How does this happen? There’s no silver lining which makes this conviction reasonable. If they can’t appeal, I hope they use Streisand to get the town or state of Virginia to vacate everything.
The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.
I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.
Take off my uniform.
My partner spent several years in childcare, both at centers and as a nanny. We're out in public and she sees a crying child? She goes to it, talks to it, hugs it perhaps, reassures.
Me? Not a chance. For better or worse, societal conditioning is that that is something I as a male /do/ /not/ /do/. Because it's nefarious that I'd even want to.
Many of us find it frustrating, though exposure is almost random. Someone who used to live on our street used to get very upset about trash cans being visible from the street, for instance. I think this person moved in the last two or three years because the passive aggressive HOA letters about this apparently heinous nuisance have stopped. But among groups of affluent people, I find that a small percentage never outgrew the tattle-tale phase and still behave in such a way into their sixties, seventies and eighties.
The criminal definition apparently has no such modification.
E: removed a double ‘likely’
Joke's on them because now she has rights.
I'm being a little hyperbolic but not nearly as much as I wish I was. The .gov can make just about anything stick if it's civil. Criminal is where your rights really kick in.
And in particular, the conviction here was delinquency of a minor. That's usually used to convict parents of teenagers whose kids do serious crimes.
I caveat to say, we don't know the full details. But it all seems pretty weak sauce.
The boy could have been spotted walking along a highway median, or similar detail that would kind of spoil the outrage effect. Lord knows the pedestrian hostile nature of modern infrastructure.
Though in this case the kid was walking all in a gated community.
It's far from improbable that a family court judge would have a bone to pick. Law enforcement gets a weird lens about public safety because of selection bias.
Simple. Evolutionarily, the dumber you are, the higher the risks of dying, because you do stupid shit. Inversely, the safer the environment, the dumber people become, because not doing stupid shit stops being evolutionarily advantageous. Nature is pretty brutal so there is evolutionary pressure not to be dumb, but in modern civilization we have pretty much infinite resources dedicated to safety, which means there is a feedback loop "people are dumber -> more safety measures -> people are dumber -> more safety measures".
When you go to poor countries you'll realize just how much knowledge children posses on the topic on how not to die.