Blake Dowling: Tech tools to help find missing kids

A closeup of missing children posters on a bulletin board, with a central image, reflects the communitys hope and awareness in the search for the kids

In 2023, nearly 30,000 children were reported missing to Florida law enforcement agencies.

A kidnapped child is every parent’s worst nightmare, something no parent should experience.

When I was growing up, a kidnapping in Florida was put into the national spotlight that no one who lived at that time could forget.

Adam Walsh went missing in 1981 at age 6 and was killed by his kidnapper. During that Summer, Adam was taken from a Sears Department Store in Hollywood, Florida.

After his abduction, his father, John Walsh, made his mission to stop kidnappings and crime in general.

With that, the show “America’s Most Wanted” was born.

Hosted by John Walsh, the show ran for 24 seasons, catching over 1,190 criminals through tips called into the show and law enforcement.

Also in 1984, following Adam’s high-profile kidnapping, Congress passed the Missing Children’s Assistance Act, followed by the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Not long after that, the “Code Adam” alert became the standard for department stores to help find missing children fast.

Then, in 2006, President George W. Bush signed into law the “Adam Walsh Child Protection Safety Act.”

There was also a made-for-TV movie called Adam, which ran for several years in the 80s.

During each broadcast, pictures of missing children were shared with a hotline for viewers. Fifty missing children were shown, and calls resulted in 13 of those children being found. These media engagements would be an early look at the future of the massive impact technology and digital media would have on locating missing children.

These days, we have a wide array of tools to ensure that missing kids are found as soon as possible. One of those tools was named after Adam Walsh. The ADAM Program is the “Automated Delivery of Alerts on Missing Children.”

This program was rolled out in 2000 and, to this day, uses technology to geo-target the region of the missing child and get photos sent to the media, schools, and medical centers ASAP to assist law enforcement with locating the child. The NCMEC led this effort, and LexisNexis built the software.

Some statistics on the ADAM program show that 1,145 of the 1672 missing child cases processed are resolved. That is awesome. Technology is helping parents and law enforcement keep our kids safe.

Another massive weapon in this fight is the Amber Alert system. We all know that loud noise might be the difference in finding a lost child. The system is named after another abducted child, Amber Rene Hagerman. Amber was kidnapped in Texas on Jan. 17, 1996; she was 9 years old.

The alert system developed by media and local police in Dallas, Texas, was a response to her abduction. By 2012, through the Wireless Emergency Alerts Program (WEA) — AMBER alerts would be sent directly to cell phones, which we are familiar with today.

The impact is staggeringly positive.

According to numbers last year, over 1,200 children were saved or found because of the system. Other tech tools to allow all of us to do our part in locating missing kids. Right now, you can scan a QR code to see missing children within 50 miles of your location. This program and tech are another product of the NCMEC.

I scanned it to keep my eyes open for the five missing kids listed in Tallahassee.

Facial recognition tools and artificial intelligence are also employed in the fight to find missing children. During the pandemic, this tech helped reunite a Chinese man with his family 32 years after his abduction.

GPS tracking can also be used. If you have a child, make sure they have one of these GPS devices and track their whereabouts on a cellphone. This redundancy could make a difference.

Here are several to choose from.

Angel Sense is explicitly designed for children with special needs; it even includes a two-way talk feature, which could be an additional positive in various situations.

With these technologies and programs, agencies and people help parents and law enforcement fight back. The goal is no one must experience what the Walsh or Hagerman families went through.

Unfortunately, there will always be criminals, but by working together (along with the latest tech), we can do our best to stop the monsters in our society from committing crimes and getting away with them.