Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile
reason.com
reason.com
> "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'"
Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.
This is the fault of the nosey neighbor AND the fault of the police AND the fault of the district attorney AND the fault of the CPS case worker. All four bear blame for this travesty.
The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
You really have to take the adversarial mindset when thinking about large scale systems like this, to make sense of how they can break.
When I write software, every line of code is accompanied by the thought "I'm a blackhat hacker, with execution thread. How do I leverage this line of code?"
No, they'd rather not coordinate any of that and just play the blame game.
Many workplaces employing software engineers are actively hostile towards any kind of engineering. I have a very hard time believing anyone writing code is sloppy on purpose. Incentives are often very misaligned. These are pretty much always organizational problems.
Instead of immediately blaming software engineers, you should consider questioning whether it ever makes sense to have non-technical leadership in charge of them. Most places where "real" engineering is done don't have idiots at the wheel.
The executive and judicial branches hold equal responsibility to this problem. Why not include them in the solution?
Writing code to affect millions of people’s data, or controlling millions of people’s actions they can perform with software, has a lot in common with passing legislation that will affect millions of people, in terms of the edge cases and unintended consequences that you must consider beforehand.
Not to mention the potential for malicious actors.
Occasionally, we see well meaning policies going astray - the "must arrest someone" domestic calls in jurisdictions are a contentious-but-great example. Sometimes calls get put in spuriously and now someone must go to jail for a relative non-issue / non-altercation that a neighbor called in.
Problem here is that the success of policing in politics is measured by number of closed cases or by how many people got convicted after their arrest. By crime rate and success in fighting it. This of course creates perverse incentives for the most part. Budget fights and politics leave justice far behind.
If there is no more crime in a country, it shouldn't mean that police are getting pressured because they arrest fewer people. But exactly that would probably follow in a political discussion.
Metaphorically it feels like we've adopted a model that has safety interlocks and authenticated access for every screwdriver and light switch in your house. Some of the inaccessible to the end user without serious reverse engineering. To some extent I get why absurd proliferation of IoT devices necessitates some of this but I think there's a better way. A world where we have a decent lock on the front door and you're the one who's responsible for not putting the drill through your eyeball, not the drill.
Dumb things like spamming others, issuing hundreds of unnecessary requests to external APIs or databases, trashing all the memory of a system, filling up the disk... A "general purpose" language which basically doesn't exist?
Anything even a bit non-trivial can be used to do dumb things. It is a responsibility for everyone in the chain not to do them, and if dumb things happen, everyone in the chain _is_ responsible.
We can debate how much blame each of them should take, but we should not ignore the blame an individual doing a dumb thing should take simply because there were people in "official" roles being even dumber.
I mean, this was already depicted in the South Park when all the parents get sent to jail by their kids.
I feel like I would have done this 1000 times by the time i was 8 in the rural Australia, is the danger in the US that much larger ?
When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.
I wasn't suggesting that the ends justify the means. I'm simply speaking to the realities of the situation. However, from an ends justifying the means perspective, if you're not going to investigate, there's little point in hearing the case, and more importantly in people making the call in the first place.
"When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint."
We do have a higher standard of evidence for that power to be invoked; that's what applied here, and why CPS ultimately passed on this one. If anything, the bar is generally pretty high, and you can get away with some pretty dastardly things with the odds of CPS taking any kind of "family destroying" action very low.
> Otherwise, we should be OK with the government monitoring us 24/7 so that they don't miss any terrorists or child molesters.
I think that's unreasonably slippery sloping this story.
Sure, there are horror stories about CPS being overzealous, but this isn't one of those stories. I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring... and CPS obviously wasn't worried about terrorist or child molesters in this case.
It's a hard problem to get right. There's a LOT of really bad stuff going on (estimates are that 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse or neglect at some point). No matter how you do it, families will be destroyed and children will suffer horribly. However, the system errs on keeping families together, which is what you'd want. Given that bias in the system, engaging in at least a lightweight investigation is entirely reasonable.
> evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.
I encourage you to look at the data on this. It's one sided.
The parents were forced in to two weeks of supervision, requiring another adult around them 24/7. The innocent parents, who had not actually done anything wrong.
How is that not "overzealous"?
> I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring...
"Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second."
That sure sounds like 24/7 monitoring, even if it's not the government doing it.
> How is that not "overzealous"?
I didn't say it wasn't overzealous. I said it wasn't one of the horror stories about them being overzealous. I was specifically referring to the power to "destroy families". That didn't happen here.
> "Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second."
>
> That sure sounds like 24/7 monitoring, even if it's not the government doing it.
At best that's 24/7 for 14 days. In truth though, it's not monitoring at all, as there was no monitoring requirement, just that they couldn't be left alone with the kids. I mean, they literally considered a sleeping grandmother somewhere in the house to be sufficient. It's certainly intrusive and unpleasant, but it's not 24/7 monitoring, nor is it a slippery slope towards that.
I get that sometimes pro-active measures are prudent, but "hey, police, I saw my neighbor's kid walking outside unattended" is not one of those times.
And even if we did agree that these parents were in the wrong, and that the kid shouldn't have been walking alone, the "safety plan" CPS came up with was still a huge unnecessary overreaction. That kind of plan should be reserved for situations when CPS is investigating reports of active abuse.
That's true, but the thinking you are describing also enables all sorts of abuse.
> the "safety plan" CPS came up with was still a huge unnecessary overreaction
Yeah, at least as described in the article, it seemed excessive and unnecessary. I could see where they don't have a smaller scale mitigation to put in place during an investigation. It's definitely not ideal.
It's possible that "I saw a kid walking alone" isn't enough to justify an CPS investigation but "This child's parent was just arrested and is being charged with a felony for endangering this child" is reason enough.
At the point CPS got involved, they were investigating the home of someone being charged with felony child endangerment. We don't know what CPS polices demand n that situation, or what alternatives were available to the family, but after hearing what options they had the family agreed to the safety plan. If the alternative was "this or we have to remove you or your children from your home" I'd say it was the right choice.
It's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have and were required to do under the circumstances. In fact, if the family had gone to trial it would have helped their case that CPS investigated the home and determined that that the complaint was unfounded.
There's no reason to think that a neighbor with a beef could have called CPS and had this happen to anyone else. There's not even reason to think that a neighbor calling the cops would do it since those cops would have to be as dumb as the one in this story and arrest and charge an innocent person with felony child endangerment for it to work. That should be a pretty high bar to clear. The police screwed this one up, and that's what opened the door to all the other grief.
It's also worth noting that CPS's investigation would no doubt serve as helpful for the parent's defense against the charges.
Look at the hoops you’re willing to jump through to apologize for this behavior… the banality of evil.
“Of course it’s reasonable to report a parent because their child went for a stroll. Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law. Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids coulda got kidnapped. Let’s solve this by kidnapping them, strip searching them, and putting them in an abusive home.” (the stuff about strip searching was an amalgamation w/the propublica story. Not a part of your story, but not fake.)
Anything is reasonable as long as you follow policy? You were just following orders?
There was no comment about how it was reasonable to make the phone call, and there's specific criticism of the police conduct... All they said was that at the point CPS got involved, it's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have.
I would point out that all we know that CPS did was a) require that the parents not be left alone in the house with the kids while they were conducting their investigation (and even for that, it's not clear from the story that that requirement came from CPS, but it seems likely that's the case) and b) perform an investigation that concluded there was no observable risk to the kids. They weren't involve in the decision to perform the arrest, not involved in setting bail, not involved in any strip search, etc.
I would suspect the first step of any investigation would be to find out why they are investigating and not just set everything in motion based on a vague report from police?
One could imagine that is how the investigation proceeded.
never said that. It's worth noting also that the person who called didn't report the parent. They reported the child who was alone. I don't know why she was concerned about the fact that a kid was walking unaccompanied, but as others have pointed out, we've only got one move when there's concern about some strange child's immediate welfare and we don't want to get involved directly and that's to call the police. It'd be nice we had a better option, like an agency to call who didn't see everyone without a badge as the enemy, but we don't.
> Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law.
Again, I said nothing of the sort. In fact I explicitly stated that the cop was in the wrong.
> Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids coulda got kidnapped.
Yes, CPS should follow procedure. That doesn't mean that they should act as mindless drones, but they depend on police to alert them to situations where they need to be involved and once they are involved they should do their job. The concern the CPS should have had wasn't to make sure the kid isn't going to be kidnapped. It's to make sure that the child isn't being neglected or abused.
CPS has a tough job. If they a get a case and blow it off as no big deal and the kid they were supposed to protect gets killed that's an injustice too and sadly it happens (see https://abc7.com/gabriel-fernandez-anthony-avalos-noah-cuatr... or https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/cps-cases-workers-fired-aft...).
CPS has a job to do, and there was very little harm done by them in this case. They had a grandparent stay over for a few days. That was it. It might have been worse if the family didn't have nearby relatives who could stay over during the investigation, but again we don't have information on what CPS was obligated to do or what they would have done, we only know what happened and this was not a CPS horror story (which I know do exist!)
In this case, CPS was inappropriately given the case by the police, but there's no indication that they acted inappropriately in their role. In fact, they correctly identified that there was no need for them to be involved.
So in the end some lady messed up and thought a normal situation was an emergency and called the police. It happens and it wouldn't be reasonable for her to think there would be any harm done by that. The police showed up and failed at their job entirely, gave the mother a felony charge and got CPS involved. CPS did their job and are on record that the police made an error. The cop was the real problem here.
I'll also call out another party that failed here and that's the entire rest of the justice system. Every other officer aware of the circumstances who did nothing, and the folks who decided to go ahead with the charge and offer the "deal" that punished the innocent mother are just as bad. If the police officer involved isn't punished for this it also makes the department guilty.
The problems with our justice system go far beyond police. Anyone so clearly innocent should be able to fight in court with confidence that they can be cleared of the bogus charge and without risk of bankrupting themselves in the process. We clearly don't have that today.
I have had jobs that required me to be a mandatory reporter several times in my life, and none of this was even close to evidence of abuse I'd have to report.
> I have had jobs that required me to be a mandatory reporter several times in my life, and none of this was even close to evidence of abuse I'd have to report.
Mandatory reporting rules are, by design, not intended to include anything and everything that constitutes abuse or neglect.
When the report itself doesn't have any abuse in it, no way.
I have heard that it is shockingly easy to get a judge to issue a search warrant at 2 in the morning on a Saturday. I am not a lawyer, but from what I understand even then there is a minimum bar that needs to be met as far as evidence supporting the petition goes: what is the suspected crime? What evidence is there that supports the suspicion? Why do we believe that a search warrant will produce concrete evidence that the crime occurred and what is the scope of the required search (what property, specifically, are we asking to be able to examine and potentially confiscate?).
Similar, much higher, thresholds need to be met with respects to holding suspects in custody pending a trial.
Under no circumstances should any other government agencies be able to compel anything from anyone "just because." That's what the courts exist for. People have a right to due process and "agree to a safety plan" under threat is an act of force that was not authorized by a court order but by an independent government agency acting alone; outside of the one single entity that we trust to be in charge of doing that both fairly and under extremely tight scrutiny and limitations.
Police are empowered to arrest people on the spot. It seems impractical to add a judge to that process. Once someone has been arrested, you need CPS to step in anyway, at which point it seems silly to bar them from investigating.
> Similar, much higher, thresholds need to be met with respects to holding suspects in custody pending a trial.
I mean, she was released on bail, but she was held in custody. So yes, holding them in jail without bail has a higher standard, but you'd really hope the standard would be higher for that.
> Under no circumstances should any other government agencies be able to compel anything from anyone "just because." That's what the courts exist for.
That seems like a broad and vague statement. In fairness, the parents aren't obligated to do anything, but if they don't, then the courts would get far more involved.
No, they don't. CPS does not need to investigate observations that, even if they are true, imply nothing. That's just sentencing everyone who deviates from orthodoxy to constant investigation. CPS should be investigating claims of something and should have clear standards for those claims instead of being aggressive as a defense.
Or you can be a black man with a white stepdaughter, or a white-passing daughter, and literally get authorities called every time you walk outside with her.
I think you're taking a slippery slope argument well past the point of reason.
For starters, there'd be no reason for constant investigation: once you've completed an investigation, there is no reason to have another investigation in response to a similar report. At worst, every family would get a cursory investigation once. Admittedly, that's not great. Realistically, that would not happen either, as CPS does not have unlimited resources and would of course prioritize their time. So, the more people make spurious complaints, the less likely they'll get investigated. Similarly, it's pretty trivial to identify cases where someone is just spamming the system with complaints, and deprioritize it accordingly.
