The first-in-the-nation Ebony Alert reaches cases police log as runaways, the classification that keeps most missing children out of the Amber Alert system.
BY OGNSC STAFF | Ognsc.com
When a Black child or young woman between the ages of 12 and 25 goes missing in California, the family can ask the law enforcement agency investigating the case to request an Ebony Alert from the California Highway Patrol. The system is nearly three years old. It has been used 31 times.
The alert was created by Senate Bill 673, authored by then-state Sen. Steven Bradford of Inglewood and signed in October 2023, making California the first state with an emergency alert built for missing Black youth and young women. In its first year the alert was activated 31 times and 27 of the people it was issued for were found and returned home, according to the California Highway Patrol. Pennsylvania, Alabama and Massachusetts have since proposed versions of their own.
The law was written around a classification that keeps most missing-child cases out of the public eye. California agencies took more than 60,000 reports of missing children in 2025, according to the state Department of Justice, and about 19 of every 20 were logged as runaways. Stranger abductions, the cases that dominate public fear, numbered in the dozens statewide.
Children logged as runaways are not necessarily safe, and many did not meaningfully choose to leave. They run from abuse at home, and children living on the street are whom traffickers look for first. The classification can still keep a case out of the Amber Alert system. SB 673 reaches those cases directly: it covers young people considered runaways, those who may be victims of trafficking and those missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances, and it directs that its provisions “shall be broadly construed.”
Nearly one in three children reported missing in the United States is Black, though Black people are about 14 percent of the population, according to Villanova University law professor Itay Ravid, who has written that Black children who go missing “are often labeled as runaways, which excludes them from the Amber Alert system.” FBI figures show Black children under 18 accounted for about 141,000 missing-person cases in 2022.
The recovery operations that make the news work on a different scale. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Aug. 25 that a five-day sweep called Operation Statewide Shield had recovered 163 missing children, ages 2 months to 17, across Florida, six other states, Puerto Rico and 12 countries. Three people were arrested. Uthmeier said many of the children “were human trafficking victims and suffered abuse, neglect and exploitation,” and acknowledged that the recoveries also included custody disputes, foster care cases and runaways.
California ran a comparable operation in March. Attorney General Rob Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that Operation Safe Return had located 37 missing children in Riverside County, with seven arrests, working with the U.S. Marshals Service, Riverside police and the county sheriff. Investigators used the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database to identify the children they considered most at risk. “Finding missing children and bringing them home safely is some of the most important work we can do,” Bonta said.
California’s annual missing-children reports break the totals out by report type, county and gender. They do not include a racial breakdown, which leaves no published measure of whether the state’s first-in-the-nation alert for missing Black children is reaching the children it was written for.
An Ebony Alert is issued by the Highway Patrol at the request of the agency investigating the case. Families who believe a case qualifies can make that request of the agency handling it.
A version of this story first appeared on ognsc.com.