Amber Alert still needs to be fixed

Recent events show that the Amber Alert system still needs to be fixed, such as the incident in Blue Springs this week where two teenagers kidnapped a woman and intended to cut her baby from the womb.
The incident is similar to a Skidmore case in December of 2004. Then an Amber Alert was delayed being issued for over eight hours in the hunt for Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s child because there was no procedure for a missing newborn baby.
Luckily this crime was stop- ped before we had a similar situation. These types of crimes are an awful reality that we must wake up, too.
I introduced a fix to the Amber Alert in 2005, but it was bottled up in Committee because lawmakers believed it was a unique situation. The loophole is named for Victoria Jo (Tory Jo) Stinnett who was found alive after the Amber Alert system helped yield a national tip that corroborated forensic evidence.
Time and again over the last two years we have seen that this is not a unique situation. This is just the latest incident – now is the time to fix this loophole before this happens again. My legislation will clarify that law enforcement may issue an Amber Alert for a newborn child, but they are not required to.