Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk to Dunkin' Donuts
reason.com
reason.com
A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.
Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).
Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.
Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.
We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).
Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account. That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.
We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.
A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.
You're defending yourself without knowing the charge, with the investigator/judge/jury CPS agent presuming you are at least somewhat guilty.
Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.
They can make your life hell and take your children away. They do it for things as minor as possessing marijuana in your home, and they do it every day to people who are poor. You just don't hear about it because those stories don't make it into the news.
but having no consequences means they CAN retaliate the same way
Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.
A few days ago, CPS had to get involved because somehow an eight year old ended up in the middle of a highway. Cops showed up first and shut down the highway to safely extract the kid. CPS got to bring the kid back to the parents.
People abuse kids all the time.
Do you have any evidence to back this statement?
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.
Cue Will Ferrell yelling at kids:
This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.
No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.
I'd recommend people skip the article and go directly the advocacy site it links to and affect change locally. The event happened in 2019, involves the typical dumb ACAB trope and then is swept away.
They most likely dropped charges because it was an unlawful arrest and the parents could have sued and most likely won. When the DA found out they most likely shut the whole thing down.
We have elections... but having some wine at your picnic in the park may get you a citation.
We have elections... but, this article.
We have elections... but civil forfeiture.
We have elections... but you'll spend tons of your "free" time fighting with our healthcare system, should you ever actually need to use it. Ditto the time and contortions required to navigate our benefits systems if you ever hit our "social safety net". In either case, you're not gonna be feeling all that "freedom".
We have elections... but an LOLWTF-high incarceration rate.
We have elections... but are constantly scared shitless of civil litigation and liability and there are rules and disclaimers posted on every flat surface.
We have elections... but no mandatory annual leave, with the result that for most people 2 weeks off a year is considered decent. How many people feel "free" at their job?
But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)
Now I'm in Ontario and statuary limit for leaving child alone is... sixteen years :O
We can see school from out house but do not dare let our (independent safe and bright) child walk, not due to fear of crime, but the real fear of some overzealous bored neighbour calling it in.
Boo.
> That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.
I gently suggest that you might be missing the forest for the trees here. OP is referring to the well documented (Eastern block level authoritarianism) practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved).
I went to a hospital and the building looked in rough shape not really clean. The examination room had a leak in the corner. But you bet the doc knew what she was doing, was thorough and sterilized everything. It's not pretty, but gets the job done.
In the 2000s we used to pirate like there was no tomorrow. But cp is taken seriously.
Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.
The police did drop charges. But then a social worker got involved and they had years of grief afterwards because of it. Which couldn't have been reported on back when the event happened, and makes it a lot more than just "stupid cops got immediately corrected".
Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere. Which is another can of worms.
It is just as well, because USSR preceded USA and Europe by a few decades to have BOTH parents work and thus the actual neglect of the kids began. Under socialism this was “emancipation of women” and proceeded also in Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, where women now worked all day in the same professions as men. Socialists were far ahead by decades in this regard.
But of course, this leads to a generation of kids who grow up without any parents most of the time, and raised by the state and the street — it is also what we have in the USA now too. The only difference is that most people work for large corporations instead of socialist cooperatives or government jobs:
Except babushka didn't have a dumpling shop because private enterprise was outlawed. You probably mean the Pastry Workers' Cooperative, an organization that didn't actually make dumplings because flour and vegetable oil was ratoinalized. The state was exporting those ingredients to the West at a loss in order to obtain dollars and pay back the IMF loans. Instead, the PWC shop had lots of vinegar and pickled cucumbers for sale. Which was too bad, because nobody wanted to buy those things.
I know several other people already commented, but still I want to add my own view because this pains me.
I grew up in the 1970s/80s in an area of two 35 thousand people towns (plus lots and lots of smaller towns and villages - rural but it's still all densely populated).
We had all the freedoms to go anywhere except doing school hours - as long as we didn't drive (pretty far) to the German-German border area. Which I would not even have been able to point out the direction. I was in the forests and out alone ALL THE TIME, and so was everybody else. I also was a "key child", this too was very common, I had a house key and was left alone in our house all afternoon, and again, that was common.
Independence, education, sports - the East did not want to raise feeble people. Daily life was NOT some dystopian thing. Youth life was full of biking around in the afternoons, visiting friends all over the place or into the fields and woods, weekend parties, and we were mostly left alone, by parents too.
When I visited the US for two months, driving around in an old car I had bought (~20 - rental car was too expensive for that long, surcharge for being young too) - and sleeping in it most of the time. My impression afterwards was that the US was quite the police state. Sleeping in the care alone, never mind driving in an old car near the Mexican border once, got me lots of friendly meetings with ne police friends... never had any problems and it was all friendly, with my German passport and my story of driving from New York to Alaska to San Diego to Key West to Washington D.C. and lots of loops for scenery and NPs on the way, but I don't think I had a SINGLE encounter with East German police in all my life. Okay once, visiting the East Berlin airport, when I was with a friend who looked "non-standard", they only checked his ID and nothing from me.
