Help Find Missing Children

On average, nearly 2000 children go missing each day in the United States - some 800,000 children per year. While programs like the national AMBER Alert™ system have been useful in alerting the public to abductions, the number of alerts issued and subsequent recoveries represent a small fraction of the missing. 

In 2013 a total of 194 Amber Alerts™ were issued nationwide involving 243 children. An AMBER Alert™ was issued for about 0.025% of all missing child cases. From 2008 to 2013 an average of 188 alerts were issued annually. 

According to the FBI, in 2014 there were 466,949 NCIC entries for missing children in the United States. Similarly, in 2013, the total number of missing children entries into NCIC was 462,567. Unfortunately, there is no reliable way to determine how many total children are actually missing in the U.S., as many children are never reported missing.

The team at Alerted, LLC believes technology is not being fully utilized in the recovery of missing children. While the Wireless Emergency Alert system has been credited with the recovery of 20 children since its inception and partnerships with Facebook and Google have gone a long way to raising awareness of the missing, the technology remains mostly billboard like and oftentimes is geographically irrelevant. 

In June 2012, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), a global community of innovators building practical open technology to make the world a better place hosted “RHoK Global June 2012” at the World Bank in Washington DC and Alerted, LLC was invited as a featured “problem”. Our team presented the missing child challenge alongside Nike, NASA and Amnesty International.

After an intense 48 hours we had a functional prototype application and presented it to a global audience of RHoK attendees. The team of developers who worked on our solution during RHoK would agree to stay on as volunteer developers and see our vision to completion.

Unfortunately, as time went on, our developer’s enthusiasm for bringing this technology to market as a volunteer effort diminished. As a side effect, our relationship became one of client/customer and we were forced to pay for completion. What we ended up with was a shell of our initial vision and we were not in a financial position to do much about it.

Our commitment to this project remains steadfast and we are intent on addressing this vital need. All donations in support of this project will go toward creating the technology. Your support will allow us to hire professional developers with the skill set to implement our vision and fund such an endeavor. Crowdsourcing can be an amazingly powerful tool – please donate whatever you can in support of this effort. It all counts. Help us find missing children.