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Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

While it's tough to criticize the decision to leave a child in the car for a few minutes -- happened to me all the time as a child -- I'm forever scarred by seeing a dead child pulled out of a car in the office complex next to mine [1]. The dad was bashing his head against a tree trying to knock himself unconscious because he was so overcome with grief. Officers were trying to restrain him when his wife showed up and went completely (understandably) histerical, pounded her fist on the ground and screaming at her husband.

I can't fathom how one could begin to process and move on from such an incident.

So while I don't think it should be illegal to leave a child in the car, personally that's a line I'll not cross with my kids.

[1]http://www.khou.com/news/Baby-left-in-hot-truck-dies-in-Aust...

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As with lots of things: The details matter. Leaving a kid in a car shouldn't be an offense. Not returning ~soon~ might be and might be a reason to call the cops/force the car open.

Parents can damage/kill their kids in uncountable ways. Most don't and really try to avoid that. Trying to watch over their shoulder isn't 'Good citizenship', it's crazy and a witch hunt. You start to be labeled as child abuser if your kid is crying like hell (toothing maybe, or really interested in strawberries that you don't like to hand out - but the people around you don't understand that, don't have the slightest bit of clue about the situation. More often than not, OTHER parents are worse than the rest).

Give it a rest. The scenario you describe sounds terrible. But it's not relevant to the situation at hand. The person in the article describes that she checked the temperature, knew how long it'd take (even had a deadline on multiple levels, not only 'Today I do not want to choke my kid in the car' - she even planned to take a flight before the kid could have taken any damage. More seriously, a parent decided something for her kid. Something she does gazillion times a day. People might object to a number of her decisions and this particular one got her in trouble? Someone 'snitched'? Sad. The system failed.

I understand:

- someone was worried, called the cops

- cops reacted (yay!)

But:

- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent

- charges were pressed, just because?

One word: Insane.

I'm a father of two, both younger than the kid in the car.

edit: One of the worst typos I made so far.

It was worse than that. Someone wasn’t worried. Instead of acting, by, say, trying to talk to the kid in the car or perhaps just calling the cops, they “recorded the incident using a phone’s camera, and had then contacted the police”. Baffling.

By the way, this is what I think of every time I hear someone use the phrase ”a good samaritan”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIVB3DdRgqU

- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent

The second half of your premise contains two completely unwarranted assumptions. How exactly were the police supposed to know the now-departed child was a) safe and b) with his parent? Recall that the Mom who wrote the piece was driving a vehicle that wasn't registered to her and so therefore didn't match the description on the registered owners' driving licenses. We know with hindsight that she had borrowed her parents' minivan for the trip, but the police would not have been justified in making that inference.

- Track down the car owner

- Call about the kid

- (Optional) Visit owner (grandparents) in person and take an official statement

- Drop the case

And what is the danger we're protecting the child against here? People seem to like the 'baked in car' setup. You seem to fancy the 'kidnapped wholesale with car' idea? I mean - your neighbor is taking the kid to the car, and gets back in (probably forgot a thing). 30 sec later you look out of the window and the car is gone. What happend?

a) The car was stolen, kid inside

b) The owner of the car and responsible person for the kid inside moved it outside of the viable area from your position

Really?

Again, the situation with my neighbor (someone I know well enough to trust my kid with) is completely different from that of seeing a stranger leaving a kid in a car in a shopping mall parking lot. The fact that you need to change the facts of the situation to make your point should be a clue to the inherent weakness of your argument.

Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (even if the weather didn't seem to justify it, but the fact is it's very unusual for a parent to leave a kid in car in the US these days. From the police point of view, the confusion about the identity of the car owner and driver is enough to warrant further investigation. When the police hear from the grandparents that the child is inaccessible because the Mom got onto a plane and flew home, that's probably true but they don't know for sure - after all that's the sort of story people give out when they abduct children in custody battles during ugly divorces. It's the police's job to put the welfare of the child first in ambiguous situations like that.

Me, I wouldn't have prosecuted once the full facts came out, but on the other hand a statewide missing child alert uses up a bunch of police resources and that's not free, so the prosecutor may have that demanding some community service in return was justified. I can't tell what state the writer lives in or exactly when this happened, so it would be worth considering those contexts as well.

Aha! My argument is weak because your neighbor is more trusted than the general public.

Read that again.

Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person?

If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is shouted at, throws itself to the ground and needs to be carried, etc. etc..

It's not my argument that is weak (my example might be crap, if you happen to really like your neighbor. But that also means that you missed the point of my post though, inserting real persons wasn't part of the thought experiment and is entirely irrelevant).