While it's not unusual for complainants to exaggerate, it's also not unusual for complainants to understate; you get a call about a family you've never heard of before, from someone who has never called in before, you just have no idea what you're going to find.
> Or you can be a black man with a white stepdaughter, or a white-passing daughter, and literally get authorities called every time you walk outside with her.
...and again, in that case, you're going to learn to ignore those calls pretty quickly.
Imagine how that'd work. If you called in a complaint about a ten-year old today, the kid would no longer be a minor by the time the investigation began. ;-)
Why does CPS need to restrict parental rights while investigating a report which even if confirmed as true (as it was in this case) does not violate family law and warrant further action.
This would be like saying that, had the law which addressed the family law aspects also (as it should have) made the same changes to criminal law, the police should still have arrested her, even when their information was only of an act that would be a non-crime if true.
So, the police arrested the mom, which means you've got a case where the mom has at least been accused of violating the law. Even if mom has not done a single thing wrong, given that she's been arrested & taken from the home, CPS has to get involved just to make sure the kids are okay. It follows that some degree of investigation is done.
I guess you can characterize it as "restrict parental rights", but really all they were doing was insisting that there be someone else in the home with the kids at all times. That does still seem like a bit much, I agree, but I don't see that as a restriction on parental rights. Let's say that it is then, I don't think it's unreasonable that someone who has been arrested specifically on charges of child abuse/endangerment might have their rights curtailed at least until such time as someone can feel like the kids are okay.
> This would be like saying that, had the law which addressed the family law aspects also (as it should have) made the same changes to criminal law, the police should still have arrested her, even when their information was only of an act that would be a non-crime if true.
It's very clear that they interpreted her own statement as meaning she did not perceive how she was endangering her children. I think that's a terrible assessment of the situation, as by their own admission, the kid was NOT in serious danger, but given that assessment, yeah, they should arrest her.
In the end, you do end up empowering people to exercise good judgement, and when they get it wrong, there will be terrible consequences.
The police arrested the mom, not CPS. There was no interaction between the family and CPS prior to the arrest. The arrest is what brings CPS in to the picture. Just by virtue of arresting a parent, CPS should to get involved, because arresting the parent potentially puts the kids at risk... and then you double down on that because they've been arrested for endangering the kids. CPS then needs to figure out the lay of the land, so that they can establish that the kids are NOT at risk and they can step out of the picture.
Which is another way of saying that it is just as much a precaution as it is a punishment.
CPS responsibilities are to the children and their safety. The police & courts deal with the parents, collect any evidence, mete out any punishment, etc.
Again, CPS isn't focused on the crime.
CPS's job is to protect the kids. AFAIK they aren't involved in any kind of punishment. Any measures they take are limited in scope to the best interests of the children. Now, they're indifferent to the impact on the parents, so some of the measures to protect the kids can feel like punishment to the parents, but that's not their concern.
I keep feel like people aren't able to draw the line here between what CPS did and what the cops did. Absent more details on the story (and we always have to keep in mind that we're getting the version of the story that is most charitable to the mom), it sure seems like the cops really messed up here. Once the cops arrested her, that's when CPS got involved, and the consequences from CPS's involvement were pretty much inevitable, and frankly the least of the hardships placed on that family.
It seems like they wasted two weeks of this family's time and added a ton of unnecessary stress, before even figuring out if the complaint was warranted. That seems deeply dysfunctional, and violently at odds with "innocent until proven guilty"
I’m not; there should be some reasonable basis for this level of intrusion, which there was not (note that the facts of the report were true and confirmed and still did not violate family law that CPS enforces; this isn't a case where someone reported something which would have warranted CPS intervention if confirmed.)
The same way they knew when the investigation confirmed the initial report, and it wasn't a violation.
Hahaha. Government employees lol.
Now, I am not saying that a report which on its face does not describe a violation does not warrant investigation, but absent some other evidence which provides cause to believe a violation exists which would legally impact parental suitability, it doesn’t warrant limiting parental rights during the investigation, just as a report to police that raises articulable suspicion but not probable cause to believe a specific crime has occurred warrants investigation, but not arrest.
If CPS is going to force this sort of thing on parents, they could also reasonably be expected to compensate for the involved expenses - force CPS to pay for a nanny if CPS really thinks that's essential. If CPS can't afford to do that, then we as a society have already voted that the nanny wasn't actually worth the cost.
Yes, these kind of ”no unsupervised time, but children remain with parents” agreements are one alternative that CPS sometimes gives, where what they see as suitable supervisers are available, to putting the children in temporary foster care during an investigation.
They are justified in exactly the same cases where what they are an alternative to would be justified.
It's safe to assume if that legal barrier was actually met they would have put them in a foster home as staying with the parents would be too unsafe.
The parents got bluffed by tyrants. Personally I would never open the door to, nor sign any document, nor speak with CPS outside of court proceedings. Let them gather whatever evidence they need with a warrant and enforce any order by mechanism of the judge rather than agreeing to whatever pompous authoritarian bullshit is spewed out by some 3rd-rate bureaucrat in a "voluntary safety plan."
>”no unsupervised time, but children remain with parents” agreements are one alternative that CPS sometimes gives,
IANAL but I don't think anyone but a judge can give that order, and I would certainly bet my freedom and even my life on that.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/atlanta-judge-chews-lawyer-missed...
Stuff like due process is what our forefathers died to at least ostensibly give us.
Unfortunately, due process is whatever the judge say it is.
CPS is basically the adversary in the court proceedings so I see the judge more as an additional layer in the swiss cheese rather than a replacement layer in the swiss cheese, which your previous statement seems to allude towards.
The parents agreed to the surveillance plan. Unless they go to a judge for an order mandating it, it's voluntary. It's likely the lawyer recommended they go along with it.
This is like the 5th time you've commented on my stuff while missing major information from the article, or simply going off on some random tangent.
From the beginning I indicated I would force them to go through the court for the "voluntary" agreement. Your snark "but judges are better?" completely bypassed that, seemingly completely missing the request for the order would never even get to the judge if the adversary CPS never pushed for the order in the first place.
> nor did they bring it to a judge.
Which is why I proposed a scenario where they were forced to if they wanted it to happen. I'm well aware many of my opinions were not expressed in the "information" of the article (oh no!).
>This is like the 5th time you've commented on my stuff
If you check this thread, you initially commented to me on this thread. It was your choice to reply to me unsolicited, although your statement here is a nice attempt to try to turn that on its head.
Cheers and have a good day.
It's the CPS equivalent of "let me in your house or else I'll get a search warrant and things will go worse for you." If they had the evidence to get in the house, they wouldn't be standing there asking you, the police would be there with battering rams busting in.
It's a bluff. If there is actually evidence they need to remove the child they will go get the order from the judge and execute it. And if that evidence exists, in no way would anyone in their right mind let you keep the kid by signing a "safety plan" to pretty please keep grandma and grandma around, who are not in any way credentialled/vetted to host supervised visitation.
Whereas if - as you seem to be assuming - CPS only heard "this parent commited neglect and possibly abuse of their child", investigation would indeed be needed to figure out they were being lied to. But other people are assuming CPS got accurate information in the first place.
Edit: apparently dragonwriter already explained this (better) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33629395.
Every parent within my hometown would be getting arrested. And god forbid when these people learn that we were riding the public bus service to and from school at 10 years old...
"My mom made me walk home because I was mean to my siblings."
"Where do you live?"
"That house over there."
Alternative, less dumb reality:
"Carry on."
A bit more concerned, still less dumb reality:
"I'll walk with you."
Dumb reality:
"I am calling the cops!"
And that fear needs to grow a lot before any action will be taken, so it's still a net loss for the present time.
Is that actually a harm, given the evidence?
So while the buck did eventually stop with them, it wasn't before they did harm of their own.
It is absolutely the fault of the justice system, the police officers who abused their power to arrest a mother for no reason in front of her kids. They made a considered decision to teach her a lesson - they asked her if she had learned her lesson and when she didn't answer how they wanted they arrested her, handcuffed her in front of her children, and took her to prison.
It's also the fault of prosecutors and judges involved who overlooked and participated in this egregious abuse of the justice system. They are each responsible for stemming the overreaches of the police. We can't expect police to always make good decisions - they are people who go fight with criminals, not legal scholars, after all. That's partly why we have lawyers and judges involved - to stop overzealous policing. Of course, the prosecutors and judges involved failed miserably here, as they frequently do.
And of course child services are at fault too for their participation in this farce.
They verified where the child lived, which was just down the block, and still proceeded to call the police instead of... escorting the kid home?
> A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.
1. I'd think if I stop and offer to pick them up, they might think I'm a potential pedophile/kidnapper. So I'm reticent.
2. They would think, as they likely have been trained, if they put out a hand and ask for a lift it might be be a kidnapper.
Somehow we have conditioned ourselves and our children in the space of maybe 40 years to think the absolute worst is likely when the reality it is actually quite rare.
(I'm in Australia)
I’ve been preaching for years that “stranger danger” has done massive harm to society, far far more harm than the bad actors they’re trying to save us from would have done.
Teaching children that all people are inherently bad and you should be afraid of anyone you don’t know sets the tone for how they are going to relate to other people for the rest of their lives.
In my experience most people are good and helpful, I’ve had far far more people be kind to me than harmful or malicious.
Mr. Rogers taught me to “look for the helpers” and that also told me that there are always good people out there who are trustworthy. We need to go back to that.
- a stranger is someone you don’t know
- most strangers are good
- the safety rules for strangers are to check first with your grown-ups before talking to, going with, or getting something from a stranger
- for kids who are old enough to be out and about on their own, checking first changes to thinking first, i.e. evaluating the situation
- if you are having an emergency where you can’t check first, you can get help from a stranger without needing to check first
https://www.kidpower.org/library/article/safety-on-the-way-t...
Maybe another way to put it is that the neighbor did a slightly bad thing, unnecessary police call, call it 0.01 Bad. The police did a terrible thing, 100 Bad. Judges and prosecutors even worse because they failed at their explicit task - making reasoned judgments about what is right and wrong - 1,000 Bad. CPS also had a complete failure of their explicit task, but maybe it is a little more excusable because hopefully most people who reach this point in the process actually do require some intervention, call it 980 Bad.
When you say that the neighbor is also to blame, it's kind of true in some meaningless technical sense. The neighbor did something slightly bad, but it is so slightly bad as to be totally inconsequential in the broader sense. If you were to try and minimize the badness here you should focus on the justice system, CPS, and the police - and you would basically never get to the neighbor because you could never optimize those other systems enough for the neighbors small fault to be consequential.
The failures here are all of the form "You incorrectly invoked system X. That was a mistake because X is totally broken!" The neighbor incorrectly called the police. The police incorrectly arrested the mother invoking the courts, the courts incorrectly penalized the mother and invoked CPS. All of those systems are completely broken and the solution is not to minimize calls to them, but to fix the systems.
That would probably not be a safe thing for the neighbor to do in a place like Waco--he/she could be arrested as a pedophile.
But the whole thing sounds totally crazy to me. I walked a half mile to and from school alone from first grade to high school almost every day.
Complaining about the neighbor is like complaining that the child was misbehaving which caused the child to walk home. Yes, it's true that misbehaving is bad, but only very slightly and we expect children to do that sometimes. Making unnecessary police calls is slightly bad and we expect some overly cautious people to do that sometimes.
Only in the most unproductive way. You're not going to fix the problem by exterminating all nosy neighbors. If your new roof leaks when it rains, it's not the rain's fault, blame it on the person who builds roofs ignoring the unavoidable fact that rain will eventually fall.
The first people to decide that child welfare was important were anti-animal cruelty organizations, so any protection for children is new and not at all obvious or intrinsic to us.
> Animals were legally defined as property, but Bergh's watershed legislation recognized cruelty as an offense to the animal itself—irrespective of ownership.(3) Historian Susan Pearson argues that these laws helped transform American liberalism—from a classical conception of rights in the negative—to augur the rise of the modern "interventionist" liberal state. Pearson contends that this positive conception of rights drew animal protectionists into child protection in the 1870s. Bergh's chief counsel, Elbridge Gerry, founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 after he secured the arrest and conviction of an abusive foster mother for felonious assault. Animal protectionists across the nation subsequently instituted amalgamated "humane societies," which safeguarded animals and children under a singular protective fold, positing that helpless "beasts and babes" had a right to protection because they could suffer.
https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2015/november/the-history-of-...
And even with those qualifiers, you are only talking of legislative decision to protect child's welfare in USA. Eg. a quick search finds legislation aiming to improve protections for children in UK 50 years prior to your "1870s": http://history.parkfieldprimary.com/victorians/lord-shaftsbu...
