Missing information: A content analysis of U.S. missing persons alerts using the missing and endangered persons message framework

Missing and endangered person (MEP) alerts are a prominent messaging strategy used by law enforcement agencies in the United States to recover missing persons, with over 1,800 AMBER Alerts issued via the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system and nearly 40 similar alerts introduced by state legislatures for other groups of missing people. Despite their prevalent use, the contents of MEP alerts have not yet been empirically examined. Drawing from warning message design and AMBER Alert best practices, we propose a new MEP Message Framework and use it to evaluate the contents of 4,053 MEP WEAs sent from 2013 to 2023. We find that the majority of messages are incomplete and lack detail about who is missing and how message receivers should respond, and often use jargon alert names (e.g. ‘AMBER Alert’) in place of specific details of the event. We conclude with proposed areas for future empirical and practical applications of the MEP Message Framework.