According to the U.S. Department of Justice, of the children
abducted by strangers and murdered, 75% are killed within the first
three hours. Amber Alerts are designed to inform the general public
quickly when a child has been kidnapped and is in danger so that "the
public [would be] additional eyes and ears of law enforcement."^{[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#cite_note-irsay-8][9][/url]}
As of August 2002, the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children reported that 17 children had been successfully recovered
after an Amber alert was issued, including one case in which the
abductor released the child after hearing the alert.^{[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#cite_note-irsay-8][9][/url]}

By September 2002, Amber alerts were used by all or part of 26 states and had helped to recover 27 children.^{[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#cite_note-cnnseptember2002-13][14][/url]}

Some outside scholars examining the system in depth disagree with the "official" results.^{[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#cite_note-bostonglobe080720-24][25][/url]}
A team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked
at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that
Amber Alerts actually played little apparent role in the eventual
return of abducted children. Furthermore, AMBER Alerts tended to be
"successful" in relatively mundane abductions, such as when the child
was taken by a noncustodial parent or other family member. There was
little evidence that Amber Alerts routinely "saved lives", although a
crucial research constraint was the impossibility of knowing with
certainty what "would have" happened if no Alert was issued in a
particular case.

Griffin and co-author Monica Miller articulated the limits to AMBER
Alert in a subsequent research article. They pointed out that AMBER
Alerts are inherently constrained, because to be successful in the most
menacing cases there needs to be a rapid synchronization of several
felicitous events (rapid discovery that the child is missing and
subsequent Alert, the fortuitous discovery of the child or abductor by
a citizen, and so forth). Furthermore, there is a contradiction between
the need for rapid recovery and the prerogative to maintain the strict
issuance criteria to reduce the number of frivolous Alerts, creating a
dilemma for law enforcement officials and public backlash when Alerts
are not issued in cases ending as tragedies. Finally, the implied
causal model of AMBER Alert (rapid recovery can save lives) is in a
sense the opposite of reality: In the worst abduction scenarios, the
intentions of the perpetrator usually guarantees that anything public
officials do will be "too slow."

Because the system is publicly praised for saving lives despite
these limitations, Griffin and Miller argue that AMBER Alert acts as
"crime control theater" in that it "creates the appearance but not the
fact of crime control". AMBER Alert is thus a socially constructed
'solution' to the rare but intractable crime of child-abduction murder.
Griffin and Miller have subsequently applied the concept to other
emotional but ineffective legislation such as Safe Haven Laws and
Polygamy raids, and continue their work in developing the concept of
"crime control theater" and on the AMBER Alert system.