> As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace
> "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'"
Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.
> Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade-off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
This is the fault of the nosey neighbor AND the fault of the police AND the fault of the district attorney AND the fault of the CPS case worker. All four bear blame for this travesty.
When I write software, I know that users will do dumb things and it is my responsibility to write my code in such a way that they can cause no damage.
The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."
I think a lot of people take this to mean "laws bad" when in reality I think LBJ was saying to be careful in how you craft your laws so you can prevent this kind of abuse.
If you adapted it for software, it's almost the same as saying "don't focus too much on the happy path, make sure you limit the blast radius for the failures cases", which just sounds like sensible advice.
You really have to take the adversarial mindset when thinking about large scale systems like this, to make sense of how they can break.
Thinking about the failure modes is the default mindset of a traditional engineer. Unfortunately software engineers in general are entirely too focused on the happy path and nothing else.
Focusing on anything besides the happy path requires the approval and support to do so from other teams and their respective management and QA.
No, they'd rather not coordinate any of that and just play the blame game.
Many workplaces employing software engineers are actively hostile towards any kind of engineering. I have a very hard time believing anyone writing code is sloppy on purpose. Incentives are often very misaligned. These are pretty much always organizational problems.
Instead of immediately blaming software engineers, you should consider questioning whether it ever makes sense to have non-technical leadership in charge of them. Most places where "real" engineering is done don't have idiots at the wheel.
When I write software, every line of code is accompanied by the thought "I'm a blackhat hacker, with execution thread. How do I leverage this line of code?"
Ironic, given the subject matter. It could do with a corollary: "when making a statement, consider the most simplistic and/or uncharitable interpretation possible".
Another way of putting this might be that it's reasonable to assume that most legislation/laws/procedures/policies are in fact created in good faith, and one can also assume that those advocating for them will do a good job covering the benefits. Where the work is needed, therefore, is in considering the unintended side-effects (of either enforcement or poor enforcement)
The legal system long ago worked around this - they allow virtually every person at every level to exercise "discretion." An officer can frequently choose how to handle an issue, a prosecutor can choose not to prosecute, etc.
Occasionally, we see well meaning policies going astray - the "must arrest someone" domestic calls in jurisdictions are a contentious-but-great example. Sometimes calls get put in spuriously and now someone must go to jail for a relative non-issue / non-altercation that a neighbor called in.
It is good that the agents have this wiggle room, because you cannot craft a law that could handle any case. This is why it is important to have competent people that represent the state and see that laws are followed. On the contrary, people should be incentivised to constantly reflect if a law really serves justice. If not, the legislative branch needs to change it.
Problem here is that the success of policing in politics is measured by number of closed cases or by how many people got convicted after their arrest. By crime rate and success in fighting it. This of course creates perverse incentives for the most part. Budget fights and politics leave justice far behind.
If there is no more crime in a country, it shouldn't mean that police are getting pressured because they arrest fewer people. But exactly that would probably follow in a political discussion.
Writing code to affect millions of people’s data, or controlling millions of people’s actions they can perform with software, has a lot in common with passing legislation that will affect millions of people, in terms of the edge cases and unintended consequences that you must consider beforehand.
Not to mention the potential for malicious actors.
Considering that programming language compilers or interpreters are also written by human "software writers", where you the developer are the "user" doing dumb things, hopefully you are using a language that stops you from doing dumb things.
Dumb things like spamming others, issuing hundreds of unnecessary requests to external APIs or databases, trashing all the memory of a system, filling up the disk... A "general purpose" language which basically doesn't exist?
Anything even a bit non-trivial can be used to do dumb things. It is a responsibility for everyone in the chain not to do them, and if dumb things happen, everyone in the chain _is_ responsible.
We can debate how much blame each of them should take, but we should not ignore the blame an individual doing a dumb thing should take simply because there were people in "official" roles being even dumber.
I mean, this was already depicted in the South Park when all the parents get sent to jail by their kids.
I agree with your point in this context 100% but I would like to push back on the vibe in *all* software contexts. Obviously in some contexts sure, nobody wants another Therac-25. However, in general I believe modern software is overly concerned with preventing the user from doing dumb things at the expense of expandability and user control.
Metaphorically it feels like we've adopted a model that has safety interlocks and authenticated access for every screwdriver and light switch in your house. Some of the inaccessible to the end user without serious reverse engineering. To some extent I get why absurd proliferation of IoT devices necessitates some of this but I think there's a better way. A world where we have a decent lock on the front door and you're the one who's responsible for not putting the drill through your eyeball, not the drill.
That’s part of the problem… everything can’t be reduced to if-then-else; situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing. In this case, how helpful is it to the child to remove the mother from the child, to teach her a lesson not to remove herself from the child?
My guess is that the mother was removed from the child not as a punishment to her, but in order to ensure the safety of the child. In other words, deterrence rather than retributive justice. FWIW, I do agree that this is a huge overreach on the part of the police and that "situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing."
Only in the most unproductive way. You're not going to fix the problem by exterminating all nosy neighbors. If your new roof leaks when it rains, it's not the rain's fault, blame it on the person who builds roofs ignoring the unavoidable fact that rain will eventually fall.
Right: what do we care about more, ideals or outcomes? Certainly we don't want to be doing immoral or unethical things to achieve the outcomes we want, but sometimes the ideal is just not particularly achievable.
In this case, we want to avoid situations where parents are punished for their entirely reasonable childcare decisions. We're never going to be able to eliminate all ignorant busybody neighbors; that's just not realistic. So the law needs to be structured (and law enforcement trained) to ensure nosy neighbors can't cause damage like this.
And I think fixing the law enforcement response will actually fix some nosy neighbors: law enforcement telling such people that their report is incorrect and inappropriate will have the effect of reducing the incidence of such calls in the future.