No, your argument is weak because you changed the facts to fit your narrative.

Why? Why would a random parent

Yet again, the assumption of parental status based on hindsight. The police who answered the 911 call at the shopping center had no way of knowing that the author was the parent of the child in the car, and given that that person did not match the description of the registered vehicle owner, such an assumption would have been entirely unjustified. In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.

Downvote away, but every single argument you have posted in this thread is built upon hindsight bias.

I don't think that darklajid can be the one downvoting -- at least not your post replying to him. I suspect you're being downvoted (and not by me) for suggesting that a statewide missing child alert is warranted in response to a kid being spotted alone in a parking lot for a few minutes, which is the kind of thing that people are mad about in this thread.

> In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.

Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?

I'm not suggesting that, and you're being disingenuous for ignoring the fact of the person driving the car not matching the id of the vehicle owner, which I have repeatedly pointed out as the suspicious circumstance.

Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?

Population of CA is ~38 million, of which ~24% are minors, or approximately 10 million children. 10m/~2000 abductions a year in the state = 5000.

http://www.childabductions.org/ Annual abduction rates http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html CA census data

Are you happy now?

Your math is broken. It doesn't even have the right units to be a probability (children/(abudctions/year)).

The police would have been completely justified in assuming that a parent had taken the child, and that the child was safe. Abductions (especially unreported ones,) by strangers are so uncommon that the officers would have to be suffering from acute paranoia to believe that a stranger had abducted the child.

No they wouldn't. The police are paid to check those things out, not to make facile assumptions. When they are the license plate they would have noticed that the person they saw in the video was not the registered owner of the car. That was absolutely something worth following up, which was why the author's mother found a police car waiting for her when she returned from dropping her daughter off at the airport.

The probability of a crime occurring is not the only factor that has to be taken into account here. There's also the severity of the possible criminal outcome. Kidnapping is actually relatively common in the US by international standards, and it is among the most aggressively prosecuted crimes. Until 1972, kidnapping was a capital crime, ie you could get the death sentence for it.

The article appears to indicate that the person capturing video saw the lady leave and return. It is not clear if the video was rolling the entire time but certainly as the video-taker was giving the video to the police, they may have mentioned that the same person who left the car also returned. I don't see why the police would be more worried about an abduction in this situation than in any other "person with child" situation.

Because the person in the video doesn't match the description of the registered owner of the car as recorded on their driving license. Think about it.

I've thought long and hard about it... Still makes no difference.

For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves.

I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids and only 1 in 10 of those steal cars. So there's only a 2% chance of that happening at once!

Considering the possibility isn't the same thing as leaping to the conclusion. It's not like the woman was pursued, arrested, and thrown in jail before she ever got near the airport. Rather, the police did the sensible thing and followed the matter up by checking with the owner of the vehicle that was seen in the parking lot.

Are you saying that if there's only a 2% chance of something odd being a criminal incident, they should just blow it off?

Absolutely, yes.

I'm sure you'll be equally philosophical if you're ever in the position of needing to report a crime and they tell you not to worry about it.

I think you have it backwards. I would like to be able to call the police to report an ACTUAL crime...but unfortunately, they would be too busy investigating reports by paranoid folks who think they've seen a possible crime.

> I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids

Wow... because I know like at least 30 moms and none of them have snatched any kids. To cover the odds, there must be people out there that know a lot of baby snatchers. Those people should be calling the police. :)

You know what they say, 97% of statistics are made up ;)

I of course picked an absurdly high number because even with two absurdly high numbers it still only nets 2%.

«Because the person in the video doesn't match the description of the registered owner of the car as recorded on their driving license. Think about it.»

First, you have to arrive to the cops checking for that. Before that, you must imagine the "good" samaritan, who hasn't seen any driving license and knows nothing about the minivan, speculating about who was that woman leaving and then coming back to the minivan.

But it's not the reason he or she has called the police and the police, at the moment they reached the house of the parents of the woman, they knew the latter was none but the daughter of the owner of the minivan.

Case closed... Except for the charge of having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. By the way, the good samaritan can be charged of the same crime since the video proved that, since even if he could have "caught" the criminal mom in the instant he was starting her criminal act and thus he could have "saved" the child, he preferred keep filming... so, if there was an actual crime, it would have been too late.

The very big difference is that child-bakes-in-the-car heat deaths are not because Dad left the kids in the car while he ran in to the store for a few minutes, but because Dad forgot the kid was in the car at all.

http://www.parenting.com/article/tragedy-in-the-backseat-hot...