And when I saw "Employee of the Month" parking at the very first McDonals I drove by in my new (old) car I could not stop laughing. THIS was sooooo East German! And we even had jokes about it, assuming such a thing would never exist in the West! And here I was in the capitalist mother country and saw a key component of "socialist" worker life.
If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned. And they probably would have been suspects for the rest of their life.
I'm pretty sure you can find happy kids in North Korea too, it doesn't mean they're not living in an authoritarian society.
I’m sure there were children in Moscow, Kyiv or Cracow who had very different experiences from you. Whose parents did something that caught the KGB’s attention and then they were in for a world of pain.
I think it’s very accurate to say that for most people living in a relatively rural area anywhere in the world, they’ll be pretty safe from this sorta attention. The big difference is the degree to which your life is ruined. In China (or USSR) any sort of individual disagreement with the police would virtually guarantee a trip to an undisclosed location, bribes and probably torture. Here in the US you still have to deal with people and their egos but many of the laws will protect you from the worst of other peoples’ power trips.
>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.
You could even extend this and say that the level of authoritarianism on display is what I was told Eastern bloc countries were like (and why they were bad).
Instead they made their community less safe by creating even more doubt and distrust in police, in their community, and psychologically injuring the parents and children.
He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash and arrogant. If you put someone like that in an environment with other people that are also there for the power trips, these sorts of situations are the outcome you get.
This is what gets me. Even if this town is as dangerous as these police claim that it is, I can think of a hundred other responses that are orders of magnitude more useful than the route they chose, if their priority is indeed the safety of the children.
Follow the kids for a bit to make sure they're ok. "Hey kids, your parents know you're going to the store? ok!" "Hey parents, you gave your kids permission to walk to the store alone? ok!" "Hey just checking in, you know that there's this sex offender around the corner right? ok!" You can surveil the sex offenders. You can, you know, make your town safer (you are the police, right?).
I doubt this town is that unsafe, however. Ironically the polarization, paranoia, untrusting nature, and general hysteria in the US are a vicious cycle that leads to actual danger and more polarization, paranoia, etc.
Agreed. This is one where qualified immunity needs to go. This is a rights violation all the way... against the kids civil rights and against the parents. Also, I'd love to listen to the 911 calls.
I thought this was going to be about various killings by cops, but it turns out to be a place name.
Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America. I suspect if you went looking for anecdotes involving black children you might find far worse outcomes. Nobody in this story spent even a whole night in jail! Nobody was injured! Nobody had to pay bail fees! No property damage by police! They didn't even shoot the dog.
I mean, I'm not a huge fan of that stuff either, but I lived in Killingly for a number of years, so perhaps this one caught my attention for that reason?
Outside of the Polish martial law I don’t think my family ever risked arrest for walking to a cake shop as kids.
Cannot comment on the USSR, but I highly doubt the authorities did that kind of thing either outside of, perhaps, the holodomor.
I wholeheartedly agree that the fundamental issue is the complete lack of judicial accountability. These people are getting paid a salary while they harass you, clock out at 5, and their morning routine is to get right back at it. Meanwhile your entire life is personally disrupted due to their power trip and/or malicious mistake, and the best case you can hope for is to be able to walk away?
Whether or not these officers' actions were in line with official department policy, there should be automatic compensation to the victims for their arrest and imprisonment, emotional distress, hiring attorneys and other expenses incurred. And if these officers' actions were not in line with written department policy, then they need to be treated as private citizens harassing people under the color of law, and be held personally criminally liable for the false imprisonment, etc.
Have to get rid of qualified immunity first, which we invented (in a total coincidence) at the same time cops really wanted to be thumping civil rights protesters without consequencews.
Interesting how that works. My state has zero dunkin donuts. But I live 3 miles from downtown, and pass 5 starbucks, 4 dutch brothers, and a few other independant coffee shops :) but sadly, only one donut shop
Growing up, I was allowed to freely travel within my neighborhood, but not cross the main roads. There was a Dunkin I could safely get to without crossing any big streets.
Maybe in Boston. They're not THAT common in CT and other states.
They could file a FOIA for 911 call recordings during that timeframe. It's likely no calls were made.
I think there has been a confusion in our society between well-being and safety. There are definitely circumstances where one is unsafe, but this is for their well-being (letting the teenager drive by themselves for an errand), and there are circumstances where one is safe, but someone’s well-being is degrading (helicopter parenting).