> So the law needs to be structured (and law enforcement trained) to ensure nosy neighbors can't cause damage like this.
Let's take this a bit further. We are never going to be able to eliminate all ignorant law enforcement regardless of training, that's just not realistic. Or prosecutors. Or...
I mean, this is a case in point (all of them were dumb or unwilling to admit to error in judgement), and I am sure you've seen plenty yourself: I don't know a single person who hasn't first-handedly experienced a dumb police officer (not saying they all are, but some certainly are).
If we accept that we'll never get everyone to be perfect, we should accept that we rely on everyone to not be dumb. It starts with your neighbour and you.
If I was the parent, I'd include the neighbour in my damages (emotional, reputational and lost income) suit along with the police and all the other institutions that didn't put a stop to this. Provided the parents can win anything in court, which I am not even sure about.
If the neighbour was really worried, they could have accompanied the kid to the house and had a chat with the parents.
> A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless.
I have no problem blaming this behavior. To be clear, it would not be productive to blame only the neighbor.
That woman has no certification or authority to decide whether a child is in danger, and the fact that the kid was a block away from home is not some undeniable indicator that he wasn't.
That woman has a civic responsibility to call authorities when she's worried about the welfare of a child. The authorities have a responsibility to be competent. The woman fulfilled her responsibility, the entire justice system failed. If the police and justice system aren't expected to have or use any expertise beyond some random concerned chick, they're not only failures, but useless. Lone individuals shouldn't be held to a higher standard than these people that we vest with the authority to make these decisions.
If anything, it would be nice if the police would have explained to her, when she called, the minimum standards for intervention when suspecting that a child is in danger. The reason they can't is because they don't have any.
Instead, it's somehow super-important to focus on and villainize this random concerned busybody. It's not important, and that woman could have been a hero for reporting on any other day (or with a legitimate justice system.)
That woman is dumb. Authorities are indeed incompetent to pursue this further, but those two are unrelated. If either of those were not true, dumb thing would not have happened — as humans, we are all in this together, and it's all of our responsibility to do better. That neighbour included.
If she was worried about a child, she should have accompanied them home.
Next time, she'll send police over when a kid can't watch more TV (or go to a party, or eat more sweets, or...) and ends up crying her guts out: hey, she's worried about children's welfare. I would be having police at my door almost every other day with a neighbour like that.
The woman is an authority. It takes a village. Instead of calling the police, the guys with guns whose job is to detain and sometimes kill people, she should have asked the child what's up.
The police are the guard dogs who arrest criminals.
What? No. People have a civic responsibility to protect exercise good judgment and common sense. If the people are broken the justice system, or any system, can’t fix it.
Planning for nature and planning for failure aren’t exactly the same. And too much planning for failure when there are missed opportunities to plan for success, well, it leads to failure.
If you drove it off the lot, an unrelated point is made.
I don't understand what you're saying, but nosy neighbors are as inevitable as the rain, both are entirely natural, and planning that assumes that either will ever disappear is already a failure.
The problem is not that the neighbour is nosy, but that they are making a dumb decision in spite of all visible evidence that nobody is in immediate danger.
So you are worried about seeing a neighbour's kid walking near the home alone? Talk to them to check they are ok. Accompany them home. Talk to parents about your concerns.
Do not call the police.
Note that I am in no way saying that they take grunt of the blame, but we put adult people in jails for doing dumb things (hey, that lion in the zoo looked really sad so I released it). When you can hurt someone, it is your responsibility to not be dumb.
No, child abuse is why these rules exist. They may not be calibrated well because they overreach from prevention to prescription (from telling you how not to treat your child to telling you how you should treat your child), but they're a necessity.
The first people to decide that child welfare was important were anti-animal cruelty organizations, so any protection for children is new and not at all obvious or intrinsic to us.
It's not usually safe to assume that current values are somehow invariant. Humans have never discovered child welfare was important, because that's not something you discover, it's something you decide.
> Animals were legally defined as property, but Bergh's watershed legislation recognized cruelty as an offense to the animal itself—irrespective of ownership.(3) Historian Susan Pearson argues that these laws helped transform American liberalism—from a classical conception of rights in the negative—to augur the rise of the modern "interventionist" liberal state. Pearson contends that this positive conception of rights drew animal protectionists into child protection in the 1870s. Bergh's chief counsel, Elbridge Gerry, founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 after he secured the arrest and conviction of an abusive foster mother for felonious assault. Animal protectionists across the nation subsequently instituted amalgamated "humane societies," which safeguarded animals and children under a singular protective fold, positing that helpless "beasts and babes" had a right to protection because they could suffer.
And even with those qualifiers, you are only talking of legislative decision to protect child's welfare in USA. Eg. a quick search finds legislation aiming to improve protections for children in UK 50 years prior to your "1870s": http://history.parkfieldprimary.com/victorians/lord-shaftsbu...
Legislation is only needed when a particular behaviour becomes incompatible with current values, or has long been incompatible but becomes so prevalent to need legal recourse to stop. Children were protected by their parents and families through the ages, and while it was certainly not universal, it was prevalent. Though, I do recognize that the very definition of who children were was different, as it was mostly pre-puberty children to be treated with more protection.
To me this is a side effect of people getting trained to see crime, terrorism and evil deeds everywhere.
It was always a joke that you will be arrested for going for a walk in the land of the free. Until it isn't just a joke anymore.
Sure, there certainly are bad neighborhoods, but to me the focus on security has everyone getting crazy. A lot of countries don't need armed guards at school.
Cops see a lot of crime and have a lot of contact to criminals. I can understand why they would have such a perspective. But everyone else involved should have done a thorough sanity check. And in my opinion they should get some audit if they are in any way able to discern if there is any real danger or not. That is the minimal requirement for their jobs.
What part of "Child services had the family agree to a safety plan" makes you feel that CPS is blameless here?
