AmberView--Phase I Report

While the Pilot effort, coordinated in West Virginia and designed to work in collaboration with the State and national Amber Alert Programs, confirmed the viability of the AmberView concept and process, and demonstrated its operation, additional work is recommended in developing it into an operational capability in the areas of streamlining the enrollment process to reduce time disruption and costs; standardizing all the child information items necessary for enrollment; and determining if it would be desirable to support the use of existing child 2-D photos to quickly expand the AmberView program prior to deployment of 3-D cameras on a large scale. The AmberView Pilot project was enthusiastically embraced by parents, teachers and school administrators, law enforcement officers, media professionals, and others. The AmberView concept was developed in order to take advantage of the latest, cost-effective computer and communications technologies to help in the critical first hours (usually 3 hours) after a child is abducted or missing. AmberView enables the Amber Alert information coupled with a high-resolution 3-D image to be broadcast over the Internet and wireless networks, to law enforcement, and to media/news organizations, as well as others. The Pilot AmberView concept, supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice was publicly demonstrated in 2005 at the West Virginia High Technology Consortium (WVHTC) Foundation in Fairmont, WV. This report describes the AmberView concept with enhanced images, the development of AmberView, the implementation of AmberView, the effectiveness and lessons learned from the Pilot project, and recommendations for the future of AmberView. Appendixes A-F