The one where the cop straight up told the husband 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'
Yeah, totally not on a power trip. Definitely. Just doing it for the public good.
Instead, the cops left the children who were supposedly in mortal peril to go harass the parents.
Why do you think they might not have been doing this capriciously in this specific case? The department admitted the stop was over-reach, even before the parents found out the officers had called child proctective services on the parents over walking outside. Is that demonstrating a reasonable concern for well-being? I surely want to have the right to let my kids walk around outside, and I believe that there is no U.S. law that limit this right, nor should there be one.
You mean there are people who genuinely feel that it should be an arrrestable offence to let an 8-year-old out on their own?
Well, sure; that doesn't surprise me. But what some cop "feels" bears no relation to what the law is.
It's amazing how effective propaganda can be.
The infuriating thing isn't that the police made mistakes or were jerks. It's that the family can do nothing to achieve justice against the state/the state has no consequences.
It's supposed to. This is Reason's schtick, publishing click magnets about terrible overreach by our evil Big Government Overlords, and you need to give this publication a ton of salt if you read it.
Like start out by noticing that this isn't journalism. It's written by Lenore Skenazy "president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement." Quite literally this is an evangelism and fundraising piece by a charity that benefits from exactly the outrage it's trying to drive.
If the guy was arrested, where's a link to the records? Where are the statements from police? This apparently happened four years ago. Where's the contemporary coverage? Why does a Google search for "Killingly CT parent arrested 2019" return a bunch of SEO cross links to the same story by the same person?
I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm saying we need to be a little more careful with what we get upset about.
I haven't been able to find any reporting about this story[0] till this Reason piece, so I'd be curious to understand their journalistic process in putting this together.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=Killingly+parent+arrested+20...
Edited to remove flamebait swipe at Reason -- I'm better than that. For now.
Your axe grinding doesnt make sense here. Police powers are one of the most federated types of power in the country! And these sound like they were the smallest unit of police, town police.
In fact, its difficult to imagine the more centralized police causing this type of trouble. Can you imagine a state trooper wasting time with this? Or the FBI investigating a child walking alone?
I don't have great insight into police, but I've had a little into a few county governments and school districts, and the impression I've gotten is the opposite: the more local interested are insulated from state or federal oversight (de facto, if not de jure) the more wildly-corrupt and tyrannical they get.
Nah, my family is from eastern Europe and the stuff that happens in US was never seen here, ever.
Yep. TFA: "that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them" -- Police should be arresting the shit out of those criminals, not innocent people.
Congratulations, police, by arresting innocent parents you just traumatized some kids, and if they become criminals because they grew up in foster care missing their actually good parents, you have blood on your hands. (I know they dropped charges, but in the shitty slow legal system we have, it's a real possibility this could have played out differently.)
Fix the town so innocent people can live sane lives in it.
They asked us to disarm ourselves, they asked us to trust them, to give them the power to police our behavior, then we do and our societies become less safe. Then they use this as a justification to tell us how to raise our kids.
If society is less safe it's their fault. So they either need to fix the problem or go get a job at McDonalds, either way leave me the fuck alone and don't tell me how to raise my kids.
Norway has a single national police organization which extends the local level. It is well-regarded by the citizens who are also big on free-range parenting. In Oslo you can find teenagers practicing skateboard on the steps of parliament during the day. On the other hand Americans might find certain means of protective services, for adults and for minors, overreaching.
Also, didn't absolutely everybody in the US rally around James Comey, during his unjust firing?
(*) when not matched by appropriate safe guards.
Nope it's just good old fashioned American police state activities. Once again people on this website love this subtle form of American Exceptionalism where they Pretend that America is not the most oppressive and destructive racist country in history.
If you were a A person of color fighting for your rights, a Communist, or any other ideological enemy of the United States you would realize that this activity from the police is nothing more than a generalization of the official policies of police towards "undesirables" in the 20th century.
OTOH, you could argue the opposite. It made the news (even if the source in this case is especially biased, I will assume good faith). In a country the size of the US, some amount of official misbehavior is going to happen with some regularity, it's just a numbers game. I'll worry more when we stop hearing about it.
Without talking to them, I'm not sure that's a fair conclusion.
Regardless, IMHO the real culprit is vagueness / ambiguity in the applicable laws. Which means the legislators are at fault. And in a democracy, ultimately the voters.
How can you seriously think this is anyone’s fault but the cops? Blaming politicians is one thing and they absolutely are to blame for a lot of our policing problems, but blaming “voters” for cops being assholes is just ridiculous.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when...
Personally, as a parent, I hate these laws. I want my son to be able to explore the neighborhood, have fun, do outside chores etc without myself or my wife monitoring him. Imo forcing parents to be glued to their kids 24/7 makes life more stressful for everyone.
Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?
I can imagine a world where culture gets better in 20, 30 years and we look back at the 2020s and say "yikes, good thing it's not like that anymore."
Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.
Why stop there? Do that for all law enforcement jobs.
The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges.
The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.
Kinda reminds me of the song Dystopia Now by Mental Minority[1] which quotes George Orwell's 1984 "If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever"
While I'm sure that many have genuine compassion for others, this doesn't change the fact that many are literal morons who have been given incredible authority to interfere with the lives of others. What could possibly go wrong?
I'm asking because I don't believe you. Here's a list I found, see page 28 for Social and Behavioral Sciences' above average scores: https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-data-2016.p...
Haha nice one dude, very edgy.
This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.
I'd go a step further, which technologists will fail to accept, since it's essentially an animistic argument. Cars, very specifically, the actual physical _thing_ are evil technology. In absolute terms, in absence of their application.
Americans don't recognize it as such. We see it just as a tool. It is not. Cars have their own force field and it has changed our minds, our bodies, our relationships to other, our dispositions.
Once americans recognize it as such, we can see change. It's not impossible. From my visits to Europe, the difference is already night and day in so many places compared to just 10-15 years ago. If they can, we can. But it will be such a hard slog.
That's also not to say that there's no car dependency there, but it's not as ruthless and overbearing.
Society’s urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is detrimental. It has negative health effects. It also removes any idea of community when you can’t go out and explore what is around you. That’s even before you think about freedom of movement.
You need to secure not only housing, food, and energy, but also 24/7 supervision, in the form of daycare, after daycare activities, after school activities, or one parent being with the kids at all times. Which means you are especially screwed if there is a divorce, so you probably want backup grandparents and aunts/uncles, if they can afford to be available and near you.
I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.
Indoor, sedentary and with a price in general.
Well, they're right.
We used to treat concern trolls like laughingstock, now they set national policy.
Karenism is an existential threat, and it should have been treated as such before it got this bad.
This helicoptering is nuts. It's something my family does, which is especially weird from my parents: humans I wouldn't see for days due to their long work schedules and my boredom in the summer.
People used to talk about "The Popsicle Index"[1] which is the percentage of families in an area comfortable with letting an elementary school aged child walk to the nearest store and buy a popsicle on their own. These days parents don't get to make that decision, the entire community makes it for them. Any dissenting opinion can result in losing your kids.
> This was in Killingly, Connecticut, a suburban town in the northeast part of the state. The Rivers' lived near an elementary school, library, state police barracks, sidewalks, crosswalks, many Victorian-style homes, and the aforementioned donut shop. The kids gathered $7, and off they went.
Street View shows that the town looks quite walkable especially for suburban America. It just boggles my mind that people would consider calling the police on a 7 and 9 year old for walking on those streets.
https://slate.com/business/2022/04/old-enough-netflix-do-jap...
It's carefully monitored and setup. The kids don't know it. They are genuinely doing the things on their own. But it's not like the parents then rely on the kids to go do those things independently after the show.
They are more independent at a young age. But you don't see toddlers walking around Japan unattended to shops.
You shouldn't get your "news" from entertainment TV shows.
Back in West Germany, they had lived across from a bar, and every night my grandfather would send my mom and her older sister across the street to get some beer for him.
Then they moved to Ohio and rented an apartment down the block from the bar. And my grandfather sent two little girls who didn't speak any English to the bar for some beer.
Well, they came back with cops, who then had to fetch a neighbor who spoke more English than my grandparents to translate and explain the whole situation. The cops then left with a, "don't do that again" and that was the end of it.
The mind boggles at how quickly Opa would have been behind bars in 2023.
A man at the table next to ours handed a £10 note to his sons, who were about 8-10 years old. They went to the bar and asked for two Fantas or something like that. The bartender said "I can't serve you, you need to be 16".
Silence fell. It was a small room, and we'd all heard the boys ask.
The old man at the end of the bar said, "You'll serve the boys, John, or else you won't be seeing me in here again."
The boys got their Fantas.
(Checking the law now, the boys were clearly accompanied, and I see no reason the bartender shouldn't have served them. I think it may have been forbidden before 2003, when the rules distinguished between children "at the bar" or not, rather than the current rules which distinguish between accompanied and unaccompanied children. But even then, the bartender would have been applying a 'rough city bar' approach to a posh village pub.)