It seems like they wasted two weeks of this family's time and added a ton of unnecessary stress, before even figuring out if the complaint was warranted. That seems deeply dysfunctional, and violently at odds with "innocent until proven guilty"
> That was only while they investigated (which I'm fine with).
I’m not; there should be some reasonable basis for this level of intrusion, which there was not (note that the facts of the report were true and confirmed and still did not violate family law that CPS enforces; this isn't a case where someone reported something which would have warranted CPS intervention if confirmed.)
It seems to me that if CPS immediately and preemptively puts you under a punitive regime like this (what happens if grandparents don't live nearby or just aren't alive? Oh well, not their problem I guess) for merely being reported, then it is a highly effective vehicle for harassing neighbors you don't like.
> They came up with that plan because the grandparents DID live nearby.
Yes, these kind of ”no unsupervised time, but children remain with parents” agreements are one alternative that CPS sometimes gives, where what they see as suitable supervisers are available, to putting the children in temporary foster care during an investigation.
They are justified in exactly the same cases where what they are an alternative to would be justified.
Putting children in a foster home is a higher legal barrier than a voluntary "Safety plan." Phrasing this as alternative is disingenuous.
It's safe to assume if that legal barrier was actually met they would have put them in a foster home as staying with the parents would be too unsafe.
The parents got bluffed by tyrants. Personally I would never open the door to, nor sign any document, nor speak with CPS outside of court proceedings. Let them gather whatever evidence they need with a warrant and enforce any order by mechanism of the judge rather than agreeing to whatever pompous authoritarian bullshit is spewed out by some 3rd-rate bureaucrat in a "voluntary safety plan."
>”no unsupervised time, but children remain with parents” agreements are one alternative that CPS sometimes gives,
IANAL but I don't think anyone but a judge can give that order, and I would certainly bet my freedom and even my life on that.
I'm not saying they're better, but would you rather just let it end with CPS and not get a hearing? To get a kid taken basically is going to require your consent or the holes lining up in the swiss cheese. I want as many layers in that swiss cheese as possible if the allegations against me are false.
Stuff like due process is what our forefathers died to at least ostensibly give us.
I'm not so sure. It appears the parents capitulated to two weeks of "safety plan" to CPS when there was no abuse at all. I don't see much functional difference between "CPS found no abuse and stopped there" and "CPS found no probable cause of abuse, then brought it to judge who said WTF with the safety plan without probable cause of abuse" other than the latter shut down the whole safety plan BS.
CPS is basically the adversary in the court proceedings so I see the judge more as an additional layer in the swiss cheese rather than a replacement layer in the swiss cheese, which your previous statement seems to allude towards.
Did you read TFA? Nothing you are saying is matching up with the information. CPS is not the adversary in this case, nor did they bring it to a judge.
The parents agreed to the surveillance plan. Unless they go to a judge for an order mandating it, it's voluntary. It's likely the lawyer recommended they go along with it.
This is like the 5th time you've commented on my stuff while missing major information from the article, or simply going off on some random tangent.
The fact that you characterize someone building an abuse case against you, and interfering with your normal parental rights, as not your "adversary" really makes me question what you have to prove here. Is this an ego thing? Is this why you're trolling right now?
From the beginning I indicated I would force them to go through the court for the "voluntary" agreement. Your snark "but judges are better?" completely bypassed that, seemingly completely missing the request for the order would never even get to the judge if the adversary CPS never pushed for the order in the first place.
> nor did they bring it to a judge.
Which is why I proposed a scenario where they were forced to if they wanted it to happen. I'm well aware many of my opinions were not expressed in the "information" of the article (oh no!).
>This is like the 5th time you've commented on my stuff
If you check this thread, you initially commented to me on this thread. It was your choice to reply to me unsolicited, although your statement here is a nice attempt to try to turn that on its head.
You can't really say what other alternatives were available beyond that this is what the family preferred. The grandparents were available and that's what they chose.
They could just do what we do with every other crime, and only punish people AFTER we find that they're guilty. You say this like the parents absolutely NEEDED to be supervised, despite saying "we only did this because we didn't realize it was illegal" - this is not exactly a High Threat situation.
If CPS is going to force this sort of thing on parents, they could also reasonably be expected to compensate for the involved expenses - force CPS to pay for a nanny if CPS really thinks that's essential. If CPS can't afford to do that, then we as a society have already voted that the nanny wasn't actually worth the cost.
The people arguing with you are assuming that the police accurately reported the situation, so that CPS was told "this parent let their child walk half a mile unattended". If that is the only complaint, there's clearly no need to investigate because there's nothing to investigate.
Whereas if - as you seem to be assuming - CPS only heard "this parent commited neglect and possibly abuse of their child", investigation would indeed be needed to figure out they were being lied to. But other people are assuming CPS got accurate information in the first place.
No, they would know by comparing the facts alleged in the report to the law, just like, when those facts were confirmed by the investigation, they compared those same facts to the law.
Now, I am not saying that a report which on its face does not describe a violation does not warrant investigation, but absent some other evidence which provides cause to believe a violation exists which would legally impact parental suitability, it doesn’t warrant limiting parental rights during the investigation, just as a report to police that raises articulable suspicion but not probable cause to believe a specific crime has occurred warrants investigation, but not arrest.
Are these guys Inspector Clouseau? 2 weeks of investigation to determine whether kid was abused by walking home. Legends. They must have been chasing down leads. Stake outs at the house. Subpoena the teachers.
I think the element missing here is that these "safety plans" tend to be "voluntary."
It's the CPS equivalent of "let me in your house or else I'll get a search warrant and things will go worse for you." If they had the evidence to get in the house, they wouldn't be standing there asking you, the police would be there with battering rams busting in.
