last year when he signed the bill funding the program with $25 million. "These criminals can know that any driver they pass could be the one that spots them and brings them to justice."</p><p>When Congress first considered the bill, only nine states had AMBER Alert systems, said Deborah Daniels, the assistant U.S. attorney general who coordinates state Amber Alert programs for the Justice Department.</p><p>Forty-one states had programs by the time Bush signed the bill and all 48 contiguous states have them now. Hawaii and Alaska are working on theirs.</p><p>Some angry parents question the time it takes to issue alerts, and local police are frustrated at having to fill out paperwork, attend classes, then still have to convince state officials that alerts should be issued.</p><p>In the South Carolina case, Anderson County Sheriff Gene Taylor said it took his officers about five hours on March 22 to persuade state authorities to issue an Amber Alert for little Hunter Thompson.</p><p>"We need to put a little oil on the cogs to make it run better," Taylor said.</p><p>Requiring a state to get permission from other states for cross-border Amber Alerts also causes delays, says Klaas. He cited a Georgia kidnapping that he said required 30 hours for permission to be granted for alerts to be broadcast in neighboring Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina.</p><p>"If you're not distributing that information across state lines, without a 30-hour lead time, you're going to miss the kid, and you're going to lose the kidnapper, and it's going to cost lives," Klaas said.</p><p>The only way the government could require states to relay Amber Alerts nationwide immediately would be to federalize the program. Justice's Daniels said that would be a mistake.</p><p>The program works best when local authorities can weed out false or inaccurate reports, she said. Otherwise, the alerts could become as common as the shrieking car alarms many people ignore.</p><p>___</p><p>On the Net:</p><p>HASH(0x28638e4)</p><p>HASH(0x286398c)</p><p>HASH(0x2863a70)</p>