The kind of people who think it's reasonable to call the cops over a nothing-burger like this are simply a part the extremist long tail that is a product of middle/upper middle class culture that condones and encourages bucking everything to some external party whenever possible. When you exist in a bubble where everyone is patting each other on the back for calling the city over disputes that should at least be initially handled between neighbors, reporting petty business disputes to the state AG, calling a plumber to replace a toilet flapper, getting engineered drawings for a garden shed, etc, etc, it should come as no surprise that some people take this sort of responsibility to think for yourself outsourcing too far and call the cops on some kids walking down the street.
Of course dispatch and the police were behaving like idiots here too but they are clearly serving a community where responding to frivolous calls like this is the norm because if this one case was so outside of their normal purview it wouldn't have been handled the way it was.
And the DCF part, well that fact pattern just looks like a boring old case of bureaucratic incentives and ass covering. They were fishing for something to make the rest of the fact pattern look less unreasonable. And then when they found it they jumped right to some sort of remediable action so they could say "there, we did something, case closed".
So, of course, you arrest the parents and leave the sex-offenders and drug dealers roaming the street. Makes perfect sense.
I'm under the impression cops tend to arrest drug dealers regularly.
"More arrests, just for other things" isn't the fix here.
I am totally for this. I don't like the idea of restricting children, I think it inhibits growth.
Still, I had my near miss, and I know others of my age that had near misses too. I walked to park alone after school. I got tired of swinging on the swing set and went to sit on the park bench. Soon a man came and sat right next to me. I was uncomfortable, I slid down the park bench away from him. He soon slid right next to me again, his leg and torso against mine. I remember him being warm and sweaty and I thought him weird. I got up and went back to the swings and from the swing set stared at him. He eventually got up and left.
As an adult, I'm fairly freaked out by what could have been a bad experience. I don't condone arresting parents that give their children free reign. I do understand the perspective just a little bit.
(End of sarcasm towards these "cops.")
Any cop who threatens retaliatory arrest because his feelings are hurt should be severely reprimanded, then fired and barred from police work if the behavior continues.
Same goes for airport security who casually threaten to add passengers to the no-fly list if they push back. Retaliatory abuse of power isn't acceptable.
1) The police have no real criminals to arrest but need to do something to justify their existence. So they're harassing people over things that not only aren't crimes but are examples of good parenting that teaches kids to be independent. In this case, "defund the police" would genuinely be justified as they're clearly overfunded.
2) The police are refusing to do their job and arrest real criminals. Instead, they are harassing people over things that aren't crimes because those things are "unsafe" due to the refusal of police to do their job. In this case, the police need to be reformed so that they do what they're supposed to do.
Either way, the police should stick to arresting murderers, rapists and thieves to protect the fundamental freedom of decent people who respect the rights of others to use a public street whenever they want without fear of becoming a victim of violent criminals or of the police. Since this is literally why the government exists according to social contract theory (which the US was founded upon), the refusal of the government's police to do their job or the choice of the government's police to oppress others out of boredom is a breach of the social contract that makes said government illegitimate and no better morally than a street gang or mafia.
Even if the laws are vague, enforcing a vague law in a way that is clearly evil and oppressive is unacceptable because the core principle of the American legal system is that our fundamental rights are the supreme law and supersede any laws that infringe upon them. The right to walk on a public street is clearly protected by the 9th Amendment as it is so obviously a basic right that there was no need for the 1st Congress to enumerate it. Thus infringing on such a right in the name of "safety" is flagrantly unconstitutional.
I understand why child protection services exist, but it freaks me out that someone can arbitrarily decide that my wife and I aren’t good enough parents and take my kids.
As someone who was fostered and ultimately adopted, I want to reject the characterization that CPS is a useless organization - they are typically made up of underpaid people who genuinely care about the welfare of children.
Before dismissing them think about what kind of organization would you create to handle the distressingly common scenario of a drunk/drugged parent doing terrible things to themselves and their children in the middle of the night. CPS shows up in this case and takes care of the children. That is a routine event that doesn't make the news, it probably happened in your city last night. An insane response like TFA describes cannot be defended, but that is not the typical case at all.
This is what happens when you create an insane concept like qualified immunity and give it to people that have absolute power. Society treats cops like they are a special privileged class so they act like it and treat everyone else like serfs.
I let my 11 year old ride his bike to 7-11 the other day for the first time. I can't imagine how I would react if the gestapo showed up telling me I was a bad parent and endangering my child. I would absolutely sue if they arrested me for it, especially after threatening my wife as in the article and then dropping charges.
Instead of this: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...
For whatever reason, our society has confused well-being with safety. Those are not one and the same.
There will be a time when an adult has to assess risks and opportunity, and make choices. There are things in one’s life where they have to face the unknown and decide actions without having safety nets. A life cowering from the possibilities is small, with the illusion of safety.
And that’s for navigating one’s own life. What happens when these risk-adverse kids are raising their own kids?
What happen when these kids are the adults who have to vote and make decisions on things that affect the whole society?
