Underneath the children’s tent at the Marshfield Fair Thursday, kids of all ages proudly wore junior deputy badges after being fingerprinted and photographed by State Troopers.
As part of the Child AMBER Alert program, parents were given a digital identification kit with their child’s information at no cost.
Trooper Nicole Morrell explains the information is not put into the state police’s database but rather on an individual flash drive making it easily accessible for a parent, “It’s just contained on the drive itself so the family’s responsible for it, for updating a photograph for the child and their height and weight.”
If a child is missing or abducted, a parent is left in a world of chaos. One grandmother who took her seven year-old granddaughter to the event says the ID kit will help ease the situation, “If something happens you don’t necessarily know, because we were saying how tall is she? We have no idea until we measure her. So it’s good to have the information.”
The digital ID kit will act as a vital tool for police during the recovery effort,“If a child goes missing, investigators can go into the crime scene and try to lift fingerprints for us to see if the child has been there,” says Trooper Morrell
A photograph of the child along with their physical description should be updated every six months to ensure the information is recent and accurate.
According to Trooper Morrell, luckily they have yet to send out an AMBER emergency alert of a missing child so far this year.