It's a bluff. If there is actually evidence they need to remove the child they will go get the order from the judge and execute it. And if that evidence exists, in no way would anyone in their right mind let you keep the kid by signing a "safety plan" to pretty please keep grandma and grandma around, who are not in any way credentialled/vetted to host supervised visitation.
Anybody who thinks parents being prevented from being alone with their own children for 2 weeks due to an unfounded complaint, is far too comfortable with authoritarian government. That sort of thing can cause irreparable harm in the development of the children as well, causing trust issues and fear of government to be deeply ingrained.
I don't think that the ends justify the means, but the outcome of having people have more fear and mistrust of government over-reach is at least a thin silver-lining.
you would think someone would take a look at the allegation and determine that this was not necessary anyone with an ounce of sense knows that an 8 year old can walk half a mile on the street.
Every parent within my hometown would be getting arrested. And god forbid when these people learn that we were riding the public bus service to and from school at 10 years old...
It certainly looks that way, but there are other factors at play such as the child being problematic and discipline being dumping him on the street to walk. It's not merely some kid playing in the neighborhood. Some car came to a stop and a kid was kicked out and there was likely yelling involved. It's certainly suspicious. Child abuse investigations aren't about one incident in isolation.
...and really, CPS does need to investigate. Yes, most often it's just a nosey neighbour, but every now and then those nosey neighbours are on to something, and while unpleasant for the families, missing that one case is the horror story they want to avoid.
You can't just say the ends justify the means, without actually working out the price you're paying. Otherwise, we should be OK with the government monitoring us 24/7 so that they don't miss any terrorists or child molesters. What proper Good Thinking citizen would possibly object to Big Brother watching them, after all?
When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.
> You can't just say the ends justify the means, without actually working out the price you're paying.
I wasn't suggesting that the ends justify the means. I'm simply speaking to the realities of the situation. However, from an ends justifying the means perspective, if you're not going to investigate, there's little point in hearing the case, and more importantly in people making the call in the first place.
"When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint."
We do have a higher standard of evidence for that power to be invoked; that's what applied here, and why CPS ultimately passed on this one. If anything, the bar is generally pretty high, and you can get away with some pretty dastardly things with the odds of CPS taking any kind of "family destroying" action very low.
> Otherwise, we should be OK with the government monitoring us 24/7 so that they don't miss any terrorists or child molesters.
I think that's unreasonably slippery sloping this story.
Sure, there are horror stories about CPS being overzealous, but this isn't one of those stories. I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring... and CPS obviously wasn't worried about terrorist or child molesters in this case.
It's a hard problem to get right. There's a LOT of really bad stuff going on (estimates are that 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse or neglect at some point). No matter how you do it, families will be destroyed and children will suffer horribly. However, the system errs on keeping families together, which is what you'd want. Given that bias in the system, engaging in at least a lightweight investigation is entirely reasonable.
> evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.
I encourage you to look at the data on this. It's one sided.
> Sure, there are horror stories about CPS being overzealous, but this isn't one of those stories.
The parents were forced in to two weeks of supervision, requiring another adult around them 24/7. The innocent parents, who had not actually done anything wrong.
How is that not "overzealous"?
> I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring...
"Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second."
That sure sounds like 24/7 monitoring, even if it's not the government doing it.
> The parents were forced in to two weeks of supervision, requiring another adult around them 24/7. The innocent parents, who had not actually done anything wrong.
> How is that not "overzealous"?
I didn't say it wasn't overzealous. I said it wasn't one of the horror stories about them being overzealous. I was specifically referring to the power to "destroy families". That didn't happen here.
> "Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second."
>
> That sure sounds like 24/7 monitoring, even if it's not the government doing it.
At best that's 24/7 for 14 days. In truth though, it's not monitoring at all, as there was no monitoring requirement, just that they couldn't be left alone with the kids. I mean, they literally considered a sleeping grandmother somewhere in the house to be sufficient. It's certainly intrusive and unpleasant, but it's not 24/7 monitoring, nor is it a slippery slope towards that.
No, they don't. CPS does not need to investigate observations that, even if they are true, imply nothing. That's just sentencing everyone who deviates from orthodoxy to constant investigation. CPS should be investigating claims of something and should have clear standards for those claims instead of being aggressive as a defense.
Or you can be a black man with a white stepdaughter, or a white-passing daughter, and literally get authorities called every time you walk outside with her.
> No, they don't. CPS does not need to investigate observations that, even if they are true, imply nothing. That's just sentencing everyone who deviates from orthodoxy to constant investigation.
I think you're taking a slippery slope argument well past the point of reason.
For starters, there'd be no reason for constant investigation: once you've completed an investigation, there is no reason to have another investigation in response to a similar report. At worst, every family would get a cursory investigation once. Admittedly, that's not great. Realistically, that would not happen either, as CPS does not have unlimited resources and would of course prioritize their time. So, the more people make spurious complaints, the less likely they'll get investigated. Similarly, it's pretty trivial to identify cases where someone is just spamming the system with complaints, and deprioritize it accordingly.
While it's not unusual for complainants to exaggerate, it's also not unusual for complainants to understate; you get a call about a family you've never heard of before, from someone who has never called in before, you just have no idea what you're going to find.
> Or you can be a black man with a white stepdaughter, or a white-passing daughter, and literally get authorities called every time you walk outside with her.
...and again, in that case, you're going to learn to ignore those calls pretty quickly.
You’re assuming someone in the process is in the position to apply sanity. More likely, they operate as “call-taker puts every call into GovJira, investigators are required to investigate in order to close a GovJira ticket”
I didn't assume that. I specifically pointed out that CPS has limited resources. Let's assume the process works in the moronic fashion you're suggesting. Texas CPS has under 10,000 people, of which about a third are investigators, and investigations typically take 2 weeks. Then there's the police/courts/jails that have their own limited resources.