Legislation is only needed when a particular behaviour becomes incompatible with current values, or has long been incompatible but becomes so prevalent to need legal recourse to stop. Children were protected by their parents and families through the ages, and while it was certainly not universal, it was prevalent. Though, I do recognize that the very definition of who children were was different, as it was mostly pre-puberty children to be treated with more protection.
In this case, we want to avoid situations where parents are punished for their entirely reasonable childcare decisions. We're never going to be able to eliminate all ignorant busybody neighbors; that's just not realistic. So the law needs to be structured (and law enforcement trained) to ensure nosy neighbors can't cause damage like this.
And I think fixing the law enforcement response will actually fix some nosy neighbors: law enforcement telling such people that their report is incorrect and inappropriate will have the effect of reducing the incidence of such calls in the future.
Let's take this a bit further. We are never going to be able to eliminate all ignorant law enforcement regardless of training, that's just not realistic. Or prosecutors. Or...
I mean, this is a case in point (all of them were dumb or unwilling to admit to error in judgement), and I am sure you've seen plenty yourself: I don't know a single person who hasn't first-handedly experienced a dumb police officer (not saying they all are, but some certainly are).
If we accept that we'll never get everyone to be perfect, we should accept that we rely on everyone to not be dumb. It starts with your neighbour and you.
If I was the parent, I'd include the neighbour in my damages (emotional, reputational and lost income) suit along with the police and all the other institutions that didn't put a stop to this. Provided the parents can win anything in court, which I am not even sure about.
If the neighbour was really worried, they could have accompanied the kid to the house and had a chat with the parents.
Planning for nature and planning for failure aren’t exactly the same. And too much planning for failure when there are missed opportunities to plan for success, well, it leads to failure.
If you drove it off the lot, an unrelated point is made.
So you are worried about seeing a neighbour's kid walking near the home alone? Talk to them to check they are ok. Accompany them home. Talk to parents about your concerns.
Do not call the police.
Note that I am in no way saying that they take grunt of the blame, but we put adult people in jails for doing dumb things (hey, that lion in the zoo looked really sad so I released it). When you can hurt someone, it is your responsibility to not be dumb.
I have no problem blaming this behavior. To be clear, it would not be productive to blame only the neighbor.
That woman has a civic responsibility to call authorities when she's worried about the welfare of a child. The authorities have a responsibility to be competent. The woman fulfilled her responsibility, the entire justice system failed. If the police and justice system aren't expected to have or use any expertise beyond some random concerned chick, they're not only failures, but useless. Lone individuals shouldn't be held to a higher standard than these people that we vest with the authority to make these decisions.
If anything, it would be nice if the police would have explained to her, when she called, the minimum standards for intervention when suspecting that a child is in danger. The reason they can't is because they don't have any.
Instead, it's somehow super-important to focus on and villainize this random concerned busybody. It's not important, and that woman could have been a hero for reporting on any other day (or with a legitimate justice system.)
If she was worried about a child, she should have accompanied them home.
Next time, she'll send police over when a kid can't watch more TV (or go to a party, or eat more sweets, or...) and ends up crying her guts out: hey, she's worried about children's welfare. I would be having police at my door almost every other day with a neighbour like that.
The police are the guard dogs who arrest criminals.
Not in clown world USA. The USSC said there is no government responsibility when USSC created the doctrine of government immunity.
This is why false police reports are generally forbidden and can put you, a reporter, in jail.
You shouting out a crazy theory on leukemia will not compel anyone to listen at the hospital. Police are obligated to act out on all reports.
So while they do bear the least responsibility, I disagree it's by a wide margin.
The police are not obligated to act out on all reports and they exercise this executive discretion all the time. In this case the police choose to arrest and the DA choose to file charges. Nothing obligates the law enforcement professionals to behave this way — not even a sense of PR as this only stains their image. This train could've been stopped by professionals at every step of the way but instead they choose to power through. The mother pled guilty.
This is not swatting. In the eyes of law enforcement, the neighbor did not engage in false reporting.
If you are not used to having police at your door, the mere event can be intimidating.
Not in USA. Supreme Court said cops have no duty to protect any individual. Supposedly cops provide general protection, or something.
USSC said cops don't have to do anything.
Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005)
It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.
Plus other details: The police can refuse to take the complaint. The police can refuse to arrest someone. The prosecutor has "prosecutorial discretion". CPS can outright refuse, both the CPS case worker and the people actually implementing the decision. The people implementing community service can refuse.
No this is 100% on each and every one of the government workers involved.
But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.
It was always a joke that you will be arrested for going for a walk in the land of the free. Until it isn't just a joke anymore.
Sure, there certainly are bad neighborhoods, but to me the focus on security has everyone getting crazy. A lot of countries don't need armed guards at school.
Cops see a lot of crime and have a lot of contact to criminals. I can understand why they would have such a perspective. But everyone else involved should have done a thorough sanity check. And in my opinion they should get some audit if they are in any way able to discern if there is any real danger or not. That is the minimal requirement for their jobs.
That would mean they would be responsible for the damage they caused, which includes years lost income (ie. a LOT of money). So no, they bear no blame.
No state accepts CPS bear any responsibility for the damage they cause. Not a single one.
Then go downtown and.. do some police work? What the hell man, stop harassing an innocent mother.
If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it.
Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
Easy to say, but you're voting for them for a lot more than that. If that's the only thing you care about, you can easily vote for that person. If you care about other things, it gets a lot, lot harder.
A party that never loses an election has no incentive to do anything for the voters.
When did it become illegal for children to be outside without adult supervision?
>> the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 ... clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger.
The police did not enforce the law. Hence the anger towards the police officers and the DA.
Edit: I stand corrected, this is family law not criminal law.
Legislators failed to change the criminal law.
But this way beyond what the law was intended for. It was passed in 1973, and there's no way that in 1973 lawmakers would think it should be used against this mother. Any law can be overzealously enforced.
Outside of incredibly particular offenses, "It's the law, I have to enforce it, I have no choice" is just an excuse.
No, let's not. According to the article, the neighbor who called the cops asked the boy where he lived, "verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless". Excuse me? What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house?
I agree the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place, but one of the things you're supposed to do as a neighbor is to understand that we have an insane legal system and not invoke it on one of your neighbors unless you really, really have to.
it's also a case if the police actually cuffed and brought the mom to jail, someone there should tell them they won't book them for something stupid.
If a DA is involved, it's also a case where the DA should say that they won't prosecute such a stupid thing.
This failure is not one crazy individual, but a whole failed system, from the bottom up. You'll always have a crazy neighbor, a paranoid cop, etc., but having a whole chain this rotten really sucks, and something should really be changed.
Edit: By "Ron Swannson" I mean "someone who takes a skeptical by default view of things the organization chooses to engage in", not necessarily a libertarian.
So that's one reason you wouldn't want a libertarian CPS agent.
There are edge cases, such as a woman becoming pregnant against her will (rape, for example); but those are edge cases and don't change the basic principle.
Ugh. That sounds ugly. Which part is the quote?
I assume not the "Well, I personally believe.." part but don't see any quotation marks so hard to tell.
> Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.)
It's a pretty extreme view. However, he points out that parents still have a moral obligation to feed their child, and goes on to argue that removing the legal obligation would actually make things better for children. I think his argument is that bad parents who don't want their child would be able to sell their child to a nice family, and anyone who cares so little for their child that they'd let them starve would probably rather just sell the child.
I'm not a libertarian myself, so I don't agree with this. I'm just summarizing.
Ironically, more rural Texas regions tend to ha√e more independent kids; after all, you'll see 10 year old kids driving the family truck on farms and ranches.
Genuinely curious. How did you manage to type '√' rather than 'v'? It this a keyboard or locale issue?
More often (but still rare), I'll end up with a † instead of t. As someone below mentioned, it appears to be (on Mac) opt+key.
I use a Razer Blackwidow something something mechanical keyboard, and it sits pretty tall. Only just now I figured out how I think this opt thing is happening. The side of my left hand appears to sometimes sit low enough that it may be bumping the opt key. Prior to this moment, the whole † thing had been a mystery to me :P.
I'm not sure I agree. One of the requirements for an adult citizen in a civil society is to be reasonable in your dealings with neighbors.
> It is, however, the police's, DA, and CPS's job.
"Mentally functional" does not necessarily mean "giving citizens a break". The criminal law that the mom was charged with is a law, it's on the books, and law enforcement is supposed to enforce the law. They do have a certain amount of discretion, but the incentives they are facing, particularly in a community which is strongly in favor of "law and order" (which I suspect the one in question is), are against their exercising discretion in favor of a citizen. And putting the "sex trafficking" thing into the mix just makes it worse.
The only real way to fix this is to remove things like this from the discretion of law enforcement by not having a law like this in the first place. (Unfortunately, it appears that when the law was revised to allow kids more independence, they only revised the family law code, not the criminal code. They should have revised both. So I would say the ultimate fault here is the legislature, for being incompetent when making law.)
I do agree that the neighbor should not be let off on this, nor am I trying to excuse their behavior. But there are always going to be Karens that call the cops for no reason and the system has to be able to deal with that.
Speed limit laws should not even exist in the first place. They are a paradigmatic example of laws that are unreasonable and should not exist. The fact that it is impossible to enforce them as written, or even with light-years of as written, is one reason for that.
> I don't really think officer discretion is avoidable to a certain degree.
To a certain degree, yes. But it should be limited. In the system we have now, it's not; the scope of laws on the books is huge, to the point that all of us are probably technically violating multiple laws every day, and we are all relying on a huge amount of discretion on the part of law enforcement to allow us to go about our business without continually being interrupted. That's not good.
> there are always going to be Karens that call the cops for no reason and the system has to be able to deal with that.
Yes, and the way to deal with it is to have the law be reasonable. It is not to have lots of unreasonable laws on the books and then hope that law enforcement exercises discretion in practically all cases, only actually prosecuting the "really serious" ones. It's to not have unreasonable laws on the books at all, so when a Karen calls the cops for no reason, the cops can just say "Ma'am, that's not against the law, nothing for us to do."
I have said no such thing. Do you really believe that the law is the only thing that defines what's "wrong"?
> Speed limit laws are clearly flawed in many ways but there is a clear reason why they should exist.
No, what is clear is that the law should be written to penalize actual harm. Speed limit laws don't do that. They penalize people who have caused no harm, and because they can only be enforced arbitrarily--who gets stopped for speeding has nothing to do with actual risk reduction--they reduce people's respect for the law in general.
A properly written law for "rules of the road" for speed would be something like this: The posted "speed limit" on any public road is advisory; you cannot be stopped or ticketed simply for driving faster than the posted limit. However, if you are in an accident and it is found that you were exceeding the posted limit, you are presumed to be at fault. (You can still rebut the presumption, but that requires going to court and presenting evidence and having the judge rule in your favor based on that evidence.)
I have said no such thing. The only implication of my position for drunk driving is that the law should not be able to punish you for it if you cause no harm. But that in no way means that, for example, a cop who sees you driving erratically can't pull you over, give you a breathalyzer test, find out that you're too drunk to drive, and lock your car, making sure that it's safely parked, and then ask you who to call to come pick you up and take you home. He just can't write you a ticket that forces you to either come to court or pay a fine.
It also in no way means that other people have to let you drive drunk. Bars don't have to sell you drinks if you're going to drive. Friends don't have to let you drive drunk. And in a sane society of responsible adults, those kinds of preventions work better than any law possibly can. The fact that our society has so many nanny state laws that micromanage all aspects of life is a sign that we don't live in a sane society of responsible adults.
> I think doing things in your car that have substantial and easily preventable risk to other people should not be allowed
I think you are way too ready to give power to the government, which will abuse it, and the costs of that abuse of power will far outweigh any possible benefit from such laws.
First, if a cop pulls you over for speeding, it's not for "traveling at an unsafe speed". It's because you were going faster than the posted limit. The law says nothing whatever about such a speed being unsafe. In practice, cops usually don't pull people over just for speeding, but only for going significantly faster than the general flow of traffic. But that's only usually; cops in most jurisdictions have monthly or quarterly ticket quotas, and if it's getting close to the end of the quota period and they're behind on tickets, it's simple to go out to places where people routinely speed and start pulling everyone over. I have seen this happen.
"Driving erratically", unlike "going faster than the posted speed limit", is always a subjective judgment on the cop's part (in most jurisdictions it's something like "reckless driving" or "driving in a clearly unsafe manner"), but the whole point is that it's supposed to be rare; by definition most people on the road will not be driving recklessly and this kind of law can't be abused in the way I described above just to make a ticket quota.
