Police will never apologize for issuing an Amber Alert

Police who run the Amber Alert system say they won't ever apologize for late-night alerts.

When a child goes missing, the system immediately sends an alert to cell phones, regardless of the time of day or night.

There have been six Amber Alerts so far in Ontario this year, including one issued in May for a Sudbury toddler taken by his mother. He was later found safe in Toronto.

Five of those six alerts have resulted in the safe return of the child, says Ontario Provincial Police staff sergeant Carole Dionne.

However she adds that calls to 911 increase in the hours following Amber Alerts.

That's because not everyone likes being woken up by the shrill alarm, particularly if the child resides in a different jurisdiction.

During an alert in late July several people called 911 to voice their frustrations about the alarm waking them in the middle of the night, especially since the missing child in question was nowhere near northern Ontario.

Dionne reminds people that 911 is not a complaint service. It's a number for emergencies only.

Some critics are calling for stricter rules on how the alerts get pushed out, including why Sudbury might hear an Amber Alert about a child missing from southern Ontario.

One man called his frustration in to the CBC Sudbury Talkback line: "I'm not going to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning and start running around in the streets looking for a child that wouldn't have made it up here if they had a Ferrari. This is so stupid. It's so wrong."

While this woman had a differing opinion: "They can wake me up anytime: day or night. I don't feel one bit upset about being woken about a child who's gone missing"

Dionne says there is a reason alerts get pushed out to as many devices as possible. The goal is for police to reach as many people as they can with the information.

"It's easy for somebody to jump on the plane and within an hour be completely at the other end of the province," she said.

"We can't restrict which cellular device is going to get this. We need to make sure that we reach as many people as we can to ensure the safe return of this child."

Dionne adds the Amber Alert system is built for the safety of the public, not the convenience of a few.

"If it wakes you up from a sleep, well, we'll never apologize if this is going to save the child's life," she said.

"This is the life of a child that we are talking about."