Introduction
Jenniffer Price-Lehmann is a leader in law enforcement and a pioneer of the AMBER Alert program. Speaking with her opened my mind to a whole new perspective of the process of conducting investigations and the responsibility of saving a life. Each path is different, and learning her story and the true passion that led her to where she is today have helped me reflect on the importance of doing, as she says, what truly makes you tick.
How do you define your career? What does a typical day at work look like for you?
I am the deputy administrator for the AMBER Alert Training and Technical Assistance Program. That’s a program that’s based in Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisconsin. We provide training and technical assistance to criminal justice professionals like police officers, detectives, judges, and victim advocates. We give them the tools and skills that they need to be better prepared for when a child goes missing. We make sure they can find a child, bring them home, and support them in investigating the case. Our program is responsible for training all of those people in investigation as well as the ones sending out the actual alerts we all get on our phones. We have to make sure that this system is being used as intended to keep the public informed.
I’ve been with Fox Valley Technical College for about five years now. Prior to that, I was in law enforcement for over 20 years. I worked for the Wisconsin Department of Justice as a special agent. I began my work with the DOJ in the narcotics unit, but I knew that my passion lied in working against child exploitation. After transferring, I ended up working closely with the AMBER Alert program, which is what really interested me. My job specifically now is making sure we have the logistical resources and budget to conduct training classes. We travel all over the country, and I make sure that we have all the equipment needed, the money, and the subject matter experts. I've gone from being on the front lines in law enforcement to being behind the scenes and making sure that everything that needs to happen for this training happens.
What inspired your interest in the field of law enforcement? What did your path to your current position look like?
When I was in college, I was going to be a fashion designer. I was about halfway through college at UW-Madison when my 13 year old cousin went missing. There was no AMBER Alert in place at that time. This was 1994. He went missing, and five days later, his body was recovered. He had been murdered after being lured from his home. At that point, I knew that fashion design was something that I enjoyed doing on the side, but it really wasn't my calling anymore. I knew that I wanted to do something for the legacy of my family, and my cousin. And that job of being able to make change and work the investigations, as cliche as it sounds, always had something more to it. I enjoy the work that I do.
I was only 2 years into my undergraduate degree when the death happened, so I was able to make a change academically relatively quickly. My degree ended up being in behavioral science and law, with a certificate in criminal justice. I knew that I wanted to eventually be involved in investigations, and I knew I wanted to focus on child exploitation and abduction. At the time, there really wasn't a pipeline in place in Wisconsin to go straight from college to investigations in the field. That middle area was being a patrol officer. So I worked my way up from there. My first job was as a patrol officer, with the Wausau Police Department. I had more than enough college credits for the job, but I didn't have the law enforcement standard certification that's required in Wisconsin.
After getting that and continuing work, I got the job with the Wisconsin Department of Justice as a special agent two years later. From that point on, I was investigating in the field. That involved knocking on doors, interviewing witnesses, and trying to identify leads to pull together enough probable cause to be able to make an arrest. Other parts included executing search warrants, interviewing people, attending autopsies, etc. It requires you to have not just developed verbal skills, but the ability to be able to put that into a written form that will stand up in court and hold up to a warrant. That documentation is a matter of someone’s life. I've got to be able to make sure that everything that they told me is on paper and it's accurate.
Is outreach a primary goal for the program and for you right now?
The short answer is yes, absolutely. In order for us to really be effective, we have to be able to reach the people who need it. Even though most of our training is for criminal justice practitioners, we also provide training webinars, for example, for community members. This way they can better understand what an amber alert means. It helps our partners in the states to do outreach in their areas. Even though we're a national program, it’s a large number of people.. If we can work at the local level with AMBER Alert coordinators and missing person managers in each of the states, we can help their outreach as well. With all of us doing the same thing and trying to get the word out, we’re spreading the importance of not just taking the classes, but continuing on with the training and education to further enhance your skills. It's not just a one and done.
We work with AMBER coordinators who are responsible for the actual alerts. We work with law enforcement that’s responsible for investigating those cases and putting together child abduction response teams to be able to leverage a multidisciplinary team to search for a missing child. We work with prosecutors to be able to better understand how to effectively prosecute an abduction case, and we work with crime victim advocates to be able to better understand how to manage a family reunification. We really work across the criminal justice spectrum.
We work with tribal indigenous communities, which is different because they are often sovereign nations in this country, meaning they may have a different process. One of the major initiatives that I work with is our AMBER Alert in Indian Country Initiative. We work directly with the 575 federally recognized tribes to put together a plan for implementing AMBER Alerts in their tribal communities. This way, if an indigenous child goes missing on tribal lands, the law enforcement agency in that jurisdiction is able to respond. It’s a blend of people that we work with, and to be able to provide them with the training that we have is really cool.