Imagine how that'd work. If you called in a complaint about a ten-year old today, the kid would no longer be a minor by the time the investigation began. ;-)
Investigate, absolutely. The cops need to do that as well. However, as someone else pointed out "Child services had the family agree to a safety plan" is not investigating. That's taking action and making a threat: "if you don't agree to this we'll take you to court and let a judge sort it out at your expense."
When CPS is investigating abuse it seems completely reasonable for them to implement a safety plan to ensure ongoing abuse doesn't occur during the investigation. Far better than yanking the kids into protective custody.
That sort of thinking enables all sorts of abuse, though. Knowing this, a neighbor with a beef with parent-neighbors could cause them a lot of grief by manufacturing a false report to the police or CPS, in such a way that they won't get in trouble themselves.
I get that sometimes pro-active measures are prudent, but "hey, police, I saw my neighbor's kid walking outside unattended" is not one of those times.
And even if we did agree that these parents were in the wrong, and that the kid shouldn't have been walking alone, the "safety plan" CPS came up with was still a huge unnecessary overreaction. That kind of plan should be reserved for situations when CPS is investigating reports of active abuse.
> I get that sometimes pro-active measures are prudent, but "hey, police, I saw my neighbor's kid walking outside unattended" is not one of those times.
It's possible that "I saw a kid walking alone" isn't enough to justify an CPS investigation but "This child's parent was just arrested and is being charged with a felony for endangering this child" is reason enough.
At the point CPS got involved, they were investigating the home of someone being charged with felony child endangerment. We don't know what CPS polices demand n that situation, or what alternatives were available to the family, but after hearing what options they had the family agreed to the safety plan. If the alternative was "this or we have to remove you or your children from your home" I'd say it was the right choice.
It's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have and were required to do under the circumstances. In fact, if the family had gone to trial it would have helped their case that CPS investigated the home and determined that that the complaint was unfounded.
There's no reason to think that a neighbor with a beef could have called CPS and had this happen to anyone else. There's not even reason to think that a neighbor calling the cops would do it since those cops would have to be as dumb as the one in this story and arrest and charge an innocent person with felony child endangerment for it to work. That should be a pretty high bar to clear. The police screwed this one up, and that's what opened the door to all the other grief.
You are the reason we have a violent oppressive police state (and one that’s racist to boot).
Look at the hoops you’re willing to jump through to apologize for this behavior… the banality of evil.
“Of course it’s reasonable to report a parent because their child went for a stroll. Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law. Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids coulda got kidnapped. Let’s solve this by kidnapping them, strip searching them, and putting them in an abusive home.”
(the stuff about strip searching was an amalgamation w/the propublica story. Not a part of your story, but not fake.)
Anything is reasonable as long as you follow policy? You were just following orders?
You're reading a lot into autoexec's comments that aren't actually there (maybe it's from this ProPublica story that I can't find a reference to?).
There was no comment about how it was reasonable to make the phone call, and there's specific criticism of the police conduct... All they said was that at the point CPS got involved, it's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have.
I would point out that all we know that CPS did was a) require that the parents not be left alone in the house with the kids while they were conducting their investigation (and even for that, it's not clear from the story that that requirement came from CPS, but it seems likely that's the case) and b) perform an investigation that concluded there was no observable risk to the kids. They weren't involve in the decision to perform the arrest, not involved in setting bail, not involved in any strip search, etc.
>There was no comment about how it was reasonable to make the phone call, and there's specific criticism of the police conduct... All they said was that at the point CPS got involved, it's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have.
I would suspect the first step of any investigation would be to find out why they are investigating and not just set everything in motion based on a vague report from police?
> “Of course it’s reasonable to report a parent because their child went for a stroll.
never said that. It's worth noting also that the person who called didn't report the parent. They reported the child who was alone. I don't know why she was concerned about the fact that a kid was walking unaccompanied, but as others have pointed out, we've only got one move when there's concern about some strange child's immediate welfare and we don't want to get involved directly and that's to call the police. It'd be nice we had a better option, like an agency to call who didn't see everyone without a badge as the enemy, but we don't.
> Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law.
Again, I said nothing of the sort. In fact I explicitly stated that the cop was in the wrong.
> Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids coulda got kidnapped.
Yes, CPS should follow procedure. That doesn't mean that they should act as mindless drones, but they depend on police to alert them to situations where they need to be involved and once they are involved they should do their job. The concern the CPS should have had wasn't to make sure the kid isn't going to be kidnapped. It's to make sure that the child isn't being neglected or abused.
CPS has a job to do, and there was very little harm done by them in this case. They had a grandparent stay over for a few days. That was it. It might have been worse if the family didn't have nearby relatives who could stay over during the investigation, but again we don't have information on what CPS was obligated to do or what they would have done, we only know what happened and this was not a CPS horror story (which I know do exist!)
In this case, CPS was inappropriately given the case by the police, but there's no indication that they acted inappropriately in their role. In fact, they correctly identified that there was no need for them to be involved.
So in the end some lady messed up and thought a normal situation was an emergency and called the police. It happens and it wouldn't be reasonable for her to think there would be any harm done by that. The police showed up and failed at their job entirely, gave the mother a felony charge and got CPS involved. CPS did their job and are on record that the police made an error. The cop was the real problem here.
I'll also call out another party that failed here and that's the entire rest of the justice system. Every other officer aware of the circumstances who did nothing, and the folks who decided to go ahead with the charge and offer the "deal" that punished the innocent mother are just as bad. If the police officer involved isn't punished for this it also makes the department guilty.
The problems with our justice system go far beyond police. Anyone so clearly innocent should be able to fight in court with confidence that they can be cleared of the bogus charge and without risk of bankrupting themselves in the process. We clearly don't have that today.
> At the point CPS got involved, they were investigating the home of someone being charged with felony child endangerment. We don't know what CPS polices demand n that situation, or what alternatives were available to the family, but after hearing what options they had the family agreed to the safety plan. If the alternative was "this or we have to remove you or your children from your home" I'd say it was the right choice.
