Missing person alert: She went to the store to buy some peaches
- Jeannette Sutton
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
There's something really touching about this alert.
It is missing almost all of the critical information that we know should be contained in any missing person alert. For instance, we don't know who issued the message, there is no description of the missing person, there is no license plate. We also don't know when she left Happy Camp and how long she had been gone. The entire message is written in CAPS and it contains no information about who to call or how to help. There is no URL directing people to additional information, such as a picture or details describing her.
But something stands out: the human part of the message.
"Hammon was enroute to Gold Hill to buy peaches and take them to her mother's residence."
I don't know why this information was included - perhaps to humanize the situation? To capture people's attention? To alert locals to look at local peach stands and the roads in between? Maybe this is the information that was provided to the alerting authority from those who reported her missing.
Perhaps what is touching is how different it appears from so many missing person messages - instead of a terse message with a link, this one is personalized.
It sort of reminds me of the AMBER alerts that I will occasionally see that say "a child's life is in danger." It really grabs your attention and in an "attention economy" making a message relevant can be key to getting people to pay attention.
Did you know that researchers now estimate that the standard adult receives roughly 46 direct push notifications daily? Gen X averages under 100 alerts a day, but Gen Z averages around 185. The cognitive impact of constant alerts can be very distracting, making it hard to focus. The constant checking of messages also means that we must continuously evaluate whether that push notification (generally defined as a high-priority alert that actively wake up your screen or ping your attention) is really worth our attention. It also means we face alert fatigue simply from have our phones near us all day, every day.
And that may be why this particular message about "driving to the store to buy her mother some peaches" stands out to me. Not because it is particularly useful (this message is NOT actionable), but because it breaks through the daily alerts in a novel way.
How does this translate to alerts and warnings? I'm not going to advocate for writing messages that lack critical information. This message should have included key details to help the message receiver. The research record demonstrates a missing person message should include the following:
the name of the message sender,
the type of event (missing person),
where they were last seen and when,
a description of the missing person and
how they might be traveling,
plus any key vulnerabilities about that person.
It should also describe what we can do to help.
Perhaps this is one answer; in our recent research on AMBER Alerts, we conducted an experiment using three types of messages, two of which had live links to additional information. Participants were told multiple times that the link was live. But we found that less than 25% clicked on that link. In the case of this missing person, there is evidence on the County Sheriff's Facebook page that hundreds of people found their way there and interacted with the content posted online. They had to search for that information to get there, but they found it.
Missing person alerts are sort of a game of odds. It takes just one person to see the message in the right place at the right time to lead to information to find the missing person. But getting the attention of that one person may take a great deal of effort - or luck.
This event turns out to have a tragic ending. The missing woman was found deceased a few days after the alert was issued. No additional details were provided.