What are some skills that are important, in addition to communication, to be successful in your position?
For me, what helped was knowing my why. I think it's really hard for young people especially to get into a field knowing what they want to do. My question, for anyone, is why do you want to do it? That's not necessarily a skill, but it's a consideration that I think maybe needs to be more prevalent. Aside from that, I would recommend developing verbal and written communication skills across the board. What I have seen in my experience over the years, is that they really are important in any field. I've always believed that if you can nail the communication piece, everything else will organically fall in place. If you can't talk to people, and you can't write what you think in a way that's understandable and consumable by other people, you will struggle. Those are core skills to me for any human. That's how we connect.
What are the biggest challenges that you hope to overcome in your work?
I think the biggest challenge with respect to AMBER Alerts, nationally, is that when a child goes missing, it doesn't automatically mean it should be an amber alert. We see that across this country. A child will go missing with no evidence of an abduction and nothing to lead law enforcement to believe that the child is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm. Those are two of the three criteria necessary for issuing an AMBER Alert, but the community doesn't understand. What happens is, you have cases where children go missing because they run away or they wander outside of their zone of safety. The public doesn't always understand that every case does not warrant an alert.
The reason why the AMBER Alert program is so successful after all these years is the intentionality of its use in situations where all the criteria are met. If an alert was sent every time a child went missing, the public would be desensitized. After enough times of hearing their cell phone go off, they might not look at it as closely. Or the next time they see a DOT traffic sign, when they're going down the interstate, maybe they wouldn’t pay as much attention. That's the biggest challenge, of trying to educate the public and to help them understand. It is a horrible, horrific event when a child that has gone missing is recovered deceased. But that doesn't mean that if there was an AMBER Alert, the child would have been found safely and alive.
The beauty of it, especially in Wisconsin, is that if a missing child doesn't fit the criteria for an AMBER Alert, we still have a missing endangered person alert. That alert will go out to law enforcement and to the public. You'll see that on social media and all the other places where people would see an AMBER Alert anyways. The only difference is, they're not gonna get the audible buzzer on their cell phone.
How are the responsibilities of the AMBER Alert program divided among different people?
We have AMBER alert coordinators in every state who are responsible for evaluating situations and issuing the actual alert. The local law enforcement would then be responsible for the investigation. For example, back when I was on patrol, if I got information about a situation, I'd take on the missing child report. If I then believed that it met the criteria for an AMBER Alert, then I would still have to call the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
Once the AMBER alert coordinator approves an alert and activates it to go out on the cell phones, there's still a process for the emergency system to be activated. The notification needs to be made to the Department of Transportation to put it on their highway signs. A notification needs to be made to the lottery, for it to go to all the lottery terminals. A notification has to be sent to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, for them to send it to all of their secondary distributions. Then you’ll see the information on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram. That’s because they have partnerships with those social media companies. In a perfect scenario, these steps will all happen within minutes of each other, but the fact of the matter is that it sometimes takes time. There is a lot of work behind the scenes just to make that alert go out across every single platform.
Have you had any role models in your life who have helped you get to where you are today? throughout your career?
I've had a couple of role models in, um, my former work with law enforcement and the DOJ who were really great mentors for me. They really helped me to be a successful investigator and leader. I've been able to take a lot of what I learn from them into my current role. I’ve been blessed to not only have mentors but so many others along the way who made a difference in smaller ways. I think it's important to develop those relationships with those special people who have what I like to call that zhuzh. They just have those qualities that you aspire to emulate, while still keeping what makes you unique.
What does being a leader mean to you?
I've found that being a leader is not about trying to embody a particular leadership style. In fact, it's really about embracing trust, honesty and respect to serve the people who look to you. If they don't trust you and they don't think that they can rely on you, they have no reason to follow you. What I have found is that the secret is to just learn about people. What makes them tick? What fuels that fire in their belly? What is their passion? Even if people are unhappy in their job, they still have a purpose. They might not know what that purpose is, and it might be your job to help them find that.
What is one last piece of advice that you would give to young people looking to go into professional fields?
Do what makes you happy. There are always pressures from school and from home to do something that maybe somebody else wants you to do. At the end of the day, it's important to let go of all the static around you and identify what makes you happy. Then, go for it. Put everything you have into that. If at the end of the day, you find that you tried it and it wasn’t what you thought it would be? That's okay. That's part of the journey. It’s important to be able to know that you took that journey on your own terms. I'm not suggesting that any young person should go against what their parents are saying, but I think there's a way to have a conversation. It all comes back to communication. Communicate what makes you tick. Find it, and follow it.