However, the important difference I was talking about was not between speeding and "driving erratically", it was about under what circumstances the cop can write you a ticket that forces you to either pay a fine or come to court. Under our current laws, a cop can do that whenever he pulls you over--there will always be some traffic law you were violating. ("Driving erratically", or something similar, in itself is a traffic violation under current law.) Under the libertarian system I have been describing, the cop could not write you a ticket that forces you to either pay a fine or come to court unless you actually caused harm. He could take steps to prevent you from driving if you hadn't caused harm but were clearly not capable of driving safely, by an objective test (such as a breathalyzer), but he could not impose a fine or court appearance on you.
Don't get me wrong, I would love it if people everywhere acted rationally and only stuck their nose into other people's business when it is actually necessary and useful to do at. But it's not realistic to expect that we can "fix" everyone, so we should focus on the things we can fix instead.
I agree, but this is perfectly consistent with what I said. Not every adult meets the requirements for an adult citizen in a civil society. That doesn't mean those requirements don't exist.
> What we can control is the law, and law enforcement response.
To the extent this is true, it does not preclude also expecting adult citizens to be reasonable. Indeed, the more we can count on that, the less people will feel the need to invoke the law. Which makes it much easier to make the law more reasonable.
Still not sure what I should have done if he hadn't gone home or really if this is a problem waiting to happen. At his age I wandered much further from home and put myself in worse potential danger at times, though I probably never yelled at passing cars. No one ever called the police on me though there were a few times when an adult told me to stop doing whatever I was up to or go somewhere else.
If you don't know which house the kid belongs in, the first thing I would do is to find out. Start knocking on doors and asking if it's their kid.
Now that you do know, the obvious thing to do is to introduce yourself to the neighbors and describe what their kid was doing. They're new to the neighborhood so you can pitch it as letting them know that there are a lot of passing cars at that point and kids should be aware of the danger.
A driver yelled at him, something fairly vulgar like "get out of the fucking road, asshole!"
He came home and reported this to me. I was more gentle obviously, and told him that the guy wasn't very nice for swearing at him.
But honestly, I don't blame the guy, and I'm happy he yelled at him. I'm sure he'll remember that incident next time he's cruising down the middle of the road.
If you do it by yourself. But you can always try to recruit another adult--a neighbor you know, for example. Having an independent witness makes a big difference.
Sure, they make you slow down for them. But drivers now want to "make up" for that slow down. So they drive even faster between them.
Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this. Lots of people are to blame here, but the cops escalated by arresting her on a flimsy basis. The incident could have stopped there.
The article points out that that Texas law did not change the criminal code, so even though it was no longer a family law violation (hence CPS dismissed the case), it was still technically a criminal violation (hence the mom still had to plea bargain or go to trial).
Well, what decent neighbour isn't able to, at the very least, recognize his neighbors?
Maybe this child's parents have kept him locked in the closet, never seen by anyone before, until this one time he emerged unto the world and the police were called not because he was on the street, but because he's never been on the street before.
But more likely this person isn't a neighbor, at least not mentally.
It's the same in government. Government is so large now, that every law that gets passed is now make-work law. And for all the same reasons that people with no critical thinking make it their job to enforce stupid ideas like "all code used for authentication in web apps must be written in C", people in the legal system, including and ESPECIALLY "soft" jobs like CPS, have to justify their existence by making the most work out of the least situation.
So I'll do you one better: it's the fault of politicians tugging on heart strings to pass overreaching, touchy-feely laws, that give government too much power, in order to get themselves reelected.
Just a warning, more than a few of the videos on AuditTheAudit are infuriating due to the level of arrogance, incompetence, negligence, and abuse of authority displayed. But, it is nice that there is a way to air this dirty laundry in public. As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle".
Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful.
To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and 99% execution.
I guess my case falls apart when it comes to law enforcement. They don't know the law yet they're enforcing it.
For us, it often comes to "I spent 2 weeks investigating this issue, and at the end it was fixed by changing one line of code".
In this case execution was trivial, but knowing what to execute was the 99% part.
Hitting the machine with the hammer $1
Knowing where to hit the machine with the hammer $149Minor sex-trafficking is almost always done by someone known to the child, usually a relative. And the child is usually in their teens, although occasionally younger.
there is not a finite supply of culpability. they can _all_ bear (varying degrees of) responsibility for it.
this is the real problem here. who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
But my personal experience with the police here where I live is *very different* from the stories I hear from the US.
But I agree that there’s a real problem with the police in the US, one that most US citizens seem not to be able to see clearly (except for people in black neighborhoods, who know what’s up with the cops—but the rest of the country hasn’t been listening to them). I was born and raised in the US, but I’ve been living outside the country for a few years, and the cop problem is one reason I don’t think I’ll be moving back.
Assume the default for these kinds of agencies is false negatives.
The desire for more power, and thus funding, and thus better career aspirations is as relevant to CPS as it is the local PD.
Of all the spilled ink on the topic of how this stuff happens, there seems to be a culture of, "We lock up the bad guys and throw away the key". It doesn't take much to put you into the "Bad Guy" territory, and once you're there, you're not a person, a mother, a son or spouse with a life all your own. You're a threat to the societal order (no longer a human being), and deserve the full weight of punishment regardless of its implications.
The police departments which manage to actually take high crime areas, and turn them around into lower crime areas despite widespread poverty have undertaken a paradigm shift from, "Putting away bad guys" to "Building a community". Getting to know the community, its problems, its major players and learning what their struggles are and trying to find a way to integrate into solving those problems, using law enforcement as a tool and not its own pursuit.
After informing them, that unlike childs walking outside, abuse of 911 is a real crime.
Angry or nosy neighbors, police and social services can get each other caught up in a cycle of escalation that lasts years for some unfortunate families.
This assume some sort of rationality in our legal bureaucracy of course. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to exist.
The person calling is likely not "lying" about anything. If they believe it is dangerous for a kid to walk in the street, then the answer is a truthful "yes".
These people simply have different worldviews.
If a neighbor makes up details in a report to police, they should be charged with a crime. If the cops are asking "do you think we should investigate" to private citizens, they have abandoned all responsibility as law enforcement.
Imagine crowdsourcing your authority, making the justice system a militia for lazy mobs. Completely upside-down.
It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
> The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
Yes, but what's their incentive to do so? The more I look at the society in this country, the more I see that the incentives for LEOs are perfectly aligned with corruption and abuse of power.
Anybody, and I do mean ANYBODY, who has been to traffic court knows the courts are the extension of the cops. Worse yet, in criminal court, judges tell the jury that "being a cop doesnt give any more or less truthfulness or power on their words".
The judges work with with cops and prosecution on a daily basis. They work against you extremely rarely.
You're shoehorning complaints about the judiciary into a case which never made it to a judge.
A judge may well throw this out on its merits, but the case has to progress far enough that a judge has the chance to consider it on its merits. A DA offering a plea deal "so you avoid risking jail time" is basically circumventing that, as the judge doesn't have the resources or authority to investigate every plea deal that comes their way.
There's problems, and then there's unavoidable problems. Failure to design a system with checks and balances for the unavoidable problem is an avoidable problem. ;-)
Not only that, they have a reverse incentive: Say something bad happens to that kid, now the cops will be on the hook for letting them alone.
The real problem is that the fabric of society is mostly gone. In years past, those cops would be chewed out by the old ladies at church the next Sunday. No wonder there is such a backlash building up in conservative areas of the country.
There's one reason: that overreaction is retrospective, and that if you can't cure cop overreaction (when you have complete control over training and livelihood), and you can't cure the entire system's overreaction when they have all the time in the world to think about what they're doing, you have no business dictating to individuals whether they're overreacting or not.
Blaming CPS overreactions on nosy neighbors is just like blaming SWATting on SWATters: an excuse for law enforcement failure, and in that an encouragement to law enforcement to continue to fail in exactly the same way.
You can get phony DUIs now too. How many people are on some pharmaceutical? Well if so, you’re automatically guilty, even if your doctors tells you that you can drive, and must take the meds.
Now, this is a peaceful suburban neighborhood we're talking about, and we're on a stretch between his school and a park near our home. He's riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he's being careful about it.
Off he goes, and the two of us stroll peacefully until we see him stopped, with an old lady talking to him. He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
Somewhere along the way, our society blurred the line between "stepping in to prevent child abuse" and "thinking you're entitled to being hostile and sanctimonious to other parents".
no you didn’t you were just too afraid to tell her to fuck off like any normal person would do in that situation
That attitude, while perhaps more comfortable in some ways, just enables the sort of behaviour you encountered, and apparently disliked, from that woman.
A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future.
Depending on where you are, she might have gone decades without any kind of resistance to her behaviour.
Too much politeness can be worse than none at all.
Or it means she's definitely calling CPS next time.
Think about what you're proposing. You want me to drag my son, a kid who was little enough back then to still ride a bike with training wheels, into a tense argument between a weird lady, some scary-looking adults, and his parents who suddenly decided to lie through their teeth for some reason? Aside from what example I would be setting for him, how do you think a kid would handle a situation like that?
It wasn't enough that this lady already pissed on his parade, I'm supposed to compound it and put us all at risk of having him taken away because we were "negligent" and also falsely accused someone of being a pedo?
Have we forgotten that the #1 priority in this whole situation is the kid, not our pride or out desire to put someone in their place?
You don't know this person. A little old lady is unlikely to be a child molester statistically but it has happened. So when the cops knock on your door, maybe that's the concern that leaps to the front of your mind. Don't accuse anyone of anything just mention details, for example perhaps she touched him on the stomach to stop him "she placed her hand near his penis". Get creative. "Obviously a sensitive topic like this can't be discussed in earshot of the child victim".
You may say "I want to do the right thing" and that's fine, but personally I want the right thing to happen (ie. Kids being allowed to play outside) and I'm willing to bend the rules in the very same way that the people trying to prevent that are.
The #1 priority should not be the kid.
The #1 priority should be the benefit of all kids.
In this example risk is introduced to the custodial relationship of the immediate child for the hopeful benefit of all children. It's possible this could be a rational risk. Whether it would be effective I have my doubts.
If we use some arbitrary numbers perhaps it would be just to risk 1/1000 chance your own kid gets tossed in foster care by CPS if it means 10 unknown kids end up with 10% longer lifespan because they built healthy habits by being able to play alone outside because a threatening old lady got put in her place.
The first thing you learn as an immigrant to the US is to avoid escalating conflicts, especially with Americans. Even a perfectly legal immigrant like me, in a "blue state" like Washington, will avoid rocking the boat. You don't have a safety net to fall back on, you don't have extended family to help you out and support you, and you already have too many other things to worry about, so you try to avoid the risk of having a random stranger make your life a living hell because you misjudged how safe it is to tell them off.
No, it would solidify that persons' belief that the people were bad people and embolden her to act more swiftly next time.
Confrontation and escalation with swearing doesn't teach people a lesson. It makes them dig their heels in.
Stop giving a shit about other peoples opinions. Responding aggressively to a threat from someone is perfectly valid, and if that impacts their opinion of you, that's their issue.
The retired lady, with nothing to do with her time all days, will sit back and scheme about the interaction. She will decide you are an adversary, disrespectful man who needs to be put in his place after 'abusing' an elderly citizen and a child.
You have maybe 1,2 free hours a day to deal with unexpected things that come up. SHE HAS ALL FUCKIN DAY. She will calculate and connive, and avail herself of every authority and ear and talk to them like a sweet concerned grandma who is bearing witness to an evil child abuser. And they will believe her. Every lie she spends 5 minutes conniving, will take days to months to disprove while CPS tries to comb through your personal life.
You have a kid and thus exposed to CPS complaints at anytime. She has no underage kids. You have a job to lose. She does not.
In any verbal conversation, you are the automatic loser. In any physical confrontation, you are the automatic agressor. You cannot win. Literally the only way to win an argument with an elderly lady is to walk off if the situation doesn't call for polite chit chat.
Note: Not legal advice
That's the worst response. It puts them in the defensive.
If there is any "good" way, it is to be incredibly obsequious and deferential. Most of all, these kind of people just need their tummy tickled. "Yes, ma'am, will take it into consideration next time, ma'am".
Works great with cops too. They totally love that shit.
If you can, you can then nudge in right direction. "Have you met little Timmy yet? He's such a sweet little scamp, always wanting to ride his bike like his poppy". "oh you live here, i love that spicebush in your front yard. we've wanted to plant one too".
We have a busybody neighbor, she's always calling code enforcement on neighbors. I'm just really sickly sweet with her, I loath every second of it, but I don't think now she'll ever call inspections on us since we now have an expectation to chat when we cross paths.
Anyway, it's hard, and there is no "win" here. But if there is an angle, the angle is to treat them like dumb, stupid babies.
