Elmira Muradkhanyan is a journalism and sociology senior at Loyola Marymount University and Golden State's summer 2026 intern.
There’s that familiar, unwelcome sound again – not a phone call or an alarm clock, but the blaring emergency notification that jolts people awake and sends many scrambling to silence it before reading it.
On the evening of May 22, Southern Californians heard that tone as an Amber Alert flashed across their smartphone screens warning that a 3-month-old boy had been abducted in a carjacking in Alhambra. Minutes later, another notification followed: The child had been found safe, and the alert had been canceled.
There’s no doubt Amber Alerts serve a worthy purpose: helping law enforcement quickly locate missing or abducted children. But in addition to flashing on freeway signs and other public displays, they arrive on our phones with loud alarm tones, limited context and what often feels like an overwhelming amount of information in a space most people are used to reading tiny text messages. The same goes for other emergency notifications – evacuation orders, dangerous weather, even earthquakes – some of which have been sent in error, possibly training people to ignore them.
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Is the system achieving its intended purpose? And is mass annoyance really the best way we have to find missing children?
In some cases, perhaps.
The 3-month-old baby abducted in a stolen car incident in Alhambra was found minutes after the Amber Alert went out. According to police, locals spotted the car in neighboring South Pasadena, and the youngster was safely retrieved.
Last week, a mother accused of abducting her infant son in the Bay Area was found with her child in Los Angeles hours after an Amber Alert was issued.
But not all Amber Alerts resolve so swiftly or favorably. On May 25, an alert went out for 5-year-old Daleyza Fregoso after her mother was found dead in South Los Angeles. Nearly three weeks later, Mexican authorities located Daleyza and arrested her father, who was charged with killing Daleyza's mother.
The Amber Alert brought attention to the abduction, but the recovery wasn’t immediate and depended on cooperation between multiple law enforcement agencies across an international border, not everyday citizens on the alert for the missing child.
Elmira Muradkhanyan
The disparity in results raises questions about the effectiveness of these and other emergency notifications sent to our phones. Independent research is limited, but what’s published is concerning. Timothy Griffin, a University of Nevada criminologist who has studied Amber Alerts for decades, has called the system “crime control theater.” His research suggests that the alerts themselves play very little role in the recovery of children compared to other factors, such as the relationship of the abductee to the perpetrator.
There’s also the broader concern about "alert fatigue," the tendency for individuals to ignore or delete notifications when they receive too many, including those that cause panic but turn out to be false alarms. And Amber Alerts are just one more noise buzzing for our attention – they sound no different from, say, extreme weather warnings or evacuation orders.
Furthermore, a number of well-publicized errors over the years haven’t helped combat alert fatigue. In 2018, Hawaiians infamously received a warning of an impending ballistic missile attack. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message sent to people’s phones screamed. Nearly 40 minutes of statewide panic ensued before word was sent out that the message was a mistake.
Paul Thornton
Last year, police in Glendale accidentally sent out two missing-person warnings for an 81-year-old man suffering from dementia to all of L.A. County, not just city residents. Earlier that year, during the January wildfires, evacuation warnings went out across the county in the middle of the night to people in no danger, causing a panic. Afterward, officials announced they would overhaul the alert system.
Of course, these examples aren’t Amber Alerts, which are not sent out willy-nilly. According to law enforcement officials I interviewed and publicly available information, police must verify that a child has been kidnapped and is in urgent danger, and that there is enough identifying information to allow the public to help.
That’s all well and good, but the public's trust in emergency notifications risks being undermined by prior errors and notification fatigue brought on by messages that all sound the same.
Like it or not, our phones are the way we receive critical information, and public trust is crucial. Officials should think hard about whether their existing system truly is the best way for conveying emergency notifications and alerts, or if they’re just training people to silence their phones and ignore what might actually be life-or-death information.
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Michael Tubbs
