Exercise developed and produced by:

Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies

National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism

Office of Justice Programs, National Institutes of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Mobilizing a Community Around the Desire to Protect Children

Transcript [Listen to this talk]

DR. TIERNEY: Thank you very much, Diana, for that incredible first person account. Our next speaker is Ernie Allen, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an agency that he co-founded. Ernie came to the center following public service in Kentucky, where he was the Chief Administrative Officer of Jefferson County, Kentucky, Director of Public Health and Safety for the City of Louisville, and Director of the Louisville Jefferson County Crime Commission. He's an attorney, and a member of the Kentucky bar, and he has held faculty positions at the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky and Indiana University.

MR. ALLEN: Thank you. I was saying to Diane, I can't help but think about the power of people, the power of individuals to make a difference. I was a little bit curious about why I was invited to be here. I don't claim knowledge or expertise in bioterrorism, but when Hopkins asks I respond, and Monica made the point that she thought there was relevance in terms of the way that we have built our networks and mobilized the public as a real asset.
I know that there's kind of a stereotype, and that stereotype is that if you tell the public the truth in times of crisis, people will over-react or resort to violence, they'll panic. And I submit to you, and I recognize that the underlying premise of this conference is that that's wrong, so what I would like to do today is try to make the case as it relates to one particular effort, one particular initiative, that the public not only should be communicated with, but that the public is a vital ally in times of emergency. And that average citizens can do amazing things, as you've just heard.

My premise today is that if we tell people the truth, if we identify roles and are specific about what they could do, and if we mobilize them to work with existing public agencies and private efforts, we magnify the value and the impact of the whole. And to illustrate that point, let me talk a little bit about the history 20 years ago when we began an effort to try to mobilize the nation and attack the problem of missing and exploited children.

For those of you who can remember 20 years ago, it was a time very much like last year when the media called in the Year of the Missing Child. It was a time of Adam Walsh and the missing and murdered children in Atlanta. And enormous recognition of the fact that this was a nation that didn't have a plan and didn't respond very well to these crises, these disasters that occurred to communities one child at a time. And as a result, what we learned, and I think what we came to understand is that this is a nation of 50 states that often act like 50 separate countries, and 18,000 different police departments, that by and large didn't communicate with each other.

Monica mentioned to me before the panel that there are 3,000 public health agencies in the United States, and I want you to know how jealous I am of your small numbers. But I suspect that the communication and information sharing challenges are very much the same as we faced in law enforcement. So what have we tried to do about it?

Twenty years ago you couldn't enter missing child information into the FBI's national crime computer, put information about stolen cars, stolen guns, but not stolen children. And the federal government opposed a law that would allow you to do that, and the quote was, "It would interfere with the management prerogatives of the FBI", like getting in the way of doing really important stuff, like working bank robberies and tracking down car thieves. Well, that changed.

In 1982, Congress passed what was called the Missing Children's Act, made it possible to put that information in into NCIC, so at least there was the ability to exchange and spread information around the country. When Adam Walsh was abducted and murdered in 1981, arguably the most high profiled child abduction case since the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Walsh family mobilized their friends, created their own posters, and called every police department in their home state of Florida two weeks into the investigation, just to make sure they had posters, they had the little boy's picture, they knew what to do.

What they found was 80 percent of those police departments didn't know who Adam Walsh was. Eighty percent of them didn't know their little boy was missing, so that no matter how good a job that local community did in putting up pictures in the front windows of 7-11s, the reality is that if your child disappeared, you were on your own. There was no network, there was no system. And so that's what we sought to do. We sought to build a network where there was none. We sought to create a mechanism for rapidly disseminating images and information across America and around the world.

To millions of Americans, our organization is probably still the milk carton organization, because that was our first aggressive effort to take pictures of missing kids into homes across the country. We stopped doing that because Dr. Spock and others said we were scaring America's children to death, so we sought more generic ways of getting that information out there.

We had a nation of 18,000 police departments. How do we communicate with 18,000 agencies when NCIC even today, though it's changing, is still text only. How do we provide a picture real time to a police officer in Osceola, Iowa? Well, what we tried to do was work with private sector partners to build a network. CompuServe gave us a hundred free accounts, so we created state clearinghouses in 50 states, replicating the airline hub and spoke system, feeling that it would be easier to communicate with 50 than 18,000, and maybe those 50 could then get the information to all the agencies in their state.
We developed public/private partnerships. The center works closely with the United States Department of Justice, but we also work with photo partners who are actively distributing missing child information, companies like ADVO whose direct mail card, the "Have you seen me?" fliers going to 85 million homes a week. One out of every six of those children is recovered as a direct result of that photograph.