It's also worth noting that CPS's investigation would no doubt serve as helpful for the parent's defense against the charges.
> That sort of thinking enables all sorts of abuse, though. Knowing this, a neighbor with a beef with parent-neighbors could cause them a lot of grief by manufacturing a false report to the police or CPS, in such a way that they won't get in trouble themselves.
That's true, but the thinking you are describing also enables all sorts of abuse.
> the "safety plan" CPS came up with was still a huge unnecessary overreaction
Yeah, at least as described in the article, it seemed excessive and unnecessary. I could see where they don't have a smaller scale mitigation to put in place during an investigation. It's definitely not ideal.
You seem to be resistant in several threads to the idea that the specific conduct alleged is not on its face abuse. There was never a reason for CPS to even claim they were investigating abuse.
I have had jobs that required me to be a mandatory reporter several times in my life, and none of this was even close to evidence of abuse I'd have to report.
The police at the scene arrested and charged. That really seems like reason enough. Really, once the police arrest the parents, you need to get CPS involved anyway, to ensure the kids have some degree of support.
> I have had jobs that required me to be a mandatory reporter several times in my life, and none of this was even close to evidence of abuse I'd have to report.
Mandatory reporting rules are, by design, not intended to include anything and everything that constitutes abuse or neglect.
I would agree if these types of pro-active measures required a judge to sign an order given a minimum threshold of evidence.
I have heard that it is shockingly easy to get a judge to issue a search warrant at 2 in the morning on a Saturday. I am not a lawyer, but from what I understand even then there is a minimum bar that needs to be met as far as evidence supporting the petition goes: what is the suspected crime? What evidence is there that supports the suspicion? Why do we believe that a search warrant will produce concrete evidence that the crime occurred and what is the scope of the required search (what property, specifically, are we asking to be able to examine and potentially confiscate?).
Similar, much higher, thresholds need to be met with respects to holding suspects in custody pending a trial.
Under no circumstances should any other government agencies be able to compel anything from anyone "just because." That's what the courts exist for. People have a right to due process and "agree to a safety plan" under threat is an act of force that was not authorized by a court order but by an independent government agency acting alone; outside of the one single entity that we trust to be in charge of doing that both fairly and under extremely tight scrutiny and limitations.
> I would agree if these types of pro-active measures required a judge to sign an order given a minimum threshold of evidence.
Police are empowered to arrest people on the spot. It seems impractical to add a judge to that process. Once someone has been arrested, you need CPS to step in anyway, at which point it seems silly to bar them from investigating.
> Similar, much higher, thresholds need to be met with respects to holding suspects in custody pending a trial.
I mean, she was released on bail, but she was held in custody. So yes, holding them in jail without bail has a higher standard, but you'd really hope the standard would be higher for that.
> Under no circumstances should any other government agencies be able to compel anything from anyone "just because." That's what the courts exist for.
That seems like a broad and vague statement. In fairness, the parents aren't obligated to do anything, but if they don't, then the courts would get far more involved.
In this case, the parents were arrested and charged. One could argue wrongfully, but given that's happened, so some kind of short-term mitigation and investigation seems eminently reasonable.
Yeah, as I've said elsewhere, I'm not sure that the family plan, as described, makes much sense given the situation. I get that it was a temporary measure while they were doing their investigation, but it still seems pretty impractical and disproportionate.
Why does CPS need to restrict parental rights while investigating a report which even if confirmed as true (as it was in this case) does not violate family law and warrant further action.
This would be like saying that, had the law which addressed the family law aspects also (as it should have) made the same changes to criminal law, the police should still have arrested her, even when their information was only of an act that would be a non-crime if true.
> Why does CPS need to restrict parental rights while investigating a report which even if confirmed as true (as it was in this case) does not violate family law and warrant further action.
So, the police arrested the mom, which means you've got a case where the mom has at least been accused of violating the law. Even if mom has not done a single thing wrong, given that she's been arrested & taken from the home, CPS has to get involved just to make sure the kids are okay. It follows that some degree of investigation is done.
I guess you can characterize it as "restrict parental rights", but really all they were doing was insisting that there be someone else in the home with the kids at all times. That does still seem like a bit much, I agree, but I don't see that as a restriction on parental rights. Let's say that it is then, I don't think it's unreasonable that someone who has been arrested specifically on charges of child abuse/endangerment might have their rights curtailed at least until such time as someone can feel like the kids are okay.
> This would be like saying that, had the law which addressed the family law aspects also (as it should have) made the same changes to criminal law, the police should still have arrested her, even when their information was only of an act that would be a non-crime if true.
It's very clear that they interpreted her own statement as meaning she did not perceive how she was endangering her children. I think that's a terrible assessment of the situation, as by their own admission, the kid was NOT in serious danger, but given that assessment, yeah, they should arrest her.
In the end, you do end up empowering people to exercise good judgement, and when they get it wrong, there will be terrible consequences.
Depends on what was reported but if the report said child walked alone on the sidewalk the really do not need to investigate. That is my daughters regular activity when they go to school and come back. If someone reports me as having had dinner, why does the police need to come to my house? Where is the potential crime?
My point was about CPS's investigation, not the police response. Given that the police arrested their mom, you want CPS involved, and if they're involved, they ought to do some degree of investigation, if for no other reason than so they can STOP being involved.
This is the fork in the road, they need investigatory power, but not punitory power. They should be empowered to investigate the reports but their investigation should simply be evidence. The evidence should be passed into the legal system and treated no different to other evidence… presumption of innocence snd burden of proof should not be abrogated … lest we simply abandon any pretence of jurisprudence on such matters.
I think you're confusing the role of CPS with the police. It's the police who investigate crimes and provide evidence to the courts, who will in turn mete out any punishments.
