Are those alerts really effective? ABC Thirteen's Luke Jones is here with what he found. And Luke, I guess it really depends on who you ask. >> Yeah, I mean, Tom, it's pretty difficult to measure Texas Center for the missing says its Amber alerts work 49% of the time, but now one researcher is asking, how can we know it's the Amber alerts that are solving these cases? And not just good old fashioned policeot work and that missing 12 year old girl. They're coming in left the middle school girl at the center of an Amber alert and right there is now a third Amber alert in effect for a missing young person. Amber alerts sometimes the child was taken. >> Among them are five young boys, sparking an amber alert and sometimes not taken at all. >> Police believe he left of his own accord. I think the Amber alert is absolutely a crucial resource, Steve Benefield is with the Texas Center for the missing. That's the group in charge of issuing regional Amber alerts for 14 Houston area counties. Of the 218 Amber alerts they've issued since 2000, Benefield says 130 have led to the child in question being found 49% of the time. >> They credited our Amber alerts as being partially or fully responsible for being able to locate that child. >> What I'm questioning is yet when you ask Tim Griffin, do Amber alerts serve any purpose in terms of saving abducted children's lives? No. >> Griffin is a criminal justice professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. He analyzed 470 Amber alerts issued over the course of three years nationwide and found they're not helping. >> And even in those cases where it helped bring the kid back, the question you have to ask is, well, what if there had never been an alert in that case? Does that mean the kid never would have come back? >> In Texas, there's a strict set of criteria for issuing a statewide amber alert. Was the child taken against his or her will, or if the child is 13 years or younger, is the person there with unrelease and at least three years older? And if it's a parent, did they commit a murder or attempt to at the time of the abduction? Is the child in immediate danger and have all other avenues been exhausted? Also is there enough information to give the public to help locate the child? But a law signed last year allows police departments to bypass that criteria by simply requesting a regional Amber alert. >> They can request that Amber alert to be issued without having to prove at that moment that there was an abduction, but still, they believe the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death for all of 2023. >> The Texas Center for the missing says it issued just six regional Amber alerts. But in the first four months of this year, they've already issued seven overwhelmingly, in those cases, if the alert worked, then probably normal law enforcement would have worked. >> The system serves inadvertent , not intentionally, as crime control theater, but with the new Texas law, Amber alerts are not only here to stay, they will likely be more of them. >> And that's the real fear of Amber alert fatigue. Some are worried people will simply opt out of the alerts on their phones, and potentially miss out on crucial informationy miss out