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Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

> There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem.

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.

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The check and balance part isn't working. Any decent judge should see this lacks probable cause. But judges are not impartial and instead side with the DA/police by default.

> But judges are not impartial and instead side with the DA/police by default.

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.

> any decent judge should see this lacks probable cause

You're shoehorning complaints about the judiciary into a case which never made it to a judge.

She paid bail. Bail is set by a judge. Plus, felony charges generally require a hearing before the trial.

DAs more than judges, since DAs need successful convictions on crimes important to their constituency to get re-elected, and they need police cooperation to get successful convictions.

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.

You're supposed to have a hearing at which a judge determines if probably cause was met and then set bail. So a judge should have reviewed this.

Judges, DAs and by extension any public arm including police should remember that doctrine coming from Roman law "It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished" (John Adams, 1770) or likewise "the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer" (William Blackstone, 1769) or "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent" (SCOTUS, 1895).

Maybe we should remind everyone about this when they cry about cashless bail.

I think the main resistance to cashless bail is the poor implementation in many jurisdictions.

> It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.

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.

> Yes, but what's their incentive to do so?

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.

False. Police have zero duty to protect anyone, per the Supreme Court.

In fact, I’d argue that is part of the problem here: there is no liability for police, CPS agents, prosecutors, or judges for overreach and absurd enforcement actions.

> It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.

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. ;-)

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