Anyone who would call the cops when a kid is kicking and screaming must have zero experience with kids. That's just what kids do.
That's just the first three nodes of a N>10^8 causal graph.
Wasting police time is an issue, yes. It would be even more of a waste of time trying to establish whether this person had reasonable cause to call the police or was just trolling. Not to mention the other consequences I touch on above.
Suppose you want to incentivize people to report if they are at least 5% confident that there is a problem.
If you choose some small cost (say, $5 for example) if one is wrong, then if you assign a reward which is at least 19 times the cost if one is wrong, then the expected monetary value of reporting (in addition to the benefit from/of being altruistic) is positive when one is at least 5% confident that there is a problem.
(The ratio, where p is the minimum level of confidence you want people to report if they have, between the cost and reward, is (1-p)/p .)
One might question whether creating a monetary incentive scheme like this would still cause problems (akin to the expiraments about kids being monetarily rewarded for quality of artwork in schools decreases motivation or something like that), and that does seem like something that could be the case,
But one can set up a system that doesn't just disincentivize reporting when one has any doubt (as a simple fine for false reports would do), but still disince tivizes sufficiently uncertain reports.
That doesn't mean it would be a good idea though. I don't know if it would be.
The real problem lies in the numbers: To put it simply, the cost (salaries + funding) to research this issue and evaluate a good scheme and then implement it could be much higher than several years' worth of "noisy" police calls. Add this up with the opportunity costs (what those thinkers/researchers aren't doing while they're busy with this) and it's probably all the way down to "Will Do This Only If My Next Election Depends On It".
I've had someone call the cops on me because my son had a meltdown. I'm white so I just had a nice conversation with the cop, and I didn't get shot. But there are certainly people for whom even a random encounter with the cops has a good chance of turning out very badly.
Haven't you read TFA? This happens so seldom that defending against it causes more harm than good.
No, it isn't. It's a parenting fail if you can't control a situation to the point where your child is experiencing emotional distress to the point of kicking and screaming.
That's them trying to communicate and a parent failing to understand what the child is trying to say.
(Unless the child has some kind of neuro-diversity)
EDIT: But calling the police is totally wrong in that situation.
This is an incredibly broad and judgemental comment. Kids experience "emotional distress" all the time, without it being a "parenting fail". Many kids go through a "kicking and screaming" phase, and it takes time to work through this phase.
In my experience, children attempt to manipulate parents by throwing fits from the ages of about 2-5, no matter what. If you don't spoil your child, they will grow out of it. But, they're going to do it.
And, especially for new parents, failing is very common. I wouldn't judge them too harshly.
Whereas parents who give in instantly to stop the tantrum are never noticed and tsked by busybodies.
How many times are the children allowed to try it during the process of learning that it doesn't work?
Or rather, how is a parent to teach their children it doesn't work after the first (and only in your unrealistic view) time?
It's only a parenting fail if they continue the behavior beyond a generalized age of say 5 years old. And how can you, as a passerby determine if "this" time is a first/early attempt at manipulation or just the result of learning that it works?
I've learned not to be so judgmental of other parents after becoming a parent. I hope you do too.
The time leading up to the parent hand off was always difficult. If I could have let him calm down on his own timeline, I would have.
That said, every person (kid, teenager, adult) is going to have a melt down now and again.
I know it's hard to believe, and I didn't fully grasp this until I had some of my own, but children are remarkably varied in many different ways -- compared to other kids, compared to adults, and compared to themselves (even on a minute-to-minute or hour-by-hour basis).
As far as children being like small adults -- I think it's closer to the truth to consider them as small, temporarily insane adults-to-be.