Parent runs into store for few minutes, trips and knocks head becoming unconcious / has stroke / has heart attack / etc etc - child dies.

Having said that, This story is a really good example of how tough it is for some parents and how hostile society is to parenting.

If the father became unconscious, had a stroke or a heart attack, etc. while driving or doing anything with the child away from other people, the child could die.

Yes, but people would know the child was there. If someone fall down unconscious in the middle of the supermarket nobody knows which car they arrived in, or even for sure that they arrived in a car, and nobody knows about the unattended child. That's a different kind of risk.

On the other hand, for the person in the parking lot to film the child in the car and call police, but not make any contact with the child or wait by the car, borders on malice. Police and prosecutors should investigate but heavily discount such pseudo-testimony because it is deliberately presented without context.

Approaching a young child who has been left alone in a car is foolish in today's paranoic society.

Also, the returning parent is unlikely to be grateful to the comments of "I was just making sure your left alone child was not dying".

That is an entirely different world of crazy that doesn't belong here, does it?

Are we going to turn this into a 'You need to be careful about talking to a child' debate? If you cannot address/talk to a child, things are worse OUTSIDE of that car.

Of course it belongs here!

In a sensible world she would have been able to call out to some car-park lurker "hey I'm just going to grab something from the store, can you just wave at my kid through this window"; or she could just run in and grab something and people seeing her run in and then out would not call the police; or etc etc.

Society has decided that men wanting to work with children are creepy (try finding pre-schools with male workers and early years schools with male teachers), and this extends to the damaging concept of "stranger danger" where someone waiting by the car to check the child is safe is not going to be seen as a welcome bit of support for a busy harassed mother but will be seen as a creepy threat.

It's all part of the same weird system of protecting children without regard to what actual risk is.

The person was near enough to spot the child and take a photograph, so they could have remained at that distance and call the police if they feel it's necessary, not least to advise the returning parent/guardian that the police were called. In that case the police would probably have arrived and written a ticket or something. Although this would have involved a delay and frustration for the temporarily unattentive parent, it would have been better than the actual outcome involving the issuance of arrest warrants.

One could say 'why not let the matter drop, the Mom came back and so everything was OK' but that's a classic example of hindsight bias. From the police POV, a child was left alone in a vehicle that was later driven off by someone else. When they followed up, it turned out that the person who drove off was not the owner of the vehicle (which belonged to the child's grandparents). They have to at least consider the possibility of malfeasance.

Your firs para: could you imagine the situation where you tell a parent that you called the police because you were worried about their child? That's not an easy conversation.

I agree that people should report early and report often; and allow experts to make decisions. Sadly, reporting early and often just swamps people who are already far too busy dealing with children who are being abused, or it dumps reports with police who take action when they don't need to do anything more than have a chat.

I agree it's not an easy conversation, but if you think it's important enough to take photographs and call the police about it was important enough to communicate to the person who you have made a potential suspect. In this case it would probably have resulted in a much less traumatic outcome for the author of the story, who at worst might have missed her plane.

«From the police POV, a child was left alone in a vehicle that was later driven off by someone else».

No "someone else", but the very same woman: leaving the car, returning back to the car. The same woman, not someone else. Unless the good samaritan has deceptively shown just the last part and told the police he (or she) saw a different person leaving the car with the child inside.

The issue here is not car theft, driving license not matching the car owner, or whatever. It was instead a good samaritan evaluating as criminal/dangerous the fact that a mom left his son alone in the car for few minutes. And decided (when she came back) to call the police to...? Check if the child was fine? Whatever.

It takes few minutes to check if the car was stolen and/or the owner knows that someone else is driving it.

The argument still sucks. Given a reasonable choice in the beginning ("The weather's cool, the kid strapped in, car is secured, will be right back") the kid would - what? Complain and cry after a while? It's a four year old boy with a tendency (if you read between the lines) to throw fits. Maybe all boys are like that..

If the mother (to stay with the original article) would've fallen unconscious or dead in the supermarket, nevermind that both options would have some consequences for the family, the kid would've been fine.

Calling the cops was fine. Creepy the way it was described, but okay.

Cops arriving was fine. That's their job.

"Huh? The "abandoned" kid is gone already? Let's trace the car and take out our frustration on .. the mother?" wasn't fine. That was just braindead. The correct movie quote variation would've been "Nothing happened, move along".

Theoretical "But here's how the kid could've died" arguments are .. weird. And countless.

I agree that the police reaction is sub-optimal, but there are reasons not to tie a child to a seat and lock them into a car and then leave them unsupervised, even if that is for a few minutes.

