Oh? What's your source for that claim?

The US population in 2014 was 318.3M. In that year, 186 amber alerts for children were issued. Last year (2024), the population was 340.11M, and there were 188 alerts. That's almost unchanged (0.56/0.58) in the past decade. In 2011, there were onu 158 alerts in 311.56M people, lower than today (0.51) (amberalert). There have been years where there were more, and years when there were less; 2006 was pretty bad (0.87).

I can't get reliable statistics from 1880, when 72% of the population lived in rural communities. The population flipped from predominantly rural to urban in 1920 (1910: 54% rural; 49% rural in 1920, c.f https://www.seniorliving.org/ has a handy yearly breakdown), but the next best thing is to count alerts per million by demographic, and the metrics don't break it down like that, unless you count % alerts by state, and measure the population in each state and the rural/urban breakdown. I'm not sure that'd be valid for extrapolating back into history to estimate how much safer children might have been from strangers in 1900. Anyway, amber alerts don't tell us anything about stranger danger, since abductions are as likely to be by family members as not.

The point is, from amber alerts alone, 2011 was safer than 2024. The alerts/pop/year are all over the place, and claiming that it's safer than it ever has been is wild, and I'd like to see some substantiation before I swallow that - even if we count only recent history for which we have reliable metrics, which is necessarily going to exclude anything earlier than, say, 1950.