California’s Ebony Alert aims to find missing Black youths in 2024. Other states may soon follow

Golden State residents will be the first in the nation to receive a new category of alerts flagging missing Black teens—but they probably won’t be the last.

The Ebony Alert system, which went live on Jan. 1, is designed to correct systemic flaws in how society identifies endangered Black teens, bill sponsor State Sen. Steven Bradford told us in an interview. The technology behind broadcast and mobile alerts has been around for decades, but it’s largely failed to address a subset of the population that missing-and-endangered alerts are intended to help.

“It came about by looking at the disparities in all the data that clearly identified African Americans, making up less than 13% of the state and the nation’s population, but almost 40% of the individuals who come up missing on a regular basis,” Bradford said.

He noted that Black teens are “constantly being miscategorized and identified as runaways, versus their white counterparts, who are often—[or] always—listed as missing or abducted. Very rarely do you see them listed as runaways.” Black minors are also more likely to be labeled as “juvenile prostitutes” than victims of human trafficking, he said, despite the high percentage of Black human trafficking victims.

This means that programs like the Amber Alert—which notifies people of a possible abduction through alerts on cell phones, transit billboards, and other means—can fail to catch a broad swath of endangered children and young adults.

Bradford said he saw the need for an alert that specifically elevates at-risk Black youth regardless of their circumstances.

California law enforcement agencies can issue an Ebony Alert when a Black person between the ages of 12 and 25 is “reported missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances, at risk, developmentally disabled, or cognitively impaired, or who have been abducted,” according to the bill.

“Law enforcement is then asked to use the same level of resources as they do with an Amber Alert by using the digital billboards on our highways and freeways to notify [people and] work with our social media outlets, as well as our TV and radio affiliates, to broadcast this information and the description of individuals,” Bradford said.

A growing movement

When we spoke with Bradford, he’d just returned from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL) annual conference, where the body adopted the Ebony Alert bill as model legislation. This means that other states could use Bradford’s work as a template to spread the model across the country.

Tennessee State Rep. Harold Love, Jr., incoming president of the NBCSL, told Tech Brew that he is hoping to file an Ebony Alert bill in his state before the end of January.

Love has a track record of getting results, both in his state and through the model legislation process.

A few years ago, he introduced a bill bringing attention to sickle cell disease that required the state government to “engage more and make themselves aware of new treatments,” Love said. The bill passed in Tennessee in 2021, and that same year, NBCSL put it forth as model legislation that nearly a dozen other states have since adopted.

For now, Bradford said he’s buoyed by other state lawmakers’ enthusiasm for the legislation. Eventually, he sees a future in which the Ebony Alert gains critical mass and becomes a nationwide program, much like the Amber Alert.

“​​If more states adopt the alert, I think you will reach a certain threshold,” he said. “I think our national legislators would look at implementing that.”