Not a jab at you, but so tired of random people thinking they know what is best for my son from a 3 second interaction. We really need to bring back some shaming as I truly believe that is how you get a community to work together again instead of against each other.
You shouldn't have had to endure a lecture or be threatened by your neighbor. If the kid is just learning to ride a bike without training wheels, it would have been worth it to go back and get his helmet. I hope the lesson isn't "you shouldn't tell people when they are doing something dangerous," but that you shouldn't be a complete prick about it.
As for why we didn't go back, his decision to try taking the wheels off was completely unexpected -- he had been dead set against it for quite a while -- and I didn't want to take the wind out of his sails by saying, "Okay, but you have to wait 15 more minutes while I quickly hop in the car, drive back home, get your helmet, and come back with it."
It was a calculated risk, and you can always argue that we shouldn't have taken it.
The point of the whole story is exactly what you said in the last sentence. It's not so much what people think they're entitled to say, it's how they say it. Just look at the replies to my story: you've got a whole bunch of people who think it's perfectly fine to lecture me about how I'm part of the problem here and to do so in a rather hostile manner.
This is the kind of thing I was trying to point out in the first place, the fact that the more and more people these days feel entitled to be crappy to other people in order to prove some point.
Yes, teaching bike safety is important, but it's also not that big a deal.
You usually only notice people when they do something weird-- maybe 999 days out of 1000 that neighbor is perfectly normal, but on that one day they were having an off day. That's the day you notice them.
An advantage of living further from people is that just fewer interactions with strangers and near-strangers so fewer opportunities to be the victim of someone's off-day.
One came up to our back door ranting and screaming, and my dad had to tell him to fuck off.
This really depends on your life experience.
For some this is no big deal. For some this means the parents are in a drunken/drug stupor. For some taking care of a kid means being instantly labeled as a pedo by parents, police and neighbours.
I wish I knew. My children have had the cops called on them for playing in our front yard. I wish they could spend their afternoons climbing trees and playing in the grass like I did growing up, but there's a group of people who see children playing outside of direct parent supervision as a categorically dangerous activity.
I'm always struck when I take my kids to school and see the high schoolers gathered around waiting for their bus to pick them up. You wouldn't even know they exist otherwise - there's no other signs of their existence, no groups of them playing at the park, no sounds of games in the streets, no hoots or hollers from down the block - just nothing, silence. Each house is an island and each teen a castaway from 4pm when they get home to 7am when they leave for school, severed from the neighborhood and each other while the same folks say, "How come kids don't play outside anymore?"
But go and have a walk. What do you see "happening" ? nothing.
Kid: <Happily playing with clay>
Teacher: Oh, by the way, he fell out of a small tree today, he was climbing and fell, so he may have a small bruise, just so you are aware
Me: Oh ok. What tree?
Teacher: Oh we took them to <forest 5 miles from daycare> and grilled hot dogs today!
Kid: I found a snail!
But in my kid's preschool (for 5-6 year olds), when they were presenting a plan for this year and how they'll be crossing the street to another of their buildings for a few hours, one of the parents was worried they'll do that even if it rains or snows!
When asked how will they bring their kid to preschool not dressed for the elements, it was (not-surprisingly) "by car". I guess going outside is limited to sunny weather for their kids!
There are a lot of excellent videos about this sad problem, like this: https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw
But at the end of the day, when it’s not actually possible to be independent every day, you just loose this culture. And countries that made different infrastructure and development decisions 6 decades ago are in a much better place today — it doesn’t have to be this way.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310218/time-spent-using...
Generally the younger you are the more likely you are to be a heavy user of your phone. There is no data for it but I would expect that high school and jr high kids are probably even higher users than 18 - 34.
As a footnote: Yes, I know this seems fairly reductive and there's a lot of nuance left on the table. A single counter example won't change my mind because I'm talking about tendencies instead of black or white expression.
When I was growing up in the 90s, I'd routinely bike many miles away from home and disappear for hours before I came home. Nowadays letting your kids do that is liable to get CPS called on you.
How the heck did we end up here?!
In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11. What you're seeing is a symptom of this. It isn't like this in other countries: kids walk around by themselves all the time.
I've been in one of the most rural county of West Virginia, i saw kids outside each time i left the "house".
Oh, it was on this track well before 9/11. Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger as concepts were there long before terrorist attacks on American soil, for a lot longer duration, and were largely explicitly about the dangers to children.
I don't know how accurate it is, but an FBI investigator by the name of Ken Lanning links Satanic Panic to the development of X-Rays and the discovery by doctors of evidence of rampant child abuse.[1] The idea being that people just couldn't accept that kids were being abused at such high rates at home, therefore there must be this secretive "other" harming the children.
People have been primed by the media to be this paranoid for a long time, because it gets attention.
We don't live in the states.
Not true.
They'd be lucky to even have two live parents and in the picture.
Please continue and tell me more about the topic.
It's hard to fathom that this could be considered illegal.
What fun is it being a kid if you can't explore? That was the only really good part, otherwise childhood and adolescence is mostly suffering.
Wasted youth.
Richard Ramirez became popular a few years after the law was enforced, and at that point it solidified for everyone "this was the right decision".
Many parents in the 90's let their kids walk home alone, and explore their neighbourhoods on their own.. And even today it's popular in rural areas. But the nature of where people live now is more related to cost of living and jobs, which everyone changes every few years - so nobody knows their neighbours or their community.
Now it's normal to shame parents who do this. And schools automatically notify the authorities if they're told about it.
Would kids get taken away from parents for this? Unlikely, legislation only pushes a $2,000 fine.
Yes, kids have been abducted in New Zealand. Yes, kids have been assaulted in New Zealand. It is a possibility.
Everything is a possibility, it's all about the statistical probability of a bad outcome actually happening.
Someone could break into my house and murder me at any moment. I still don't wander around with a bat or a club because such events are sufficiently rare here in West Menlo Park.
When I was a kid, it seemed like adults were idiots by and large.
Now as I'm getting a bit more ahem, experienced, my perception is regressing back towards this hypothesis.
Why are the karens winning? :/
As usual, America is the weird one, perhaps with some other Anglophone nations following suit.
Recently when going by tram with kids somewhere I saw ~8-9yo girl travelling by herself seeing her confused started to cry, so I approached her, she said she is going wrong direction, told her to get off with us and then just directed her to right tram in different direction and went with my kids own way. Told her it's not big deal, she just lost few minutes and it can happen anyone to confuse tram numbers. Before COVID I used to approach tourists going in direction to my home since many of them went wrong direction, but surprisingly often I am met with German tourists who like riding trams whole line back and forth, I've had this hobby with Beijing subway lines when I lived there.
Actually my father (from small 40K town) came to visit just yesterday and he also took tram in wrong direction, realized it after 3 stops, but had problem to get back since there was no stop in opposite direction nearby, which happens with some stops, usually you just need to cross the road/tracks.
Where do you live?
Whenever I read these stories it feels like I live on a different planet from everyone else.
Note: I looked up these stats to make sure I got them right. They are mostly at the voting precinct, and census BG level, but I'm abstaining from posting them for obvious reasons.
I live in the midwest, in a smaller town. You still see kids playing in the neighborhood and parks and running around. Kids walk and bike to school. Nobody would call the cops over a kid walking by himself unless he looked to be lost or in distress.
Cops and CPS can't be bothered (note I never personally called them, although I have had to address the children directly to ask them to stop stealing from my house). I still prefer that to a "safe" place where my kids have to risk getting ripped away from their parents for walking to a park.
The key to not dealing with police is moving to a high crime area with a weak police presence. These kind of CPS paranoia stuff is generally not enforced in places that are actually less safe for children. If the area is safe, that's when CPS/police will have the time to focus on you to call it unsafe. That is, kids aren't really safe from CPS of accusing them of being unsafe unless it is actually unsafe, in which case authorities never responded in the first place because CPS and the police are busy visiting an abandoned crack-baby.
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/01/598630200/utah-passes-free-ra...
We can broaden that a bit to: “There’s an ever growing group of people who think they can and should be the arbiter of other people’s behavior.”
Everyone needs to learn to mind their own fucking business.
Complete anecdata, but the parents in my close friend group are split between "parents with a more free-range kid mindset" and "typical upper-middle-class parental paranoia."
The free-range kids are mostly happy-go-lucky, emotionally stable, and thriving. Almost every single kid over the age of 10 with paranoid parents is diagnosed with a mental health condition of some sort. I mean I literally can only think of one who is not in therapy or taking medication. I think the isolation and lack of unsupervised group activities that you describe is a big part of it.
One of my more paranoid friends made a judgmental comment recently regarding my other friend's daughter not being in therapy. I was extremely confused and asked if the kiddo was having emotional issues. Her response was, "Well not yet, but 12 is a very stressful age, and I think that when you have the money to do so, it's just good parenting to ensure your kid is talking to a therapist on a regular basis."
The level of paranoia needed to believe that every single perfectly stable 12-year-old needs weekly visits with a mental health professional to ensure their health and safety, and that not supplying this is neglectful, is just... bizarre.
I cannot help but believe this sort of behavior is severely damaging the psyche of these kids. And I also don't see how it can't be hurting the parents as well. Imagine how incredibly stressful it must be to be a parent who believes every stranger, every walk around the block, and every pre-teen mood swing is a serious danger to their child.
But as for outside masks, I agree, it's just straight up unscientific. Especially when people are wearing flimsy cloth masks that do little to ward off COVID germs in the first place! Although I know some people keep them on outside if they're walking between buildings, just because it's easier than taking it on/off constantly.
So anyway, masks kind of fall into that category of "I ain't gonna judge if I don't know your exact situation."
But I agree, it would be nice to be able to tell my friends who are perfectly healthy with no at-risk loved ones, hey, you really don't need to keep wearing a mask outside for the rest of your life. Both because it's silly, and because it seems genuinely damaging to their mental health... I have a couple friends who still get anxious/upset when someone gets within 6 feet of them without a mask on, and it's just a needlessly stressful way to live that is taking a very, very serious toll on their mental health.
It was like this when I was in high school as well: There is no place where young people are allowed to gather and explore their personalities.
He called because there was "an animal in distress."
We pulled into the driveway just as an RCMP officer was arriving "on the scene."
She entered the house with us, petted the dog, and rolled her eyes. And "closed the file."
The dog was doing its job.
Asshole neighbours (even in Canada) are a real problem.
That's his job.
He was left alone in the house for an hour. I have video surveillance showing the neighbour skulking around on my property.
Sorry, this is the reason we got a dog.
If the neighbour had a problem with the dog barking, he could have asked me "hey, when I come on your property and walk around your house, why does the dog bark?"
If the dog is inside the house, you can't hear his barks from outside of our property, by the way. Neighbour only heard him because he was right next to the house.
Easier solution: don't be an asshole neighbour.
Not sure why you want to regulate what I do with my house and dog, which isn't harming or annoying anyone, while completely missing the point -- the neighbour shouldn't be there.
And he certainly shouldn't have called the police for something that he caused.
The profoundly innumerate, that’s who. They overestimate the risk of an adverse event because they rely solely on media reports of child safety events to anchor their estimates, never stopping to consider that the media doesn’t report on children safely walking home.
Only got put in a cop car in the US - in both Germany and the U.K. they realised I was just doing normal human stuff - both childhood occasions in the US they gave my parents a talking to, as an adult they were unreasonably suspicious as to why I would be walking rather than driving, but let me go with a warning to drive in future.
So - the problem is the police, and the justice system, as curtain-twitchers live the world over.
Low and behold a few years later I find out that its my highschool police officer I get to see every day!
This parent was not exercising their responsibility as an individual to watch out for anything and everything that might hurt their child, in the US that is illegal because the free market ideology rules all.
Please elaborate.
Cops think the neighborhood is dangerous for kids because of sex trafficking? Arrest parents for allowing kids outside instead of stopping the sex trafficking.
Consumers get harmed and workers get taken advantage of by corporations? Vote with your wallet instead of actually regulating companies.
https://blog.ipleaders.in/difference-between-abduction-and-k...
The cop just demosntrated himself that he isnt doing his job and that there is something deeply wrong with society if a child cant even walk half a mile at 8 years old.
Because there was no kidnapping or sex trafficking going on, they were just making shit up.
edit: yeah, it was sarcarsm.
It's (probably) sarcasm.
On an unrelated note, I'm now going to watch Castle in the Sky tonight, thanks!
Does it? I can't see this happening in Europe. What freedoms stand out?
Merica: *more* freedoms
Europa: *better* freedomsWe normally describe America as being prude and cite anti-nudity policies of broadcast TV. However, America pioneered modern video pornography, going far beyond any country for decades.
