Fueled by controversy over a kidnapping that continued for hours with no Amber Alert, New Jersey's attorney general wants more alerts more quickly.
The move comes after state troopers hesitated February 17th to issue an Amber Alert because callers to 9-1-1 said Zara Malani-Lin Abdur-Raheem's father was the abductor.
Under the alert's guidelines, domestic disputes are excluded from the program because of the possibility that one spouse could try to embarrass the other by creating a hoax situation. Police say that several witnesses saw Shamsid-Din Abdur-Raheem take the 3 month-old from her grandmother. Plus Zara's father had no custodial rights and had never been married to the child's mother.
"The system needs tweaking and that's happening," said Paul Loriquet, chief spokesman for acting NJ Attorney General Paula Dow. He said dispatchers will be trained to ask "a series of questions" that can determine whether there's "an imminent threat of violence."
Zara's father told investigators he dropped his daughter off the Driscoll Bridge in Sayreville after stopping at the side of the Garden State Parkway. State Police divers searched the Raritan River below for three days before "scaling back" the mission.
"I do not believe she is in that river," said a distraught Venetta Benjamin, Zara's mother. Adding another layer to the debate over whether an amber alert might have helped authorities track the infant after she was snatched, Benjamin had received a restraining order against the girl's father--at about the time of the kidnapping. It's not clear that police deciding whether to alert the public were aware that a judge had signed such an order.
In the future, says the attorney general's spokesman, alerts will be issued "even in cases involving parents taking children" when there's fear for the child's safety.