CPS's job is to protect the kids. AFAIK they aren't involved in any kind of punishment. Any measures they take are limited in scope to the best interests of the children. Now, they're indifferent to the impact on the parents, so some of the measures to protect the kids can feel like punishment to the parents, but that's not their concern.
I keep feel like people aren't able to draw the line here between what CPS did and what the cops did. Absent more details on the story (and we always have to keep in mind that we're getting the version of the story that is most charitable to the mom), it sure seems like the cops really messed up here. Once the cops arrested her, that's when CPS got involved, and the consequences from CPS's involvement were pretty much inevitable, and frankly the least of the hardships placed on that family.
It's pretty much required, for obvious reasons, for CPS to put mitigations in place for whatever they might be investigating. Mitigations often feel like punishments, for sure, with the key difference that they are only until the investigation is resolved.
Is it though? If that’s necessary why isn’t it necessary to lock someone up while you investigate whether he might be involved in drug dealing, just in case he might be guilty and destroy the evidence?
Wait... I think you've got cause & effect backwards here.
The police arrested the mom, not CPS. There was no interaction between the family and CPS prior to the arrest. The arrest is what brings CPS in to the picture. Just by virtue of arresting a parent, CPS should to get involved, because arresting the parent potentially puts the kids at risk... and then you double down on that because they've been arrested for endangering the kids. CPS then needs to figure out the lay of the land, so that they can establish that the kids are NOT at risk and they can step out of the picture.
What I’m objecting to is the imposition of the “no unsupervised time with your children” rule, which, to my mind, is a punishment just as much as a precaution.
> What I’m objecting to is the imposition of the “no unsupervised time with your children” rule, which, to my mind, is a punishment just as much as a precaution.
Which is another way of saying that it is just as much a precaution as it is a punishment.
CPS responsibilities are to the children and their safety. The police & courts deal with the parents, collect any evidence, mete out any punishment, etc.
It's not at all the fault of the nosy neighbor. The neighbor made a bad choice, but could plausibly have been motivated by good intentions. A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe. I certainly see no evidence that the neighbor acted maliciously - some people are just legitimately unaware that the police are frequently comically evil.
It is absolutely the fault of the justice system, the police officers who abused their power to arrest a mother for no reason in front of her kids. They made a considered decision to teach her a lesson - they asked her if she had learned her lesson and when she didn't answer how they wanted they arrested her, handcuffed her in front of her children, and took her to prison.
It's also the fault of prosecutors and judges involved who overlooked and participated in this egregious abuse of the justice system. They are each responsible for stemming the overreaches of the police. We can't expect police to always make good decisions - they are people who go fight with criminals, not legal scholars, after all. That's partly why we have lawyers and judges involved - to stop overzealous policing. Of course, the prosecutors and judges involved failed miserably here, as they frequently do.
And of course child services are at fault too for their participation in this farce.
> A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe.
They verified where the child lived, which was just down the block, and still proceeded to call the police instead of... escorting the kid home?
> A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.
There could be any reason for that. The neighbor might be naive and unfamiliar with children and think it is a big deal, the neighbor might have misunderstood what the child said, or the neighbor might just be unusually fearful. The point is - if the police functioned reasonably then it wouldn't be a big deal to call them and report a walking child - not necessary, but no real harm. I see no evidence the neighbor was trying to be harmful, the neighbor just made a bad decision but could not have reasonably predicted the consequences of that decision.
Maybe another way to put it is that the neighbor did a slightly bad thing, unnecessary police call, call it 0.01 Bad. The police did a terrible thing, 100 Bad. Judges and prosecutors even worse because they failed at their explicit task - making reasoned judgments about what is right and wrong - 1,000 Bad. CPS also had a complete failure of their explicit task, but maybe it is a little more excusable because hopefully most people who reach this point in the process actually do require some intervention, call it 980 Bad.
When you say that the neighbor is also to blame, it's kind of true in some meaningless technical sense. The neighbor did something slightly bad, but it is so slightly bad as to be totally inconsequential in the broader sense. If you were to try and minimize the badness here you should focus on the justice system, CPS, and the police - and you would basically never get to the neighbor because you could never optimize those other systems enough for the neighbors small fault to be consequential.
The failures here are all of the form "You incorrectly invoked system X. That was a mistake because X is totally broken!" The neighbor incorrectly called the police. The police incorrectly arrested the mother invoking the courts, the courts incorrectly penalized the mother and invoked CPS. All of those systems are completely broken and the solution is not to minimize calls to them, but to fix the systems.
And that is the another "modern" problem. I live in a semi-rural village, with 5km to the nearest town. If a teenage child was walking in between them (say they're bike was broken down) and I drive past:
1. I'd think if I stop and offer to pick them up, they might think I'm a potential pedophile/kidnapper. So I'm reticent.
2. They would think, as they likely have been trained, if they put out a hand and ask for a lift it might be be a kidnapper.
Somehow we have conditioned ourselves and our children in the space of maybe 40 years to think the absolute worst is likely when the reality it is actually quite rare.
I’ve been preaching for years that “stranger danger” has done massive harm to society, far far more harm than the bad actors they’re trying to save us from would have done.
Teaching children that all people are inherently bad and you should be afraid of anyone you don’t know sets the tone for how they are going to relate to other people for the rest of their lives.
In my experience most people are good and helpful, I’ve had far far more people be kind to me than harmful or malicious.
Mr. Rogers taught me to “look for the helpers” and that also told me that there are always good people out there who are trustworthy. We need to go back to that.
This is where I really appreciate how Kidpower teaches kids about safety with strangers. They focus on the positive while making sure kids are equipped to make wise decisions when a person or situation is not safe:
- a stranger is someone you don’t know
- most strangers are good
- the safety rules for strangers are to check first with your grown-ups before talking to, going with, or getting something from a stranger
- for kids who are old enough to be out and about on their own, checking first changes to thinking first, i.e. evaluating the situation
- if you are having an emergency where you can’t check first, you can get help from a stranger without needing to check first
An 8 year old walking home, half a mile, confronted by the neighbor on the kids own street and the kid stated where they were going when the neighbor asked. They called the cops AFTER that. Per the article.
