Amber Alert hoax could hurt system

The good news about a three-year-old boy who was thought to be missing could mean bad news for the Amber Alert system. Smithfield, North Carolina police chief Steve Gillikin announced Tuesday that the boy was never missing and the Amber Alert was a hoax.

The mother of Siraj Munir Davenport reported that he disappeared Sunday as she loaded her car at the Brightleaf Flea Market in Smithfield. Police searched the area, including a river next to the market.

"I can tell you that the child was never in Smithfield. The child was not abducted from the flea market," said Chief Gillikin at a news conference. "The child is safe."

He said he couldn't give any further details because state and federal investigators are still looking into the case.

Jeff Moore, co-chairman of South Carolina's Amber Alert Oversight Committee, says he hopes this one incident won't hurt the program.

"Obviously, when you have them (Amber Alerts), people pay attention to them. And when you have hoaxes, you begin to wonder what's credible and what's not, and eventually, if you have enough of them, it would undermine the entire integrity of the program," he says.

That would not only waste law enforcement resources, it could lead to the public ignoring Amber Alerts, jeopardizing children who really have been abducted.

He says there are procedures in place to try to prevent hoaxes and to make sure that a case warrants an Amber Alert. There are about 6,000 reports a year in South Carolina of missing children, he says, and if the state issued an Amber Alert for every one of them, the public would be bombarded by 20 alerts a day.

Before an alert is issued, professional investigators question the person who reports the missing child. Police search the child's home, the area in which he was last seen, and question relatives to make sure one of them didn't come pick up the child. Even then, not all cases trigger an Amber Alert.

In September of 2006, a Kershaw County teenager disappeared between her bus stop and home. She had been kidnapped and held in an underground bunker for days, but was able to escape after sending her mother a text message on the kidnapper's cell phone. An Amber Alert was never issued, though, because there were no eyewitnesses to the kidnapping.

"We had nothing to put on an Amber Alert," Moore says, since they had no eyewitnesses, no description of a car or a suspect.

The state's procedures were criticized for being too strict in deciding when to issue an alert. Now, it will have to talk about how to try to prevent hoaxes.

"We never even thought about the fact that there might be somebody out there who would intentionally report a child abduction and ask for an Amber Alert activation," Moore says. "But certainly, with what's happened in North Carolina and bringing this to our attention, we will probably visit this and consider putting some penalties on making a false Amber Alert report."

There are penalties already for giving police false information, but he says there may need to be tougher penalties when all the resources associated with an Amber Alert are called in.