Proposed ‘Ebony Alert’ Would Work Like Amber, Silver Alerts

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A proposed bill in the California Legislature would create “Ebony Alerts” for missing Black women and girls and would work just like Amber and Silver alerts work for missing children and senior citizens, respectively.

The bill, Senate Bill 673, proposed by Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Los Angeles, is a response to those who say that Black women and children receive far less attention from law enforcement and the media than white women and children who go missing.

Of the quarter-million women and girls who went missing in the U.S. in 2020, 100,000 of those were Black, according to data cited during a congressional hearing on the topic. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said that Black women and girls make up 13 percent of the female population in the U.S. but accounted for 35 percent of all missing women in 2020.

And proponents of such action say that missing Black women and children are treated differently than their white counterparts. The latter stay in the news longer and generally receive more interest from law enforcement who may dismiss a missing Black woman as having left on her own or left with a partner. Black women and children are often classified as runaways, which doesn’t meet the criteria for an Amber Alert.

When white women and children go missing, they are more often stereotyped as blameless. It’s sometimes called “missing white woman syndrome.”

“When young girls, women of color, are harmed or go missing, they are often portrayed much differently than their white counterparts who are stereotyped as innocent, blameless or in need of protection,” Danielle Slakoff, assistant professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento told The Sacramento Bee.

Slakoff looked at four years of coverage of missing women and children from 11 major newspapers across the country and found that media messages were different for Black women than for white women.

The bill would authorize law enforcement to request the California Highway Patrol to activate an Ebony Alert within an appropriate geographical area when Black youth go missing for “unexplained or suspicious circumstances.”