I was surprised — but, then again, not really surprised — when I saw people complaining about the Amber Alert this week for a missing 3-year-old girl in Augusta. I didn’t see much of substance, initially, as people complained on social media, but initially I was grimly taken aback when I saw folks complaining about receiving the alert.
“They sent it several times! Get it together! The radio alert said ‘Asterix’ over and over and over!”
None of this should come as a surprise, I guess. But, really, a few interruptions by phone and a few clumsy announcements by radio seem like nothing compared with what I’d expect of the world should my child ever go missing. If my kid goes missing, I would hope to shut Facebook down and ruin everybody’s lives until she was found.
Complaining is something we do particularly well considering there is an audience for nearly everything. All we need is an opinion and a network and, boom, you say something, and it’s validated by responses from said network almost instantly and with relative ease.
Besides, complaining collectively about stuff that doesn’t really affect our lives is a nice distraction.
2016 has been a terrible year. These candidates. This unrest. Elder statespeople of popular culture dropping like flies. We have chosen to fabricate and buy into an outbreak of predatory clowns over paying attention to this election one more day.
I am heartened to read that on the surface, the Amber Alert, the first deployed in seven years, is believed to have been useful in tracking down 3-year-old Lenore Wilson. We’re still awaiting a full explanation of what happened after Wilson’s mother was taken to a hospital with what police called a drug-related emergency. A black woman who had previously cared for the child told officials she had the child and would bring her to the Augusta police. Law enforcement purportedly deployed the Amber Alert when Lenore didn’t show up at the police department as planned.
I’m concerned that Maine’s first Amber Alert in seven years was triggered when a white, 3-year-old girl was apparently with a black couple, especially at this moment in which law enforcement communities throughout the country are under scrutiny for brutal engagement with people of color.
Part of me is motivated to embrace the Amber Alert without question — the part of me that fears for the safety of my family. But another part of me sees this instance as one in which a statewide alert was issued for two people of color in a state where people of color already feel on edge — and in a national atmosphere in which people of color feel fear for their safety, particularly under the scrutiny of law enforcement.
I, even as a total skeptic, implicitly trust that an alert issued by law enforcement is inherently in the best interest of a child. But as my friend Samuel James wrote in a recent column in The Bollard about his experience with police as a person of color, “Some people learn to respect and depend on the police. I have learned to fear and avoid them.”
Could this alert, seemingly rare and issued for still obscure reasons, have been issued because the suspects — and we’re still not sure if they were actually suspected of anything at all — were black? Perhaps our governor’s racist rhetoric regarding his idea that people of color, particularly those with street-sounding aliases, are enemies of the state distorted how this situation was perceived.
As technological advances go, I am heartened by the deployment of the Amber Alert, and heartened by its potential as a life-saving tool. I wasn’t annoyed by the alerts on my phone or off-put. I have nothing to complain about there.
But this particular Amber Alert has me thinking about when it is used and why. And it has me thinking about the nerve-racking nature of the next Amber Alert for those who have been taught through lived and observed brutality that the state and its lethal force are disproportionately exacted against them.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