It's even worse. There are paranoid conspiracy theorists roaming the streets of Killingly, armed to the teeth. You can recognize them by the blue uniforms.
In America, you should essentially never speak to the police w/o a lawyer[1]
> They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street
Isn't that stark admittance that the police themselves are the ones failing in this scenario?
PS: highly recommend reaons's reporting, I find them quite interesting not just covering the same run of the mill topics.
PPS: I'm sure they should arrest all of Japan for being complicit in the making of this show (jk) https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279
My folks were are conservative and taught us the value of hard work. I did plenty of it growing up. It is how we had the money for the comic books and junk food. During that time period I also remember hearing of someone who was murdered and the body was dumped in a ditch on a road about a mile away as the crow flies. There were rapists nearby and children stolen only a few miles away in the next town. I am sure my mom was worried and perhaps my dad too. I remember my dad looking at my little brother once and asking him what do you do if someone tries to take you? He said, "I fight and scream as loud as I can!" He would do it too. He was a scrapper. There is a reason my dad asked him and not me. He knew the response he would get. My parents are conservative Christians. They knew they couldn't protect us everywhere, all the time. I am sure they were praying about it often as we spread our wings and gradually flew out of the nest.
and there does seem to be a substantial amount of violent crime: https://crimegrade.org/violent-crime-east-killingly-ct/
https://www.google.com/search?q=crime+map+killingly+ct
I have no comment about whether the arrest or social worker were appropriate in this situation - we're only hearing one side.
The raw number of sex offenders / violent crime rates don't tell us much about the safety of a kid walking in a particular neighborhood at a particular point in time.
Additionally, I'm not sure how arresting a kid's parents is supposed to make anyone safer...
Enforced by the same who did not manage to prevent the circumstances?
I mean, ffs, this is from the link:
"By a simple count ignoring population, more crimes occur in the northwest parts of East Killingly, CT: about 0 per year. The north part of East Killingly has fewer cases of violent crime with only 0 in a typical year."
But this part is a constant reminder of how misandric present society is:
"...the officers proceeded to charge Rivers' husband with risk of injury to a minor. They charged Rivers separately for the same thing. Then they arrested her husband and took him away."
So could the story have been embellished or made up to push a narrative and stir upset and outrage to get exposure? There doesn't seem to be any authoritative third-party evidence (public records) supporting this story.
My bus stop was like a half mile/three quarters of a mile away so in the mornings my dad would drop me off on his way into work. One morning I realized we made it too late, and I had missed the bus.
On the walk home I got approached by a police officer who pulled up next to me. Thankfully, we had some history as he was my DARE officer in fifth grade.
He told me 3 different people called the police about a 15 year old walking by himself with a bag and large jacket on. People can never resist being busybodies.
> It's become pretty common in the states to not allow children to go outside without supervision.
You can, just don't send them through the forest and city for hours alone, when they're literally 8.
To play devil's advocate: I am wondering if we have created a system where the cost of being wrong is too high. Imagine what would happen if the police didn't investigate and something had gone wrong? Or look at Gabby Petito's parents who are trying to sue the Moab police.
Your parents should start suing. The people who are reporting this kind of crap. Custodial interference, I don't know I'm not a lawyer, but maybe a lawsuit will teach people to mind their own business.
A lot of us have bad experiences and the history books are also filled. Let's stop these recurring mistakes.
(Edit.) P.S. Here is one of those lawyer articles about why not to talk to... CPS https://mayerlegal.com/f/dont-talk-to-cps
(Who knows, the way things go in a few years one will need a lawyer to pay their water bill...)
This is absurd. I’d have been very quick to retort to the officers, upon being informed that there were sex offenders all throughout the neighborhood, that it was their job to fix that and they failed.
> Indeed, they pressed the Rivers to search the sex offender registry to learn which of their neighbors were on it.
CPS came later that evening and took both of their kids. The parents being Mormon had no drug or substance abuse issues, but her mom mentioned she was on antidepressants and the state decided to put them into a 1-year foster care for both of their kids until she an complete a mandated psych review.
Does anyone have direct, first hand experiences of this kind? Not from the media. First hand or someone you personally know.
While living in Australia I used to have our front desk remind me to not leave the door open on the deck because “your annoying neighbour keeps calling us to say you left the door open while you were at work”.
I don’t know why people can be so… annoying like that. Like they just sit in their window looking for things to complain about.
Yes; a family member's friend is currently dealing with potential prosecution for briefly leaving their kid in the car.
There was an arrangement where the older neighborhood kids would look after the younger ones.