Walmart whose bulletin boards in 3,000 stores have already led in the last three years to the recovery of 75 children, just because Walmart shoppers walk in, look at the picture and say I know where that child is, just recovered an infant abducted from New York in a laundromat in Aida, Oklahoma, because a grandmother who had gone into town to use the laundromat saw the child, then went to Walmart and she walked in the front door, saw the poster of that child on the bulletin board. Mobilizing the eyes and ears of the public.

We created a central mechanism for people to report that information, a national toll-free hotline, and today a cyber tip line, a 911 for the internet. So what we sought to do were several very basic things. One is to go to the public and say this is a serious problem. This is a disaster problem happening to one family, but 800,000 families a year are experiencing it, and you can help. Here's what you can do, at its most basic, look at the pictures.

Secondly, if you have information, here's a mechanism to provide it. Thirdly, through these clearinghouses, and through law enforcement and a variety of other means, we're mobilizing volunteers to help educate families and kids about how to stay safe. And we're mobilizing businesses to provide the kinds of tools that parents need should their child become missing, photo IDs, free pictures of their kids.

Is it working? Well, the recovery rate has climbed from 60%10 years ago to 94% today. 3.2 million hits every day on our internet website which has absolutely revolutionized the way we get information to the public. The scariest information is that we know from data from research, that in the most serious child abduction cases, in abduction homicides, in 74% of those cases, the child is dead within the first three hours, so we can't wait until tomorrow. We have to move now, and so mobilizing public and private sector resources and really using the public as an asset, going to the public to help is bringing children home as never before.

Let me cite two very specific examples of simple ways that we think you can mobilize the public, and that have not resulted in vigilante violence or outrageous acts on the part of the public. One is the so-called Amber alert. Born 1996, a local grass roots effort following the abduction and murder of a nine year old in Arlington, Texas, a little girl named Amber Hagerman. The community was outraged and in these kinds of cases, you see all of the same dynamics that happen in disaster cases. The community mobilizes, people help law enforcement search. There are command centers created. There's fear that goes into thousands of homes and parents who say there but for the grace of God go my family and my child.

Well, Texas authorities, broadcasters and law enforcement said what if we use the old emergency broadcast system, the EAS system today, to provide breaking information in the most serious cases via radio, and all of us experts said you can't find a missing child through the use of radio. Well, we were wrong. Today there are 84 Amber plans across the nation, 34 statewide, and 44 children have already been saved as a direct result of Amber broadcast using radio or crawls across T.V. screens, including those two teenaged girls last summer in Lancaster, California who were recovered literally within minutes of their execution, simply through the power of communication. Giving the public information in a timely manner and telling them here's what you do with it. Call somebody and tell us about it. Forty-four lives saved and at no cost.

The second one I want to talk about is a little more controversial, and that is Megan's Law. The whole notion of taking public information that the public heretofore has not been able to access. Criminal history, criminal conviction record is public record. But as any of you from New Jersey know, when a convicted sex offender was paroled and lived across the street from a family, the family didn't know about it. The child basically befriended by the guy, ultimately murdered, so the question is can we in a reasonable way provide information to the public, just knowledge, and the critics said this will create blood in the streets. There will be massive vigilante violence.

Well, there are now Megan's Laws in all 50 states. The State of Washington has done extensive research, and what they have found is that in less than 3 percent of the cases were there reported acts of harassment directed towards the offenders. Now there have been some outrageous acts, and I don't tolerate harassment at all. I think that's got to be dealt with, but the reality is that the doomsayers said there'd be 80 percent, or 60 percent. And the message of Megan's Law, the success of Megan's Law has been based in two basic facts. One is tell people the truth. Where there had been the most dramatic reactions to offenders coming back into the community, has been when neighbors have found out about it without there being a public communication, without public meetings. Then people feel they're being betrayed, and that this guy is being slipped in under cover of darkness.
When you tell people the truth, when you go to the public with information, they can handle it. So my recommendations today, and this is certainly not rocket science or something you've never heard before is one, tell people the truth. Two, ask for their help, empower people to help, prepare, organize, just as was done in New York, and be specific. Give people tasks that they understand, and our lesson from the network that we have built is that people will help, and it will make a difference. Thank you very much.

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