Parents Encouraged To Create Safety Profile on Amber Alert Awareness Day

In honor Amber Awareness Day, Smart911, headquartered in Framingham, is encouraging parents to create a Safety Profile for their household at www.smart911.com, which can include current photos and physical descriptions of their children.  

Today marked the 18th anniversary that Amber Hagerman was abducted while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, and later found murdered. In 2003, President Bush established the national AMBER Alert.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the first three hours are the most critical when trying to locate a missing child. When a child is reported missing it can take up to an hour or more to have a current photo distributed to law enforcement officers in the field. 

If the family has a Smart911 Safety Profile, and dials 9-1-1 in any of the 450-plus communities across the country with the service, their child's photo and description will be immediately available to call-takers and can be passed on to law enforcement officials in the field, launching a search in seconds or minutes as opposed to hours.

Smart911 allows citizens to create a free Safety Profile for their household with information they want 9-1-1 and emergency responders to have during an emergency. When a citizen makes an emergency call, their Safety Profile is automatically displayed to the 9-1-1 call-taker, allowing them to send the right response teams to the right location with the right information.

"As a parent, having a child go missing can be the most terrifying moment: you may not be able to think straight, give important information or communicate effectively," said Tom Axbey, CEO of Rave Mobile Safety, creators of Smart911 in a press release. "We've seen firsthand how Smart911 can assist in this process, bringing immediate peace-of-mind to a parent by knowing their child's information is already in the hands of law enforcement. We encourage all parents to create a Safety Profile as an act of extra preparedness for their family."

Introduced nearly three years ago by Rave Mobile Safety,  Smart911 has been adopted in 33 states and more than 450 municipalities, including Framingham.