And those reasons are?

Reasons not to .. and reasons to to exactly that.

The decision is not yours, not ours. It's the parent's. Like everything else about the daily life of the kid. That argument contains no value. Of course there are reasons that one might not do that. Loop/Recur to line 1.

That's not much help for kids who do have abusive or neglectful parents, is it? They're citizens too and if they're stuck in a dangerous situation they're entitled to the same level of protection as any other member of society.

there's a middle ground between the state as inflexible guardian and complete parental sovereignty.

Fine. Abused kids need help. There, I said it. It's nothing new and not related to the example at hand, but yeah, we found some common ground.

The state has laws and agencies to interfere and check (Disclaimer: I've no clue about the US of A here, but I assume it's not too far off from what I know). But that's not related to the action(s) we discuss. Are we missing a part of the picture? Certainly. Is the partial picture scary? Yes.

The adversaries in the story didn't act to protect the kid. They acted in a completely crazy fashion. There's so many things wrong with this story, I cannot even begin to imagine how someone would defend the side of the cops here..

One (out of far too many) questions: If this mother is utterly incapable, if a lawyer actually can make the point that she might lose her kid if she's not complying: Why does it take 10 month to proceed? I'd say that someone with a little ambition can kill a kid in less time than that...

There's not One. Single. Point. in that article that makes sense, on the side of law enforcement. Zero. The only potential reason to discuss why this might not be so far removed from reality that everyone involved should be ordered to take a drug test is that the article might be lying. If that is not the case ... there is no case.

The police didn't act in a crazy fashion at all. They responded to a complaint, collected evidence, checked it against vehicle owner records. Then they visited the owner of the vehicle, gathered some more information. When an arrest warrant was issued (by the court, not by the police) months later, the police telephoned the author of the article to advise her about it and make arrangements for her to come to court.

I've said repeatedly that I don't think there was any point in bringing a prosecution. since you don't live in the US maybe you don't appreciate that the police and the public prosecutor are completely separate entities. The police didn't do anything abnormal in this case.

> since you don't live in the US maybe you don't appreciate that the police and the public prosecutor are completely separate entities.

I don't live in the US, but I often get the impression that in the US, they're less separate than in other countries.

Is this case even remotely discussable as "middle ground"? There was no malice except on the part of the police and the bystander. Your responses to this thread show a deep lack of understanding of practical parenting or human resiliency.

I fail to see what police malice you're finding. The author of the police doesn't criticize them at all.

That's part of the problem, that they think they deserve to get treated this way by making a sound and considered choice.

Get treated what way? You haven't articulated how it is that you think she was mistreated by the police.

No, society should protect children. As you say calling the police is okay, but the reaction of police is not okay.

There are parents who neglect or abuse their children. It's fortunately rare, but it does mean that children also deserve protection from their parents, when necessary.

Leaving a child in a locked car is a bad idea, even when it's totally safe, and even with a window cracked. (In fact, leaving a car window open when you're not there is also a bad idea, though a few minutes probably won't hurt.) Honestly, in that situation, it's better to leave the car door open, so the child can get out when necessary. If you don't trust the child to make that decision, don't leave it alone.

This can happen when you're home alone with your children too. Should we require night chaperones? What's the acceptable level of present adult redundancy?

Yes, driving to the store is considerably more dangerous for the child (even if it's in correctly fitted car seat (and many children are not)) than being left for a few minutes in the car.

Still, leaving the child alone leaves them open to more risk than taking them out of the car.

This parent was not buying anything important - just headphones for a child - and they took the wasy options by i) taking child to shops and ii) not taking child out of car.

I don't criticise other people's parenting because I am particularly lucky with my son but the idea of leaving my nearly-four-yo son unaccompanied (out of eyesight) fills me with cold fear.

Again, the problem here isn't that they left their son for a few minutes in a car, it is that society is pretty hostile to parents and parenting, simultaneously being quick to judge and slow to offer any real support.

> Still, leaving the child alone leaves them open to more risk than taking them out of the car.

So a child in an immobile tested-safe metal box with ventilation, locked and alarmed, is more at risk than being outside the car? I'd like to understand how you came to that reasoning.

»I don't criticise other people's parenting because I am particularly lucky with my son but the idea of leaving my nearly-four-yo son unaccompanied (out of eyesight) fills me with cold fear.«

The thing is:

1) You do. The post says "She was lazy"¹. That's criticizing.

