PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) – Aroostook County has seen several missing person cases in recent months. In some of these cases, an amber or silver alert has been issued to the public for help in locating the missing individual.
Brady Smith, Deputy Chief for the Presque Isle Police Department said, “Silver alerts in the past used to be primarily for elderly folks that had either wandered from home or were lost or were missing. Recently some legislation has changed where we can issue silver alerts now for people who either have medical or physical or mental disabilities that aren’t capable of either taking care of themselves full time or shouldn’t be by themselves all the time. Where if they’re missing it’s a true endangerment to their overall health and wellbeing. We see the uptick in silver alerts now lately because of those new criteria. Amber alerts are a little bit different. Amber alerts are child specific. So, amber alerts are for anybody that’s 17 or under where the police department has credible information that they’ve either been removed from a parent or guardian without consent, and they’ve been taken away from their home.”
Local police departments are not permitted to issue amber or silver alerts. That decision is left up to the state police based on a set of criteria. Smith, “Both the alerts get activated by the state police actually. So, for a silver and amber alert we have to call down to Houlton to the state police barracks. There are forms that we fill out with the information we have name, date of birth, things like that. For the amber alerts, the state police has people that review the criteria. If the criteria is met they’re the ones that issue the national alert. Nobody can issue their own silver or amber alert it has to go through the state police.”
Smith says that these alerts can and have helped in locating missing individuals but can also negatively impact search efforts. “A lot of times people want to go out and go in the woods and they want to search and there’s a point and a time for that but initially when we’re doing our initial information gathering especially like with the warden service if they have their tracking dogs or the helicopter things like that it’s very difficult for us because that can throw off a lot of things. The best thing is if you have information of any kind whether it’s I think I saw them, or they know this person, they usually handle them you should talk to them. Anything we can get like that please call, please give that to us. With the past couple of child ones. We did get some very good information actually about 1 child that we found out of state and were able to bring back. Smith says that if you are looking for more information on silver or amber alerts in our area you can visit www.maine.gov.
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