Farewell From Assistant Attorney General Regina B. Schofield
Effective September 28, 2007, I will leave my post as National AMBER Alert Coordinator. During my tenure, I have been fortunate to be involved in many groundbreaking developments in the AMBER Alert system, all of which add up to a powerful network for protecting our nation's children.
As I hand over my role to a successor, I look back with pride on several of the AMBER Alert network's notable accomplishments. We reached a major milestone with the Wireless AMBER Alerts Initiative, a partnership with the wireless industry that offers wireless subscribers the opportunity to receive AMBER Alerts via text messages. We launched a program to establish Child Abduction Response Teams (CARTs), which can be deployed by law enforcement agencies when they respond to cases of missing and abducted children as part of an AMBER Alert or in response to missing children cases which do not meet the AMBER criteria.
We began an outreach effort to Indian tribes and to our counterparts in Canada and Mexico to ensure that abductors are unable to use tribal and international borders as shields. We recently selected 10 tribal sites to serve as models for developing and implementing AMBER Alert plans in Indian country. Additionally, law enforcement officials in the United States have been working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Mexican federal police to ensure that a system is in place in the event an abductor flees across the border with a child.
We have seen other achievements as well - partnerships with trucking carriers and airport security screeners, the issuance of an AMBER Alert commemorative stamp, a secondary distribution agreement with MySpace, and a greater recognition of the role that AMBER Alerts can play in stopping sex offenders from preying on children. Perhaps most important, AMBER Alert has grown from an effective emergency response system into a powerful deterrent, often stopping abductors in their tracks when it becomes clear that entire communities are helping to track them down.
I am proud to have been part of the growth and development of the AMBER Alert network, and I am grateful to all those who have worked with me - law enforcement officers, broadcasters, transportation officials, private sector representatives, our partners at National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the Wireless Association, and the millions of American citizens who are our eyes and ears. Thank you for your commitment to our children, and best wishes in your continued good work.
Regina B. Schofield, National AMBER Alert CoordinatorSeptember 2007