Similarly, while in some places you need to put your beer in a paper bag but we also have open-air drug markets and streets filled with people openly taking hardcore drugs.
There are 8 year olds walking around my neighborhood every weekend and nobody bats an eye.
Sure, that's all a bit circular, but good luck breaking the spiral with a "law and order" mentality.
U.S. police kill about ~1000 people per year, and the vast majority of those aren't at all questionable. If there are 330,000,000 people in the U.S., that's 0.000303% of the population per year. Each person has, on average, maybe 10 contentious police interactions in a lifetime of 75 years? That's 0.134 interactions per year.
So, given on this Fermi estimate, you have about a 0.00226% chance of being killed per contentious police interaction if we spread it completely evenly, or 2.26 in 100,000. And spreading it evenly doesn't make any sense at all.
So, if you're young, black, male, and running around Chicago dealing drugs carrying an illegal gun--yeah, maybe worry about it. For everyone here on HN, it's a stupid thing to worry about. Worry about your sedentary lifestyle. Worry about driving safely if you drive a lot. Worry about diabetes. Worry about whether your relationships with friends and family are good. Worry about your diet. Worry about exercise. Worry about falling down the stairs. The cops aren't going to kill you.
But no, you should not "care" in the sense of worrying about it happening to yourself. The probability is so small it's not worth it, along with an infinity of other freak occurrences.
I don't know what TFA is.
> We should make it clear to those involved that it's not acceptable (we should try to punish them), and we should try to help aggrieved parties.
Here, we agree. But when you cite statistics in the manner you did, you're arguing against cloistering myself and my child in our home, quaking in fear of the improbable: beating on a straw-man.
If you re-read the last line of my first comment, you may notice that the "law and order" mentality that I'm railing against is fear-based governance. We have equipped and trained our police to be paramilitary forces that are nearly unaccountable for their misbehavior: a resounding success of fear-based governance. De-escalating the cycle of violence requires vacating fear-based governance -- convincing the police to over-react less, convincing citizens to call the authorities less; convincing voters to react to broken windows with investment in fixing windows rather than jail time and extrajudicial killings. And in the meantime, we need to hold people accountable for perpetrating administrative violence against innocent people like in TFA.
Citation needed
Yes, it's basically bullshit in most of the US. Even knowing that the media feeds on clickbait and routinely hypes up everything that even smells like it could be controversial, people just lap it up. Even people here on HN.
Police shootings are just a potent symbol for a much larger issue with the Justice System. The problem is that conversations about complex systemic issues become circular and conversations about symbols often don't.
As for police shootings being a symbol, I see your point. I would make the alteration that it's unjust police shootings that are the symbols. Most are some variation on, "Crazed knife-wielding man shot down by police after stabbing two".
I did this without the drugs and guns part, and had guns drawn on me three times growing up in Chicago for the crime of walking. If I had been killed, I'm sure it would have been coded in a way for you not to see it as a problem.
For example, a friend’s partner shared a story about the time he went to a big conference (maybe the VMware one?) in Atlanta. He was fairly senior at HP and no more threatening looking than any other middle-aged IT guy … and was the only pulled over on the way back to his hotel by a cop who was suspicious about a black man driving a nice rental car. His evening involved a very tense hour sitting on the side of the road while a southern cop straight out of a stereotype asked a ton of questions and “asked” to inspect the car while patting his gun.
Table 3, "Residents who experienced nonfatal threats or use of force during contacts with police, by demographic characteristics, 2015 and 2018"
Of people who report having police contact within the last year (~18% of people), 2.0% report "Experienced threats or force at any time during the year". 1.5% for white people, 3.8% for black. This is 2018.
Any way you slice it, having a gun drawn on you by a cop is exceedingly rare--even for black Americans. And, of course, "gun drawn" is going to be a small subset of that 3.8%.
Most mainstream media isn't overtly political, so their motivations are usually more monetary than ideological. Following the money is always a good idea.
On average, the cops are nuts in the US... It just take one hot head in a group to make them all act badly...
Please consider donating what you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...
To be clear, Wallace "is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program" and "hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again." The GoFundMe is to pay for those costs. It won't do anything to undo the original miscarriage.
I even had this happen to me with a traffic ticket. It was way too expensive to fight it even though I could easily proven my innocence.
This lady probably would lose at trial and then have to appeal. The judge could instruct the jury that they have to adjudicate whether she dropped off the child or not regardless of whether that should be reasonable. You often can't argue constitutionality and some other factors until appeal. That would bankrupt the family.
It would of course be ridiculous to claim that these things don't happen absent of car culture: it's a broader trend than that, and there are suburban areas that buck the trend. But the urban/suburban divide here is stark: I grew up walking to school and riding public transport alone, and it's normal to see kids running around my neighborhood without any supervision. That kind of freedom works because nobody is surprised to see a 6 year old running errands; they're seen doing the same thing every day.
I don't have anything to add, this is just a really important point.
So I get that you want to find car culture to be the root of all evil, but I don't buy it.
For every place like yours, there are suburbs like the ones that most of my friends grew up in: ones where everybody drives in and out, where sidewalks exist primarily as a vessel for dogwalking, and nothing can be reached on foot (parks or basic living amenities).
Of course, nothing is monocausal. But if it were, that faulty would be 'car centric suburbia'.
It's bizarre. Where I live the police are not insane like this but people will still be shocked if they find out you walked 1/2 mile instead of taking a car.
When I went to the US for a research visit, I didn't have a car, because my bed and breakfast was in walking distance to the lab (there was even a bus). So, naturally, I walked to a nearby restaurant in the evening, and was stopped by the police, asking me what I was up to. It didn't have any consequences, but still.
In Japan, children are encouraged from early age to be independent. They even take the subway and bus by themselves, albeit it's significantly safer there than in other parts of the world. Still though, I think people in America have gone off the deep end.
These problems are not unique to suburbia, but they're definitely amplified.
I've offended a lot of suburban friends and family though, because they don't understand how we could raise a child in NYC let alone give them any kind of independence. I've been told that it's irresponsible, that I'll be endangering him, and that I'm crazy to think the city is a safe place for a child, among other things.
With all due respect, whoever is telling you that is should mind their own fucking business.
We live in Hong Kong and think that it's a great environment (albeit insanely expensive) to raise our one-year old child but heard the same reaction to friends and family. Some people get obsessed with the idea of safety and can't understand the value of freedom to explore, easy access to culture in the form of theatre, art, museums, ... Instead they only optimise for that single dimension of safety and are offended whenever someone challenges their obsession by making a different choice than them.
Time for some new friends...
There's packs of them that transit their way to local skate parks near me.
> In our culture today, parents and other adults overprotect children from possible dangers in play. We seriously underestimate children’s ability to take care of themselves and make good judgments [...] Our underestimation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—by depriving children of freedom, we deprive them of the opportunities they need to learn how to take control of their own behavior and emotions.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, this comment isn't a judgment on anyone or promoting any type of child-rearing philosophy. It's just an obvious truth. Nobody wants to be that parent, and that obviously influences behavior.
Edit: at first glance I'm not sure the numbers are right...
Google says: "Lightning damage in the U.S. [...] In 2021, there were a total of 11 fatalities and 69 injuries reported due to lighting in the United States."
Also: "In the United States, an estimated 460,000 children are reported missing every year. Federal Bureau of Investigation, NCIC."
Edit again to be more specific: Many of the "goes missing" doesn't mean kidnaps, and according to wikipedia, "The vast majority of child abduction cases in the United States are parental kidnapping".
However it also says: "Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year, on average, between 2010–2017."
This number is still a high multiple of the number of people (not just children) struck by lightning each year.
One must remember that about 11% of children are eligible for a drivers license.
It's safer to be around strangers than relatives, when it comes to kidnapping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy
Children spend waaaay more time around parents and relatives.
Same reason why you are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than a stranger. (This is not monocausal, and I do not mean to imply that simply spending time with someone will cause a crime)
Are children safer ALONE with a random stranger or with a family member? Why is the child alone with a random stranger?
There are some broad daylight kidnappings, but they are relatively rare. They are relatively rare because it's much easier for a kidnapper to abscond with someone who trusts them.
It's safer to be around strangers than relatives in every study's sampling, because most people don't leave their kids with strangers. They spend most of their time with relatives, friends and acquaintances. If they did spend as much time with strangers as with relatives, you'd conclude it's safer to be around relatives.
It's like saying cyanide is safe because most people don't die from cyanide. Yeah, because most people don't take cyanide.
I agreed with you ... because I misread your comment as being concerned that the cops would come pick up your kid (like happened here in TFA). My (semi-legitimate) fear is that I'll be harassed as a parent for letting my kids do normal things like walk around the neighborhood. That'd be the only reason I might not encourage it.
Your kid is much more likely to be picked up by the cops over handwringing like this than to be kidnapped.
It took me quite some effort to overcome that but I made it easier by reading the statistics on child deaths and other crimes.
And yeah, of course nobody wants that, but you can't take away a healthy part of growing up because of that.
PS. I'm a father of three girls and live in Europe. Kids here navigate on their own with public transport if needed between home/school/etc since the age of 6.
Would not be surprised to learn that school districts in area even require children to walk to school if they are within that distance to their schools.
Anyone involved in this should at very least should lose their jobs and family should be awarded significant compensation for the harm done to the family.
But we're only hearing the mother's side of the story. The neighbor who called the cops, the actions of the police, it's possible they saw something that wasn't reported here. And something about this story sounds a little off to me. A kid is peacefully walking a half mile home, someone calls the cops, and the cops actually show up and intercept the kid before the kid gets home?
Perhaps the kid wasn't actually okay with walking home, perhaps the mom was kicking him out of the car as a punishment, perhaps the kid didn't know what to do and asked a neighbor for help, perhaps the kid told the police that he didn't feel safe with his mother, perhaps some other stuff happened that the mom wasn't willing to tell Reason about, perhaps the police made a judgement call based on interviewing the neighbors and child that the mother had behaved inappropriately here.
But maybe the story is completely accurate and this is just bad by the cops. So I hesitate to judge either way.
The giant delta between the possible prison sentence and the consequences in the plea deal is a signal that the prosecution thought they would do poorly at trial.
The choice is to avoid prison time entirely, or be willing to spend at least 2 years in prison if the jury gets this one wrong.
The woman has already been failed by the police who arrested her and the prosecutor who declined to drop the charges. Who's to say whether she'll be failed by the jury as well?
Also if your neighbors got you into this state now, what are they going to get you into the future, after you have been "guilty."
Nothing is gained without risk, and this woman likely now regrets accepting that plea deal. Her attorney should have explained to her what the outcome would have been for taking this deal, and clearly had she known she would not have, since she is now attempting to have the verdict expunged from her record.
I'm not saying it should have gone as far as it did, but I also agree there might have been more to it than we know about.
My own neighbors (who I like, but they make a good example here) had an incident recently. Their elementary school-aged kids play outside from dawn to dusk if they're not in school, which is cool. One day they built a fire in the woods behind their house, which backs up to 10,000+ acres of public woodlands and grasslands, in the middle of wildfire season in California. An hour after the kids "put it out," it was unattended and still producing large amounts of smoke. Someone walking by finally called the fire department, and the police also arrived to give the parents a citation. Anyway, to hear the mom tell the story it sounds outrageous that someone made the call and that emergency responders showed up, but everyone else who saw the situation unfold was pretty concerned about the fire.
Clearly the cops started this stupid ball rolling, but anyone at the local attorneys office could have just chosen not to persecute. Instead they offered the plea deal.
Not sure if he was the DA for this case.
*Yes I'm fully comfortable publishing a public link for a public official.
More than one person can be at fault. I would place some of the blame on the neighbor, the police officers, the District Attorney, and the CPS case worker for this.
And sure, the ideal DA would have charged the cops for the kidnapping and child abuse. But we're quite far from reforming the system so that cops are actually bound by the law, and focusing blame on both is needed to move us there.
https://www.treehugger.com/children-protected-reasonable-ind...
> "Wallace believes this could be due to the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 with the help of Let Grow, the non-profit I co-founded. It's part of HB567, a larger child welfare reform bill, and clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger."
But as the story notes, that bill did not affect criminal law, so the cops can still do this.
For example: I have a neighbor whose 10 year old rides the subway, alone, to and from school. This includes some amount of walking on either side -- something close to half a mile in aggregate on google maps.
In the suburb where I grew up, parents are now required to meet their middle school children at the bus stop or arrange for alternative transportation.
In middle school, in the same community, which hasn't changed much, I rode my bike several miles. So this is a recent change. AFAICT it's because of some pedestrian fatalities and injuries a few years back.