2) Your pov is noted and fine. You're probably a good parent. But what works for you isn't transferable to other parents and kids. And those parents will make decisions that wouldn't work/make sense for you and your kid. I love that my not-yet-two son disappears and plays in hidden corners. He's probably longer out of my (and my wife's) sight than the boy in that car was, albeit in our apartment. Cold fear sounds nasty. I understand that to a point, but for this particular parent that wouldn't work/would be unhealthy.

We're different. Projecting one's idea about child care is different from laws about child care.

1: Blame reading comprehension skills on my English teacher

Parent is driving the car and has a heart attack/stroke/etc. Car crashes and child dies. I guess we better make it illegal for parents to drive cars with kids in them.

How hostile society is to parenting? Did I read that right? Parents have free reign to brainwash their kids into some religious cult. Then theres the whole homeschooling thing - yes, enlightened HN readers will protest that they are able to give their kids a better education than the crappy public school system could, but lets face it, home schooling is as much a cover for the many nutjobs out there that don't want the scientific method taught in school. Lets not start on vaccines.

Basically, until you are 18, you belong to your parents and have zero rights, treated as a child by society. It's funny how we all forget this once we turn into adults.

You make some good points about parental rights.

Look at vaccinations. (Vaccinations are good; I had no hesitation having my child immunised; I'd like schools to require immunisations for pupils; etc). The early days of the vaccination scandal were not presented as a bit of scientific research, it was "you, as a parent, are harming your child by vaccinating them" (and that's still what the nutjobs are saying). Now that we know that Wakefield is a crook we tend not to say "you were duped by a crook who had financial interests in misleading you so let's help you get your child immunised", we say "you're a nutjob and a bad parent".

Look at HN where parents feel guilt about work life balance for one example of how hard it is to be a parent in a rich first world country.

Look at the number of people on HN who (ignoring law) say they would hesitate to employ women because of the risk of maternity leave.

The fact that "having a child" has to be written into legislation as a protected status shows that status of parents was seen as needing protection.

While I recognize that homeschooling is done by some because of their religious beliefs, and yes, some of those beliefs are pretty unusual, I would like to remind you that homeschooling is actually not 100% a cover for the nutjobs out there. I was homeschooled, and I'm now graduated highschool at 16. Homeschooling is a great way to avoid the mess and poor education that is public school, and in my experience with other homeschoolers, there aren't as many nutjobs as you seem to think. I apologize if I missed the point of what you were saying, but I wished to present an alternative view of homeschooling.

I think like this, always able to consider the worst case scenario. So, whilst I've left my kid(s) in the car on occassions I've never left them without leaving the window open a bit ... of course that makes it easier to open the door and kidnap them ...

Well, the worse case scenario is that a parent takes the child out of the car and a truck plows into them both leaving them alive but severely brain damaged, requiring 24 hour care. The truck driver is poor and has no insurance, and the parent was inadaquately insured too.

And the truck was driven by the other parent. Yes, my brain can play that game all day.

Even the link you cited claims that 15 minutes can be enough time under surprisingly temperate conditions. I've easily spent that amount of time waiting through lines on something that should have been a quick run to the store.

I was always allowed and encouraged to open doors+windows while waiting in a car as a child.

The thing is, something could happen to you while you're away. The few minutes in the car won't hurt the child, but if something happens to you, the child is still there. And if you locked the car, the child can't get out.

I'm all for letting kids play with little or no supervision. (Depending on the surroundings, of course; a place near my home where kids can build huts has the explicit rule that kids under 8 need adult supervision at all times, which makes total sense. A mother was upset that someone confiscated the hammer and saw her kids were using while she was away. That mother was wrong.)

But what's important is that if you trust your child to take care of itself, you give it the means to do so. Locking a kid in a car is not that. I'd rather let it play in the parking lot or a field next to it.

So I think the decision to leave the kid in the car is still a bad one. And not even just because of the danger, but because of teaching it about choice and consequences: The kid wanted to come along to the shop? Then it's coming inside. The kid thinks a game is more important than new earphones? Then it's not getting new earphones. Teach the kid consequences.

How much would it add to the cost of a car to put in a little solar panel and a fan or two that would bring in cooler air into the cabin on hot days? It would help avoid situations like these (or at least increase chances of survival) and keep the interior from being a scorching simulation of the surface of the sun. I think some models had this in the 90s, but it never caught on. Supposedly, if memory serves from an old issue of Motor Trend, just a couple small fans could drop the temperature almost 20 degrees on really hot days. So a 100 degree interior would be 80, which could mean the difference between life and death.

Audi started making this an option in 2008 (2007?) on their A8 line and was followed by Fisker and Toyota on the Prius. i don't think any of them have it as an option any more. It's just not effective enough.

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