Bob Frankston



This is a very good article ­ it gives perspective on our efforts to do good,
especially when children are involved. It’s very rare to have a sober look at this issues.
The article doesn’t address the issue of “Internet porn” directly ­ what makes it different
is that it has a strong political agenda that goes well beyond concerns about children.

Excerpts:

Of the 17 children Massachusetts has issued alerts on since it created its system in 2003, all have been safely returned.

These are encouraging statistics - but also deeply misleading, according to some of the only outside scholars to examine the system in depth. In the first independent study of whether Amber Alerts work, a team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that Amber Alerts - for all their urgency and drama - actually accomplish little.

[later the article notes that it isn’t obvious that the Amber alert played a vital role in most of these cases]

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What Amber Alerts do create, its critics say, is a climate of fear around a tragic but extremely rare event, pumping up public anxiety. Griffin calls it "crime control theater," and his critique of Amber Alerts fits into a larger complaint on the part of some criminologists about crime-fighting measures - often passed in the wake of horrific, highly publicized crimes - that originate from strong emotions rather than research into what actually works. Whether it's child sex-offender registries or "three strikes" criminal-sentencing rules, these policies, critics warn, can prove ineffective, sometimes costly, and even counterproductive, since they heighten public fears and distract from threats that are at once more common and more tractable.

[And ruin lives]

"The problem with these politically expedient solutions is that they look good but do very little to solve the problem," says Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern.

###

Critics, however, measure the price of the program not in money but in broader social costs, in anxiety, panic, and misdirected public energy. Amber Alert and other measures "generate the appearance, but not the fact, of crime control," Griffin and Miller wrote. In so doing, such crime-fighting efforts reinforce misconceptions about what we should and shouldn't be afraid of.

###

This is, of course, little consolation to parents who have lost children to kidnappers. But, according to Fox, if we want to save children's lives, we'd do better to worry about loosely enforced bicycle helmet and seat-belt laws, or the safety standards of school buses - all of which are much more statistically dangerous but lack comparably high-profile systems for stoking public concern.

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Benjamin Kuipers:
Steven Pinker makes a good case that we live in the least violent
and most peaceful time in the existence of homo sapiens,
and even recent decades have gotten more peaceful:

Yet constant "if it bleeds it leads" news and scare tactics by the
current administration have so many of us convinced we live in
an especially violent time.

Here's where the Internet can be most useful.  You can use it to
get a constant dose of violent news if you want to, but you can also
use it to get wise discourse by Ben Kuipers and Steven Pinker.

On the other hand, there are much larger impending dangers to
children and other people that you don't hear about so much
through the news, but you can find through the Internet, such
as the effects of climate change.