I believe that today's society, at least in North America, has added at least one nine to this statistic. Wonderful! For every 100,000 kids born, nine deaths prevented. That's a measurable success. But the reduction in "childhood experience" - the free roaming - for example, when as kids we received - and this dates me - our first 3-channel CB walkie talkies, with all their glorious 100mW of transmit power, 3 channel switch but only one set of crystals installed (channel 14) - it was completely natural that we'd fan out all over the countryside, testing the range - including a relay on a hilltop when we found that schoolmates had compatible walkie-talkies too.
But more seriously. Kids that can socialize unsupervised learn by experience how social structures are established, how to act responsibly and the consequences of not doing so and so forth, and also that the majority of people are good, nice folks who'll let you use your phone or have a glass of water or whatever. Now, instead, it's drilled into them that the world is a bad place and safety is at home with your gadgets.
We had some of the deadliest snakes in the world, slithering through our backyard (mambas, gaboon vipers, cobras, etc. -Nigeria, in the 60s), and we had brown scorpions, scuttling around the schoolyard, in Morocco.
I have had the … pleasure … of a rabies vaccination series, because of rabid rodents.
I used to pass a police fort, with a .50 caliber machine gun pointed at me (Uganda, in the early 70s -fun times), on my way to the candy store.
Coming to the US was a bit of a culture shock.
Last time around, we were told the story of Heather Wallace, a Waco, Texas woman who was arrested after her child walked home. That Reason.com article stated that Wallace’s child, Aiden, had “agreed to walk home,” after which Wallace was arrested for child engagement.
I am a reporter and I cover crime. I was skeptical of that story, so I contacted the McClennan County Clerk of Court, and I paid for a copy of Ms. Wallace’s indictment.
It stated that Wallace had forced her crying child to walk home — on the shoulder of a busy highway.
I have no doubt that Heather Wallace told the article’s author (who runs an advocacy organization…) that her son Aiden wanted to walk home, but that is not what Aiden had told the police.
Wallace pleaded guilty.
Government overreach can be a serious problem, but I would be very hesitant to draw that conclusion from any story by this author. Particularly this one, since you can’t independently verify the facts. If you are going to credibly report stories about crime, you can’t anonymize the names of people who were allegedly arrested. That is not journalism. It’s storytelling.
I don't mind talking about politics in circles such as this but it seems a bit arbitrary that this particular news story blew up on HN. Does anybody know / could speculate why?
> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
No comment on the applicability to the current article
I certainly wasn't permitted to walk anywhere by myself at that age, nor were any of the non-immigrant friends that I know. My sister wasn't permitted to do that until around 15.
I also walked half a mile to a school bus stop when I was 12 and waited there (on a pretty busy street - not sure if that makes it safer or more dangerous but I would guess actually safer.)
I don't think the risks were high then, nor are they now. But the culture of what is considered acceptable for your kids to do by themselves outside the home is definitely way different.
If I had to pick one factor that is different and driving the difference, I think it's that the society now keeps (public) databases of where sexual offenders live so the awareness of the threat is much more concrete, even if it is not particularly elevated. We are over-managing/weighting what we can measure.
But also feeding the changing dynamic is bureaucracy and funding and legislation reflecting both the wealth and fears of our society -- today I learned) Child Protective Services wasn't really created until certain 1974 federal funding was given to the states, and other legislation around this didn't come till the 1988 Child Abuse Prevention, Adoption, and Family Services Act.
Isn't it your job to protect people from all that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
Visited Utrecht in December and visiting Freiburg in April to decide where to live.
If it's the Dunkins in Killingly Commons, I'd agree, that's tough to get to on foot and that intersection is awful.
They had left their garage door open over night, and the "kind" police officers decided to nearly give my father a heart attack to let him know that leaving open your garage door could draw in a "criminal element"
I don't want to live anywhere where police can feel "empowered" to terrorize regular people because of "crime" that may or may not be happening.
an article just came out on the FT:
> "US police receive less training than plumbers"
https://www.ft.com/content/0ec78d2e-9a3b-403b-9d5a-fc68c2804...
Edit: that was the RSS title; the webpage title is "US police: is a lack of training behind the violence? // Officers require fewer hours to qualify than plumbers and cosmetologists". Which again elicits a reaction in the lines of: "suspicion of that correlation being causal is the farthest from novel".
My young (5-10 y/o) in-laws can walk around town with no worries, since the cops know who they are, and it's a tiny town. One of the few artifacts of normal life left in this country.
Oh yeah, and "Posted" signs carry force of law here, unbreakable by police or even federal agents without a warrant. They also know better than to try.
That said, assuming at least partial truth to this article, I hope the kids didn't see their parent arrested, and weren't interrogated by anyone. I'd find a really gentle Mr. Rogers-type counselor to help talk with them about it.
There should be very serious pushback against allowing people like that near any levers of power.
