Two weeks after two boys disappeared in the Walking Shield area of Red Lake, there's still no hint of their whereabouts.
Tristan Anthony White, 4, and his brother, Avery Lee Stately, 2, were last seen the morning of Nov. 22. Hundreds of volunteers and professionals extensively searched for the boys via air and ground but found nothing.
No Amber Alert was ever issued because the disappearance didn't meet formal guidelines. The alerts are only used when there's strong evidence of an abduction.
In this case, the media responded quickly when news of the disappearance was made public. But it raises the question of whether a formal Amber Alert would have received more attention even sooner.
There are logical reasons to limit how often such alerts are issued. If they occurred daily, people might become oblivious and ignore them. But there's also a problem with restricting them. While there's no reason to suspect these boys were abducted, there's also insufficient evidence to conclusively rule they weren't. If indeed they were, however, a lot of time has now passed. The greatest chance of mustering resources regionally to find them is long gone. By now, the boys could be anywhere on the globe.
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That raises the question of whether it would be prudent to revisit the alert system so names and faces can be shared with the public virtually immediately -- at least on a regional basis. With the growing number of cell phones that can receive photos and news alerts, and the large number of office workers that use the Internet, there's plenty of infrastructure to support such a system.
