What there is to know
An AMBER alert was triggered by the Montreal Police Department on the night of Monday to Tuesday.
Two children abducted by their mother in Montreal have been found safe and sound in the United States.
Police agencies don’t always release all the information they have, but they send out these alerts based on a plethora of factors.
Found in the United States
An AMBER Alert was issued shortly before midnight Monday night for two children who were abducted by their mother in Montreal around 4:35 p.m. The trio was found in good health shortly after midnight by police in the United States.
Speed in play
According to Mélanie Aubut, spokesperson for the Enfants-Retour network, the AMBER alert is an essential tool. “Sometimes, it can be disturbing to hear your cell phone ring. But the more people who know about the abduction, and the faster they know, the more it helps the police. Every minute counts.” In the case of Monday’s alert, the information specified that the mother was traveling on foot or by public transportation. “But a train or a bus, they go fast and cover a good distance. It’s not because you’re on foot that you’re going to stay on foot, and we saw that in this case.”
Adapted to the survey
Commander Simon-Luc Tanguay of the Montreal Police Department (SPVM) points out that the AMBER Alert is used differently depending on the nature of the investigation. “We determine the radius where the message will be sent. We don’t always send it across Canada, or across Quebec. The distance is assessed by the investigation team.” He notes that investigators prefer to put a little more than a little less. “To take a fictitious example, if we know that the person took a bus an hour ago, we can estimate that a radius of, say, 200 km is needed. So we’ll put 300 km so that it will be valid in another hour.”
Undisclosed items
Also, some elements of the investigation are not revealed to the public by the police. “There are things that we know, but that we cannot say. So people are sometimes surprised. If we have information that the suspect has family in a particular region, we may want to alert that region, even if people will not necessarily understand why we are doing it.”
Nothing is certain
Using tools as sophisticated as the AMBER Alert also doesn’t mean that children will be found, or that they are in good health, notes Mélanie Aubut. “The Enfants-Retour network supports families whose child has gone missing and has been the subject of AMBER Alerts. Some have been found, but others were found in conditions we didn’t expect… They weren’t safe and sound. If there are tools that can help, we’re happy that the police are using them,” she says.
Three criteria of the AMBER alert
In Quebec, two police forces are authorized to trigger an AMBER alert: the Montreal Police Service (SPVM) and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ). For them to do so, three criteria must be met simultaneously:
- The police have reasonable grounds to believe that a child (a person under the age of 18) has been abducted.
- The circumstances surrounding the abduction indicate that the child is at risk of serious bodily harm or is in danger of death.
- The police department has sufficient descriptive information about one or more of the following: the child, the suspect, the means of transportation used, which suggests that the immediate dissemination of the alert will assist in locating the child.
Source: alerteamber.ca