Raising children in a car-dependent suburb seems like a good way to set them up for a few years of stunted adulthood while they learn basic "how to operate without an adult literally physically present" skills... I'd like to move to the suburbs so I can have a nicer house and a yard, but I don't think I want to subject my children to that environment.
We can have freedom for them to play outside, if we only live in a rural area where my wife and kids will be the only non-white people around, where we will be bound to use a car for every errand, and where the politics of everyone nearby will be opposite our own.
We can have a walkable neighborhood if we sacrifice safety and health (density in US cities is built on the busiest, most polluting roadways), or all of our savings to live in one of the very very few walkable, safe urban communities in the US.
These things don't appear to be improving. We have half the country engaged in absolutely insane conspiracy mongering including human trafficking stories that spark the behavior seen in the article (when the woman calls the police on the child walking alone outside). We have cities and states that prioritize the car over every other means of transportation, which creates unhealthy air, unsafe urban environments, and fractures communities as highways get wider and wider. We have defacto segregation in schooling and housing, coupled with rising nativism, that means if you are non-white, your options for where to live without sacrificing your basic dignity are severely constrained.
I'm not anti-US in a general sense, but I do think the above factors make it a sub-optimal place to choose to permanently settle at this point. The only reason I can see at this point to live in the US is the higher salaries, but once you've got enough where you can choose to forego that, I can't see good reasons to stay.
Have you ever considered the remote possibility of your politics being the reason behind the dystopian future you see arising around you?
As far as my personal politics, no, the things I believe in do not drive us towards this dystopia. I believe in urbanism (including public transit, cycling and other micromobility, higher density, and other related policies), less power in the hands of local police and district attorneys in favor of public safety being managed at a higher level like the state level (including things like putting traffic enforcement in the purview of an unarmed and mostly automated traffic enforcement service), better social safety nets in the form of public health care and better employment protection and welfare benefits, and a few other things.
Many of these problems derive from the structure of our political system. For instance, urbanism is largely impossible in much of the US due to the structure of who determines land use policies, which is largely individual municipalities, where voters are voting in their own self interest (which tends towards keeping their own property values high). Similarly for the public safety issues I mentioned, much of the abuse we see around the country is due to the people with the most power in this space being largely unaccountable to anyone. These things have nothing to do with party, and everything to do with structure.
It only took 2-3 weeks before some Karen called the cops on me and CPS got involved. The process was insane and honestly pretty traumatizing to both me & my parents. The people were awful. the process was stupid and traumatizing and I suspect the stress it created, and missed work/study opportunites that it resulted for my parents had quite a bit to do with their falling appart & divorce a year or two later.
I think I was around 8 at the time too.
"for her to endanger"‽‽ The craziness started with the neighbor, continued with the cops, but then also through to sentencing!
You guys (as a general completely unfounded generalization) live and breathe fear.
(With the obvious caveat that I do not claim to represent the entire American population) I think it is the latter. This kind of thing is newsworthy precisely because it gets people riled up (as it should). It is pretty shocking to me as someone who has lived in the US my entire life. As other commenters have said, I also walked to school alone as a kid with no issues.
One case I always think about is when a 17 year old sent a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. Then the police went after him for child-pornography (his own penis), and demanded he either give them a picture of his erect penis or they'd inject him with something to force an erection and take it themselves[1]:
> Virginia police have obtained a search warrant to photograph the erect penis of a 17-year-old facing felony child-pornography charges for sexting an explicit video to his 15-year-old girlfriend, the boy's lawyer says.
> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.
> Police already photographed the teen's genitals against his will when he was arrested in late January, she said.
Oh, and one of the main officers involved later killed himself after he was outed as a pedophile[2].
The authorities _eventually_ backed off after the media picked it up and there was general outrage. But it's insane that that's what needed to get people in these systems to stop clearly inappropriate behavior. The fact that the whole system is happy to go along with injustices unless there's a massive public outcry shows how broken things have become.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/virgin... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/cop-who-wanted-t...
If you want to have fun, compare how many bullets are fired by cops in Germany to how many people are killed by cops in the US. Those numbers have no business being this close to each other.
It's that. I've lived in the USA my whole life in a big city and don't ever think about this stuff except when I'm online. There have been shooting instances in my city, but they're rare enough that I've never been around for them, so again I only think about them when online. The only time I physically feared (a little bit) for my safety was the height of the BLM protests when folks started smashing storefronts in my neighborhood. But that can happen in any country, obviously, and is not especially worse in the USA as far as I know.
I have represented several hundreds of people in situations like this. This lady's story wouldn't be in my top quartile of stunning injustice. I have frequently called news outlets to tell them about outrageous cases, and stories like this just don't make news. It's not news that there's a child endangerment law in Texas, it's not news that the police make bullshit arrests, and there's not much else here.
The fact that there are no other mentions of this lady and her case on the internet is basically the hobgoblin of my professional life.
Based on the public info, the locations and stuff check out. In my experience, fakes are usually almost totally fake or unverifiable. I don't think this is fabricated.
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...
(Some would say this is the point.)
1) It's about federal sentencing, which is not the same as state sentencing.
2) Sentencing is complicated and often done wrong by practitioners. For example, in a situation where harm is greatly divorced from conduct (imagine the kid in this article died on the way home) mom could get 20 years for sure in some states/municipalities.
3) Most practitioners know that the maximum is way higher than the likely sentence, but judges and prosecutors (and sometimes certain wayward members of my tribe) insist on browbeating accused people with the possible maximum in order to procure a quick guilty plea. So I'll (always) accept some blame on e.g. the media for not communicating with reasonable clarity, but this situation where people focus on 20 years is actually the intended state of affairs brought about by prosecutors and judges.
Chief of Police doesn't seem to be an elected office, but Chief Sheryl Victorian is still accountable to the public, and she should also be called upon to explain the policies of her department and the actions of her officers.
https://www.co.mclennan.tx.us/directory.aspx?eid=185
https://www.waco-texas.com/Departments/Police-Department/Chi...
Does making an 8 year old walk half a mile qualify? In a quiet neighborhood, no. In downtown Waco where the cop's supposed sex traffickers operate, probably still no, but it's getting into more of a grey area. On a highway with no sidewalk or shoulder, yes.
It all kind of sloshes around in people’s heads around there.
We paid, and pay, the wages of everyone involved in locking that woman up - the police, the prosecutors, the jail staff.
It shouldn't take forming a political action group to fix things like this. That DA is unfit for purpose, his interest be damned.
Threatening people with charges if they don't take plea deals is an easy way for them to win. That's what led to a news item last year of some immigrant truck driver getting over 100 years in prison (plus mandatory minimums) because he didn't take a plea deal after his breaks failed and he hit a car and killed some people accidentally.
It may be how they view their role, and it may be how their incentives line up.
But it's not actually their job. I bet you know this, I'm just clarifying.
[1] https://www.fox29.com/news/truck-driver-rogel-aguilera-meder...
When the San Francisco DA's office was run by Chesa Boudin, I spoke with an attorney there. That attorney told me that the role of the DA's office was to 'deliver justice', and he was explicit about that meaning they wouldn't pursue all cases they thought they could win, and wouldn't seek maximum sentences they thought they could achieve.
Prior to working for the DA's office, he was a public defender, so perhaps this attitude isn't universal...
Nobody gets their day in court, it's just not worth it. I'd like to think a jury wouldn't convict but would you be willing to take that chance?
Another data point, I have seen more kids playing around in the streets in a working class neighborhood and the richer neighborhoods are empty. These kind of issues seem to come from the more entitled, upper middle-class people who have been primed to be paranoid through crime reporting.
HB567, a larger child welfare reform bill, and clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger. [...] Unfortunately, HB567 amended only family law, not criminal law. This meant the cops were still free to punish Wallace.
The solution is to create a law like HB567, but that amends Texas’s criminal law so frivolous arrests like this one can not happen.
Another thing would be for more states to have well defined laws which give children a minimum age when they can be left unsupervised.
Related: https://reason.com/2017/03/30/mom-arrested-for-leaving-kid-a... — https://reason.com/2021/10/11/cop-family-lawsuit-midland-qua...
Nonetheless, I'm struggling to see how the case got as far as it did with her taking a plea deal. In particular, I'd expect that if this went to court and got more press, the DA or whomever is pushing this would drop everything immediately. Or even before any of that happened, somebody just sort of said 'oh, huh, kids probablyh should be able to walk in a neighborhood on their own, and the police shouldn't arrest a parent for permitting it'
Only in america..
Downvoted ? Really? People agree that it seems reasonable to put parents in jail for letting their kids walk outside ? I walked to and from school when I was 6 years old, no problem... If society has degenerated to the point where it's not safe for a kid to walk on the street, then we don't need to make it illegal for kids to walk on the streets, we need to make the streets safe.
This is creepy having to write this. It reminds me of the prisoner of war camp in north korea where prisoners of war were told to write essays criticizing their own position.
"Under Texas law child endangerment is "any act that exposes a child under the age of 15 to imminent risk of death, bodily harm or physical or mental impairment." The act may be intentional or reckless or may be considered criminally negligent behavior carried out by an act of omission.
For example, a person may be guilty of endangering a child if the child was not wearing a seat belt at the time of an automobile accident. Other acts that may be considered child endangerment include (1) leaving a child unattended in a motor vehicle, (2) driving while intoxicated with a child in the automobile, (3) hiring a person with a known history of sexual offense as a child care provider, (4) serving alcohol to an underage driver, (5) leaving a young child unsupervised or in the care of another young child, (6) unreasonable corporal punishment resulting in bodily injury, (7) leaving a young child unsupervised in an unsafe area, (8) leaving handguns within the reach of children, and (8) and failure to report suspected child abuse."
And you've got to remember that neither the arresting officer's actions nor the DA's actions were objectively reasonable, so why make any assumptions about whether the jury's actions would be objectively reasonable?
The oldest one takes the U-Bahn (Underground) to school and the bus to attend her hobbies. Often we send one of them to the nearby supermarket to buy last minute stuff.
I like to think that I'm helping them to be independent and aware of their city.
Most of my daughters' friends do the same.
There is a legitimate issue but the situation overall is much more nuanced.
Today I spend time in Poland. It is normal for elementary children to walk to school or play in parks unsupervised in major cities.
Even Texas seems to have lost it. What a sad and sorry state of things.
I went to school at 7 and everyone including me walked the way (around kilometer) every day forth and back. Around this age I regularly took bus to visit my grandparents who lived on the other side of the city. I remember that I slept in the bus once and went off in an unknown area and spent next 3 hours walking around until I recognized the area and found a way back.
When I was 12, I hopped on train and went to another country to visit my father. I spent a week in the train. Of course my mom asked some guy who happened to be in my cabin to watch over me. He was drunk almost all the time with some random girl who stole his money in the end lol.
Not a big deal. People are too protective about their children nowadays. Children are pretty capable when they're not watched over all the time.
The only independent verification I can find on this story is a GoFundMe launched by a relative: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...
Reason exists to flog stories about our terrible government overlords, and they've been caught pushing bad info in the past. This doesn't even report info that is publicly available in the arrest report and court plea!
I'd strongly recommend waiting for a general news organization like the local TV station to report this first before forming too many opinions.
There don't seem to be any other corroborating reports to be found. Make of that what you will.
While the US seems totally out of place with those laws, it seems UK is not far away. My brother's kids are 10 & 13 y.o. and it's real problem every time they have school vacation (several times per year), they must stay home all day because guess what, parents don't have unlimited vacation, and they're scared to let kids go out to play alone, not for something happening to them, but for someone noticing and reporting it. It's nuts.
I know about the Nordic countries, but they still don't hold a candle to even how free kids were all over the world up through the 1970s.
Maybe some kind of cultural enclave? Maybe a tiny island nation? A commune? A cult? Anything?
But to be serious: yes, I've been outside of North America. I've been to Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, and a few other places. None of them are as bad as North America is with this expectation/nigh-on legal requirement of helicopter parenting... but they're all still far worse than what basically-everywhere in the world was like 50 years ago.
To be clear, my expectation for a place that is better, isn't just that kids there can walk to school on their own; but rather that kids in such a place would be allowed — and enabled, by considerations of forestry and wildlife management — to just walk/bike out of the town or city they live in to play and have adventures in the fields and parks and maybe a little bit of thornier wilderness around them, all on their own, for hours at a time. A.K.A. "just be home for dinner."
That's really how things used to be! Recently enough that anyone over 50 can tell you stories about their own solo wanderings of forests and mountains and streams as a child, in search of bugs to catch and birds to watch. Anyone under 50, though? Not so much. Not even younger people from supposedly rural areas in supposedly developing countries (that I've talked to, at least) have had a chance at this kind of youth. They might go out exploring — but parents insist that it be done with a group of friends, that they stay in cell-phone service range, and a dozen other things that mean that they have zero opportunity to clear their mind and actually take in nature for even a single minute.
