The Miami-Dade Police said today that the Amber Alert of a possible child abduction turned out to be a false alarm. Most of South Florida received the state-issued Amber Alert, of which several people complained on social media like Twitter about the alert because of its accompanying jarring alarm.
The false alarm started when a Good Samaritan tipped off the police after seeing a car with a little girl aged around 4 to 6 years old inside the trunk at a stoplight. The Good Samaritan's vehicle was behind the car in question. Further investigation had revealed that the child was with her father and that the father was helping his daughter out of the trunk. The girl was picking up a water bottle that fell in the backseat of the car, and opened the flap of the backseat to retrieve the bottle. Father and daughter were not aware that an alert was sent out.
Amber Alerts are sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through the Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which encompasses all wireless carrier subscribers. The new system trumped the accessibility of the old system, of which required a sign up and had only 700,000 registrants.
The US Senate had passed the America's Missing:Broadcast Emergency Response (Amber) Alert Act in 2003 with an initial USD25 million in funding. As of January this year, the Department of Justice reported that 602 children were saved from abduction because of the Amber Alerts.
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