Silver Alert is a public notification system in the United States to broadcast information about missing persons – especially senior citizens with Alzheimer's disease, dementia, or other mental disabilities – in order to aid in locating them.
Supporters of Silver Alert point to the United States' growing elderly population as a reason for new programs to locate missing seniors.
[1] However, a 2012 review of research into missing-senior programs found that Silver Alert had not been evaluated to determine whether it was effective in returning those people to safety, or even whether wandering was a severe enough problem to merit expending resources to address it.
[2]: 22, 24 It characterized Silver Alert's rate of facilitating returns of missing people as "[i]mpossible to tell", because the statistical records are distributed among state agencies which do not necessarily publicize them.
[6] In Georgia, public efforts to locate missing seniors increased following the April 2004 disappearance of Mattie Moore, a 68-year-old Atlanta resident with Alzheimer's disease.
[7] The City of Atlanta created "Mattie's Call" to coordinate and support Metro Atlanta law enforcement, emergency management and broadcasters to issue an urgent bulletin in missing persons cases involving persons with Alzheimer's disease, dementia and other mental disabilities.
[9] In Florida, local and state government officials worked together to develop a pilot Silver Alert program following the case of an 86-year-old person who drove away from her assisted-living facility on February 26, 2008, and was found dead a week later, 10 miles (16 km) away in the Intracoastal Waterway near a boat ramp and her submerged car.
[10] Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia have Silver Alert or similar programs targeting missing seniors.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that implementation of the National Silver Alert Act would cost $59 million over a five-year period.
[82] In Wisconsin, 18 Silver Alerts were issued in the first 5 months of the program, out of which 15 of missing seniors were found and safely returned home.