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.
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.
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.
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.
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 problems, and then there's unavoidable problems. Failure to design a system with checks and balances for the unavoidable problem is an avoidable problem. ;-)
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.
Assume the default for these kinds of agencies is false negatives.
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.
After informing them, that unlike childs walking outside, abuse of 911 is a real crime.
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.