Florida Celebrates Purple Alert Anniversary
Last year, the alert system showed a 98 percent success rate in locating missing adults.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida. July marks one year since the Purple Alert system was introduced in the state of Florida.
Purple Alert is used to locate missing adults with developmental or mental disabilities over the age of 18.
This is different from Silver Alert, which is used to search for missing people aged 60 or over who are suffering from permanent intellectual impairment.
Over the past year, 255 purple alerts have been issued and 250 people have recovered.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement sends emergency telephone alerts to Florida residents through an emergency alert system, including television, radio, and road signs.
Each alert has specific criteria that must be met before being sent in order to quickly and efficiently identify the missing person.
“Our goal is always to get all missing people home as quickly and safely as possible,” said FDLE Crime Lab Analyst Chad Brown. “We put them on our website, our news site. [and] our social media pages – but it gives them another element that puts them all over the state with this Purple Alert.”
FDLE is celebrating its success in getting the public to follow up on these warnings.
“A program is only as good as the people who sign up for it,” Brown explained. “The more the public … enters it, engages and looks for these people, the better. So we ask you to go and register today.”
Anyone can register with Purple Alert by clicking here.
It’s also important to be aware of other warnings that are in use in Florida, including:
- AMBER Alert: child abduction warning
- Missing Child Alert: Engages the public in the search for a missing child.
- Silver Alert: Used to search for missing persons with irreversible intellectual impairment.
- Blue Alert: Issued when a law enforcement officer is killed, seriously injured, or goes missing in the line of duty while the suspect is still at large.
