Apparently, California Has a Racially Segregated Missing Person Alert System

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

Here’s a story that’s so crazy that, upon first glance, I assumed that it must be a hoax:

 

 

But it’s true. California has, indeed, racially segregated its missing person alert system. And not in the distant past, but beginning in 2022.

 

The two most recent additions to California’s system are the Ebony Alert, which is for “the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of a black woman or black person,” and the Feather Alert, which is for when a “missing person is an indigenous woman or an indigenous person.” Per the website of the California Highway Patrol, the Ebony Alert was “introduced through Senate Bill 673 and became law in 2024,” while the Feather Alert was “was introduced through Assembly Bill 1314, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom,” and went into effect on “January 1, 2023.”

 

I also discovered that California has a “Yellow alert,” but, mercifully, given the state’s history, that one isn’t in the same vein as the others.

 

Why are progressives like this? I can grasp why most states have separate alerts for children and senior citizens. I cannot grasp why California has separate alerts for people of different races. And even those are weird when you dig in. The CHP notes that the “Ebony Alert” accompanies investigations into “the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of a black woman or black person.” Why are those two things separated? Black women are black persons. There’s no “or” about it. The same goes for the Feather Alert, which accompanies investigations into “the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of an indigenous woman or indigenous person.” Again: one group contains the other. I suppose if you’re already slicing up adults into racial groups, then creating more weird subdivisions comes naturally. But it doesn’t half look strange.

 

And . . . well, racist. The people who passed this bill, remember, are the same people who tried to repeal California’s Proposition 209, which holds, inter alia, that:

 

(a) The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

 

They lost, mercifully. But they’re still trying. Why? Because they are absolutely consumed by race. They may have different ends than the segregationists of old, but they are no less interested in dividing up the citizenry.

 

The rationale for these changes is presumably that California is a racist society, and that, in consequence, some citizens receive less attention than others. But this argument seems weak across the board. First off, instituting race-specific government programs is unconstitutional in both California and in the United States more broadly, and that the architects of such schemes believe that their attentions are pure does not alter that one whit. Second, there are no equivalent programs for Asians or Hispanics, which raises obvious equal-protection issues, and calls into the question many of the other claims that are routinely made by California’s government. Third, if California were indeed an extremely racist place, then flagging the race of the missing person at the outset of a search would surely be wholly counterproductive? The missing persons alert system is designed to recruit the public into helping the authorities crack the case. But if California is systemically racist, then wouldn’t the obvious reaction of its people be to look at the racial category attached to the alert and ignore it?

 

What a bizarre moment we lived through in the early 2020s.