If you really do insist that "most of the world" has this opportunity, though, then maybe the particular set of countries I've visited (and the people I've talked to on my travels) represent a bubble of experience? I think the countries I've visited have all been Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth nations. Maybe that's the common factor? Did the Brits invent helicopter parenting and then carry it with them wherever they went?
It sounds like you've never been to Japan. It's exactly like that here.
>I think the countries I've visited have all been Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth nations. Maybe that's the common factor?
I feel like the Anglophone nations have all been following America's lead in many ways.
From what I can gather, Europeans doesn't have this issue either.. This kind of insanity is only an American problem AFAIK.
I'm American, and grew up there several decades ago. I also walked/biked that distance to school as a kid.
Things in America are completely different from those times. That's one of the big reasons I left.
One of the first things that popped into my mind is the likelihood of psychological trauma of that child who, effectively, sent mom home and destroyed her career and family finances due to his behavior (which led to the "go have a walk" decision).
I also have to wonder if the parents relationship with their kids --particularly the mother's-- was permanently damaged by this incident. It's like your kids became radioactive and anything you do can land you in jail for 20 years if you are not careful. This has to be horrible.
Frankly, I would probably give serious thought to leaving the country and starting over somewhere else. Living an entire life with such a dark cloud over your entire family cannot be easy.
I understand protecting children. However, I also understand common sense. What she did was not wrong at all. What everyone else did was horrifically wrong beyond any possible justification. They need to get justice. I hope they do. I also hope her record is cleared.
BTW, this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. I remember other cases from many years ago:
https://www.google.com/search?q=parents+arrested+for+kids+wa...
We need to name and shame this awful person who couldn't be bothered to walk the kid the half mile to his parents' house and have a human conversation. They need to be held accountable for the impact of their actions. Otherwise more people will do this.
>She obtained a lawyer, who told her that if she admitted guilt, she could participate in a pretrial diversion program that would close the case.
Fuck this.
Why have we decided that the legal protections granted to us are only sometimes good? Why have we built in this loophole where if an accuser says the magic word "child" to the authorities they can remove our rights? When a kid is involved simply asking for a lawyer to help you understand your rights can be seen as trying to restrict access to the kid and can result in them being taken by CPS.
The problem is that Texas's criminal law was not updated, and the cops/prosecutors made the parent pick between a crime that had a 2-year minimum prison term OR taking a plea for 64 hours of community service (and other things, like writing an apology letter, etc).
This wasn't a CPS problem. It was a cop abusing their authority and a prosecutor who didn't drop the charges. Plus a hugely abusive plea system in US criminal cases (which is a whole huge discussion in its own right).
And neither should ordinary people, generally.
> Heather Wallace's oldest son, eight-year-old Aiden, was driving his two brothers crazy in the car as they all returned from karate one afternoon in October 2021. Wallace asked Aiden to walk the rest of the way home—half a mile in quiet, suburban Waco, Texas—so that he could calm down.
It’s not like the kid was happily strolling a mile home from school or the park. The article is downplaying the situation.
Sounds like she kicked her kid out of the car, and I have doubts that went down peacefully. She was probably angry and her kid was probably crying and panicking. From the neighbors’ point of view it probably looked very cruel, and perhaps even dangerous depending where he was left. (Many suburbs are polluted by “stroads” which have no sidewalks and lots of traffic.)
Granted, a felony seems extreme, even if the Mom was raging at the kid. But I’d want to hear the neighbor’s testimony before offering my sympathy.
As someone with elementary school children, I'm much more worried about police/CPS overreach than kidnappers. All I can say, is TG I don't (and never will) live in Texas.
I see a lot of discussion about who is at fault. Everyone sucks here, but my first question is who is this judge that did not throw this out in 2 seconds?? Cops, DAs, neighbors' bad behavior is one thing. Like what.
My kids were allowed to walk, scooter, and tricycle around our block from the time they were five years old. They were allowed to walk into town, as long as they were with at least one friend, from the time they were eight.
From sixteen up, as long as they were with a group of at least three, they could take the train into NYC.
When my son was sixteen, we put him on a bus with one friend (also sixteen), for a five hour bus ride to Boston so he could go visit his sister at college, and so his friend could visit her sister at college.
And this mom got arrested because he kid walked a half mile on sidewalks to get home?
In our town, there are no busses for the middle school, the kids walk, some of them over a half mile, every school day.
The most accurate model is that this cop is terrified of the kidnapping gangs himself. Which is why he is unable to enforce anything against them.
Consequently he enforces where he can.
The only thing is the gofundme page linked in the article.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...
An that plea links back to the Reason article.
There's a big overlap between the plea on that page and the Reason article.
It's possible there's more going on here than meets the eye.
Are there really that many kidnappings in the US? (Let’s say, compared to some other relevant risk such as being run over by a car).
Here's John Taylor Gatto telling the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tEE8XoC0c
But I want to point out that the reason you're all rubbernecking is that it's unusual. Mostly, this just doesn't happen. Mostly people are reasonable.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't help the lady with her gofundme and try to punish the other adults involved, though :-)
For all of our nation’s ills, a child walking on his own block outside is a crime that warrants this extraordinary attention? I can’t believe the family didn’t sue the county.
Right now, my neighborhood is a mile and a half from an elementary school. I see the kids that age walking to school.
There is ZERO reason for this to have happened.
I would sue the FUCK out of everyone who had a hand in this.
My dad was also born in Waco and spent his latchkey days roaming the neighborhood and nearby pastures, complete with BB gun and pocket knife.
Amazing how society can evolve in a few generations.
Now, I am fearless.
We don’t need to be scaring our kids into cowardly submission if they are trained in common sense and defensive protection.
What I don't get is how this could be systemic, or, that other reasonable minds within the system would have such awful judgment.
She should be writing Governor Abbott about a pardon. He was just up for re-election last week and might have jumped all over this for the publicity.
After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
Keep in mind that Reason.com is essentially an anti-government institution, for which such stories, often presented with an extreme slant or selective take on facts, are catnip. HN's own archives will show many instances of similar articles:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reason.com>
I've no doubt that government overreach and overreaction is a Real Thing. But please, Reason is an entirely unreasonable exponent of such views.
Let's find better sources, please.
There's a bit more than "After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded." if you actually read the article to the end.
That said I agree with you that Reason is a bit biased.
Also, for all of your hand wringing over the source, you failed to realize that this is original piece by Lenore Skenazy, probably the most well known advocate for the free range kids movement, and she has not only contributed to Reason, but also the NY Times, WaPo, the WSJ, NPR, and PBS, among others.
Blindly criticizing a source without either reading the damn article or caring about whether the piece was from an original source is incredibly intellectually lazy.
I'm not familiar with the author. Though I note that her principle publishing outlets both appear to lean strongly Right-Libertarian: Reason and the New York Sun (founded by Conrad Black), per Wikipedia.
My point about Reason's slant and bias remains. If the story has legs, it should be available from another publication.
I recommend Free Range Kids to parents.
And to observe how the French raise theirs.
The real mistake was pleading guilty. She should have gotten better representation...
If you're being investigated, always communicate through an attorney.
Government workers operate with the apathy of any person at a regular job. They almost never think they're making the wrong judgements, and they can and will lie to you and misrepresent you in court.
Adults today seem to increasingly act like kids are unable to do practically anything independently, and worse, they act like they can't be trusted to anything of any importance or with any level of risk. And I'd argue that attuite is having an effect on our children because they also seem to be less independent and less capable than I remember me or my friends being when I was a kid.
I suppose a good example of what I'm talking about was couple of years ago I was at the park with my family and one of the children we were with dropped a ball in the lake. As you can imagine he was upset so instinctively ran over to us crying about losing his ball. My girlfriend's response was to ask me to get his ball back, but in my opinion this is exactly the kind of situation kids should be encouraged to solve on their own. And more importantly that adults should give kids room to solve with supervision.
Before I continue, it's probably worth noting that this lake was very shallow and the only real risk here was him falling in and getting a bit muddy, and in any case we were about 10 meters away so nothing bad was going to happen. Given this I said to him I wouldn't get his ball, but that instead I'd come over with him and help him find a way to get the ball back himself. So we went over to the ball and I asked him to come up with a plan to get the ball back himself and within a few seconds he found long stick and fished his ball out.
In my opinion the only reason he didn't get a stick and fish it out to begin with was because like most kids his age he's been encouraged to see himself as helpless and incapable of solving his own problems. This wasn't a capability or safety thing, it was purely an issue of mindset.
I've told this story a few times before and it's interesting to me that a lot of people (including my girlfriend) think that what I did was irresponsible and have told me to stop encouraging stuff like this because I'm going to get the kids hurt. And I think that's part of the problem. As a society we tell ourselves (and each other) that we're bad parents if we put our kids in any danger whatsoever. But I think this comes at the cost of our children being less independent and less resilient.
If I recall correctly Richard Branson has an interesting chapter about this in his book, Losing My Virginity. In his case I think he talks about how his mum would kick him out of the car as a kid and make him find his own way home to teach him how to be independent and self-reliant. I'm not sure I agree with what she did personally, but it's interesting that Branson seems to attribute a lot of his success to his mum and how she raised him.
Not sure how I feel about putting kids through it, though. I feel like much worse could have happened. I think he might have needed stitches anyway. What if he needed surgery?
I think they had a terrible lawyer. I also don't understand how a reasonable legislator could add "drug use in the presence of a child is an offense".
Also there is an affirmable defense since they were on the way home from Karate if the walking could be affirmed to be part of that practice. "He was cooling down from karate practice".
> It is a defense to prosecution under Subsection (c) that the act or omission enables the child to practice for or participate in an organized athletic event
Full Text: -----
Sec. 22.041. ABANDONING OR ENDANGERING CHILD. (a) In this section, "abandon" means to leave a child in any place without providing reasonable and necessary care for the child, under circumstances under which no reasonable, similarly situated adult would leave a child of that age and ability.
(b) A person commits an offense if, having custody, care, or control of a child younger than 15 years, he intentionally abandons the child in any place under circumstances that expose the child to an unreasonable risk of harm.
(c) A person commits an offense if he intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence, by act or omission, engages in conduct that places a child younger than 15 years in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.
(c-1) For purposes of Subsection (c), it is presumed that a person engaged in conduct that places a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment if:
(1) the person manufactured, possessed, or in any way introduced into the body of any person the controlled substance methamphetamine in the presence of the child;
(2) the person's conduct related to the proximity or accessibility of the controlled substance methamphetamine to the child and an analysis of a specimen of the child's blood, urine, or other bodily substance indicates the presence of methamphetamine in the child's body; or
(3) the person injected, ingested, inhaled, or otherwise introduced a controlled substance listed in Penalty Group 1, Section 481.102, Health and Safety Code, or Penalty Group 1-B, Section 481.1022, Health and Safety Code, into the human body when the person was not in lawful possession of the substance as defined by Section 481.002(24) of that code.
(d) Except as provided by Subsection (e), an offense under Subsection (b) is:
(1) a state jail felony if the actor abandoned the child with intent to return for the child; or
(2) a felony of the third degree if the actor abandoned the child without intent to return for the child.
(e) An offense under Subsection (b) is a felony of the second degree if the actor abandons the child under circumstances that a reasonable person would believe would place the child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.
(f) An offense under Subsection (c) is a state jail felony.
(g) It is a defense to prosecution under Subsection (c) that the act or omission enables the child to practice for or participate in an organized athletic event and that appropriate safety equipment and procedures are employed in the event.
(h) It is an exception to the application of this section that the actor voluntarily delivered the child to a designated emergency infant care provider under Section
What? If this draconian policy is happening in Texas, the land of the free, can I assume it's even worse in the rest of North America? I hope Texans are up-in-arms about this government overreach.
This kind of incident is NOT NORMAL. I have lived in various neighborhoods in Austin and a midsize city in Michigan, and kids walking or riding their bike around the neighborhood are common. The same is true of relatives' neighborhoods in Wisconsin, Arizona, and California.
I also thought this was extremely rare, but then when I posted about it on FB a friend commented that it had happened to them. Not as extreme as in the article, but still very traumatic for the family.
Check out Llano's glorious history:
That state has a lot of distortions and issues. The only "freedom" that exists is around ensuring the NRA keeps making huge profits.
In dark blue WA for example this isn't really a problem nor are there any laws on the books prohibiting it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our...
Meh, you're quoting their own press release at that point. It's like someone telling you they are a genius. If it isn't obvious, such that someone feels a need to tell me, then I'm pretty skeptical about the truth of it.