> "She was looking for problems," says Rivers.
1. Revoke qualified immunity
2. Educational requirements beyond a HS diploma
3. Internal Affairs should not be managed by the people they're investigating, it should be a citizen led committee that has no involvement with the department but can fire officers at will pending an actual investigation.
That part, at least, sounds like a power trip to me.
In the US about 30 million adults have a police initialed encounter per year[1]. It seems obvious to me that the vast, vast majority of these encounters end in the way common-sense would dictate, and that only very few have the shocking, blood-boiling finale that can make you angry enough to demand reform. But equally obvious is that these are the exact stories that are attention grabbing and therefor news worthy (at least in the click-through sense). I remind myself of this prevalence perception skewing effect that the news has whenever I read it and I try to actively resist it.
This reminds me of an 20yo comedy skit (that probably wouldn't be made today) by Chris Rock called "How not to get your ass kicked by the police!" which seems to say the same thing. [2]
Of course I might be mistaken. I wonder if people here have data to prove otherwise?
---
[1] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cbpp18st.pdf [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8
Wow. That person definitely deserves to never be in a position of power again. Abuse like this is insane.
Yes I'm sure I'd find myself in the back of a squad car like this dad. But it's worth it
Stop centralizing parental authority.
Why are we "normalizing therapy" if nothing has changed about it being used against you?
In 2023, you shut-up and close the door when the cops are done talking. That's the response they deserve. Anything else is used against you.
Glad to see that "free range" parenting movement has taken root the last few years.
American local TV is mostly mind poison. A lot of stations are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, a corporation with an extreme right-wing agenda.
Europeans with their tame national broadcasters have no idea how insane a large part of American TV is with its obsession on local crime.
Makes it seem even more bizarre that Americans aren't out in the streets rioting on a much more regular basis.
Our society is broken
Every American should understand that the police are not your friends. They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about. A seven and nine year-old walking together to Dunkin' Donuts resulting the in the arrest of their father is a symptom of our police state. The fact that neighbors can "sic the law" on one another and the fact that "swatting" has become a verb is a symptom of our police state.
Getting back to this story and adding my own "get off my lawn" anecdote, when I was a kid every kid in the neighborhood walked to school. Even the five year-old kindergartners, like I was at one time. Oh sure my mom walked me the first couple of times to ensure I knew the route and that was it. Some kids had to walk two miles! We didn't even get a break for inclement weather! We had to walk in rain, snow and ice. We also had to cross a four-lane arterial thoroughfare! The horrors! And all this was in a big city! In all those years not a single kid was grabbed.
But they should also understand that policy are rarely the enemy, either, and treating them as such will result in a worse outcome on average. Don't let the evening news distort reality so much.
Also, in the interest of sharing anecdotal get off my lawn moments, all the kids in my neighborhood walk to school too, in 2023. All weather, all the time, safely, nobody calls the cops, nobody gets grabbed, it's fine. The world is in fact objectively safer than it was when I was growing up in the 80s. There's a good reason I don't routinely watch the news or read partisan political media.
So who are the police serving in this case? It's not like Big Karen(TM) has a trade group that hires lobbyists. It's not like The System(TM) really cares if your kids walk to wherever.
The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.
HN is angry because the morals enforced in this case are excessive and the amount of enforcement is disproportionate but the fact of the matter is that the person/people who's morals the cops are backing up with state violence is probably not that different from them.
> Some of those that law enforce us, are the same that burn crosses
While this is technically correct, this phrase sets up a simplistic model of society where there's the Powerful on top, the Police right under them serving them, and the Oppressed under that. I don't think this is the best way to understand what the Police are and what they do.
I've heard many left-leaning people claim something along the lines of "the Police do whatever the Powerful want by taking it out on the Oppressed". This doesn't accurately reflect the behavior or mindset of the individuals who collectively make up the Police. There are thousands of stories of rich and "powerful" individuals being harassed by police officers when their actions or beliefs clashed with the beliefs of the responding officers.
In fact, in America the definition of "power" is almost tautological when it comes to police. You are a "powerful" person when the police will either look the other way or help you when you break the law. I would go as far as to say that in America it is impossible to be "powerful" unless you have the police on your side. (A possible exception is for gang leaders with their own outlaw police forces.) Without the police you do not have meaningful power, and so saying "the police exist to serve the powerful" incorrectly separates the relationship between the "Powerful" and the "Police".
The Police are the power. I like to call them the "Martial Caste", in order to draw connections between them, medieval knights, samurai, cartel sicarios, the KGB, etc. It's all the same thing: they are the muscle behind the societal ownership claims of the local warlords. Without them the warlords are nothing, and without the warlords they are nothing.
A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".