Get AMBER Alerts on your smartphone

The Missing Children Society of Canada and the Ontario Provincial Police are teaming up to get AMBER Alerts out to the public more quickly.

They’ve announced a way to push AMBER Alerts directly to your smartphone using the popular Poynt app. Registered Poynt users in Ontario will automatically receive AMBER Alerts as long as they’ve enabled notifications in the app’s settings.

OPP Sgt. Steve Montpetit says it will allow them to get the information out more quickly. “It’s all about expediency and everything is time sensitive. Whenever there’s an AMBER Alert in a child abduction case, obviously the first three to five hours are crucial.”

Not only will the app help distribute the information more quickly, Sgt. Montpetit says it can distribute more information. “We have other partnerships in place like our wireless AMBER program but with this particular app (we can) transmit the information along with photos in a poster-type format.”

Today’s announcement coincides with National Missing Children’s Day.

Poynt is available in BlackBerry’s App World, Apple’s App Store and Android’s Play Store.

You can find out more on the new initiative on the Missing Children Society of Canada website.

Here’s a demo video of the push system from the Missing Children Society of Canada.

tiffany.hendsbee@570news.rogers.com

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