Bill Would Create Yellow Alert System to Catch Hit-and-Run Drivers

[bing101]

http://www.capradio.org/articles/2014/06/13/bill-would-create-yellow-alert-system-to-catch-hit-and-run-drivers/

We need to wait for results to see how it will reduce hit and run in California and other states.

[agentsteel53]

what would the alert say?  "look for a car with blood on the bumper"?  a lot of hit and runs have no witnesses.

[roadman65]

Oh I have seen one, but what good did it do me.  The man was driving too fast on a wet road on Michigan Street in Orlando at the Division Avenue Curve, lost control of his vehicle, then hit a fence, done some damage to the fence, and then left after he picked up his bumper off the street that fell off from the impact of the crash. 

I called the cops to report it, but I was not later asked for a statement or nothing since.  As long as the insurance covered the fence, is all that matters in some people's mind.

[corco]

With admittedly limited information, I think I oppose such a thing- I fear sending out massive alerts for something as minor as a hit and run will cause an information overload and weaken the effectiveness of the amber alert. Hit and runs are annoying, and they suck, and the people that do this are terrible people who should be imprisoned, but I question how effective they would actually be in tracking down perps. Modern phones automatically start blaring when there is an amber alert or an inbound tornado to tell you there is one in the area - would this occur with hit and run incidents? How would the yellow alert be disseminated? How severe would the incident need to be to trigger the alert? Would a hit and run fender bender cause a yellow alert, or would somebody actually need to be dying/dead on the side of the road with witnesses for this to be triggered?

I suppose if it increases the perception that you will be caught, that might discourage hit and run incidents from occurring in the first place, and that's good, so long as it doesn't dilute the effectiveness of government issued alerts for actual life threatening crimes in progress/weather events/bomb strikes. Even in the case of a person on the side of the road that needs to go to the hospital after a hit and run, at least we know where they are and can get them to a hospital. While justice is good, the most important thing in this instance is to get the person who was hit medical care, and this doesn't do anything to help with that, and my thought is that mass alerts should only be used to actively save lives, not to catch perps.

And if we are only talking life threatening instances, why limit to hit and runs? That's one way to commit manslaughter,  but why not expand out to just a manslaughter alert?

[Scott5114]

I'm probably a horrible person for this, but I already ignore the Amber alerts, because the likelihood that I will be in the same place at the same time as the wanted person is vanishingly small. I don't read the plate number of every car I see, and I wouldn't remember the plate number or description of the vehicle by the time I see it anyway. (I have enough trouble remembering if I see the same customer twice at my job, much less some faceless entity driving a car I will probably never see.)

I sort of resent the Amber alerts' incursion on my phone–I should be able to control whether or not I get this information, but it is frustratingly difficult to get the phone to ignore it. When one of these happens, word gets out, mostly by people complaining about it appearing on their phones. It doesn't help that the area which the alert is cast out to is sometimes stupidly large–the most recent one I got was from Tahlequah, which is several hours away, nearer to the Arkansas border than it is to me. I could see pinging Tulsa and NW Arkansas, but hitting Oklahoma City too serves no purpose.

[roadman65]

Also, one of our local news agencies was in a local mall with mock missing posters posted at a special table in the mall.  The children in the poster are standing in plain sight of the poster being displayed and many people looking at the photo do not see the one in the picture standing there.

The news broadcast was to show how the common mind does not remember faces of photos on milk cartons, posters, etc.  Of course, they proved their point quite well.

[triplemultiplex]

From what I've read, Amber Alerts have not been nearly as useful as intended.  People just don't retain the information; especially the random strings of letters and numbers that make up a license plate.
Leads me to be pessimistic about that type of public alert being useful for hit & runs.

[jeffandnicole]

When NJ issues a Silver Alert, it is broadcasted on all VMSs throughout the state, regardless of where the person was last seen.  Extremely annoying when they take away from the travel times or other information the VMSs could be displaying.  The law states that media and other mass-communication methods should be used as well, although I can't recall a Silver Alert story on any of the state's major newspaper websites, and never received one on my cell phone (thank goodness).  At least Amber Alerts - in the rare instance they are issued - are generally headlined on those newspaper websites.

I would like to see a story on how effective the VMS alerts are in finding these lost people.  While the term 'Silver Alert' is supposed to be related to the fact that usually older people are the ones disoriented and are lost, a recent Silver Alert was for an 18 year old.  And in Delaware, they felt Silver was demeaning or wasn't proper, so they named them Gold Alerts.

[Billy F 1988]

Whatever Congress is doing with this, they clearly do not know the illeffectiveness of this system. It's not only stupid, it's clearly pointless because if you get hit by a fleeting hit-and-run suspect, your body is not quick enough to even get a license plate!