Again, if the police worked correctly this would not be a problem. We don't hear the neighbor's side of the story - it could be anything and it could completely justify her actions. Calling the police on a walking child is unnecessary, and, while it could be motivated by malice, seems more likely to be motivated by an over abundance of caution and concern for the child. Making an unnecessary police call is bad, but only slightly, and it isn't anywhere near the badness of the other actions in the article.
Complaining about the neighbor is like complaining that the child was misbehaving which caused the child to walk home. Yes, it's true that misbehaving is bad, but only very slightly and we expect children to do that sometimes. Making unnecessary police calls is slightly bad and we expect some overly cautious people to do that sometimes.
Well, obviously American are extremely weird with their constant desire to solve all problems (and non-problems) with police and then wondering why does the police have too much power.
But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.
It's deeper than that. It's a systemic and cultural issue. All of the parties you named think that they have the right to behave the way they did. In their own minds, they are all the good guy. It's a realm of petty tyrants, "Little Eichmans".
People are idiots, but the cops and everyone else in the justice system had a legal requirement to actually know the law, and letting their kid walk half a mile straight up isn't child endangerment. These people had thier lives turned completely upside down, over the dumbest shit I've heard all year.
It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.
Nope. They all have "discretion", and every single one could have prevented this idiocy from happening.
Plus other details: The police can refuse to take the complaint. The police can refuse to arrest someone.
The prosecutor has "prosecutorial discretion".
CPS can outright refuse, both the CPS case worker and the people actually implementing the decision.
The people implementing community service can refuse.
No this is 100% on each and every one of the government workers involved.
The neighbor bears the least responsibility by a wide margin which is why despite non-zero involvement they really shouldn't be on the same table for discussion. If I ask an entire hospital system to believe in my crazy theory for Leukemia and that leads to patients getting screwed, the discussion shouldn't have the inclination to focus on how one patient communicated their bad medical theory.
It's not a good comparison: everyone has an ability and authority to get police at your door. Police acting on a report and arriving at your doorstep threateningly is not a pleasant experience. And depending on how much it scares you, police might think you are more suspicious instead of less.
This is why false police reports are generally forbidden and can put you, a reporter, in jail.
You shouting out a crazy theory on leukemia will not compel anyone to listen at the hospital. Police are obligated to act out on all reports.
So while they do bear the least responsibility, I disagree it's by a wide margin.
The police are not obligated to act out on all reports and they exercise this executive discretion all the time. In this case the police choose to arrest and the DA choose to file charges. Nothing obligates the law enforcement professionals to behave this way — not even a sense of PR as this only stains their image. This train could've been stopped by professionals at every step of the way but instead they choose to power through. The mother pled guilty.
This is not swatting. In the eyes of law enforcement, the neighbor did not engage in false reporting.
That would mean they would be responsible for the damage they caused, which includes years lost income (ie. a LOT of money). So no, they bear no blame.
No state accepts CPS bear any responsibility for the damage they cause. Not a single one.
> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors
No, let's not. According to the article, the neighbor who called the cops asked the boy where he lived, "verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless". Excuse me? What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house?
I agree the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place, but one of the things you're supposed to do as a neighbor is to understand that we have an insane legal system and not invoke it on one of your neighbors unless you really, really have to.
I mean... this is a case where the police should also say "it's ok, it's not that far mr/mrs neighbor, you don't have to call us for that".
it's also a case if the police actually cuffed and brought the mom to jail, someone there should tell them they won't book them for something stupid.
If a DA is involved, it's also a case where the DA should say that they won't prosecute such a stupid thing.
This failure is not one crazy individual, but a whole failed system, from the bottom up. You'll always have a crazy neighbor, a paranoid cop, etc., but having a whole chain this rotten really sucks, and something should really be changed.
This is what lack of diversity gets you. Nobody in the chain of events thought anything happening was unreasonable enough to say something. There were probably ~8 people involved from the call to the officers to the DA and the administrative people in the middle who would have had a chance to opine. It only would have taken one Ron Swanson type to be like "hey, this is insane and we're gonna wind up being a national news story if we go through with this". It would have only taken one person from a rough part of town to be like "kids where I live walk this far and farther every day, there's nothing to see here".
Edit: By "Ron Swannson" I mean "someone who takes a skeptical by default view of things the organization chooses to engage in", not necessarily a libertarian.
Well, I personally believe that the logical outcome of libertarian thought as it regards kids is that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.
So that's one reason you wouldn't want a libertarian CPS agent.
Your claim about the logical outcome of libertarian thought is wrong, because it fails to consider a key fact: the child is there because of the parents' choice. They chose to bring the child into the world. Or, if they adopted the child, they chose to do that. And when you make that choice, you accept the obligations that come with it. There is nothing in libertarianism that prevents people from making choices that come with obligations that they must accept. The only thing libertarianism would be against would be forcing people to raise children they did not bring into the world or did not adopt.
There are edge cases, such as a woman becoming pregnant against her will (rape, for example); but those are edge cases and don't change the basic principle.
I think they're referring to this from The Ethics of Liberty:
> Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.)
It's a pretty extreme view. However, he points out that parents still have a moral obligation to feed their child, and goes on to argue that removing the legal obligation would actually make things better for children. I think his argument is that bad parents who don't want their child would be able to sell their child to a nice family, and anyone who cares so little for their child that they'd let them starve would probably rather just sell the child.
I'm not a libertarian myself, so I don't agree with this. I'm just summarizing.
While Rothbard is of course one of the major figures in libertarianism, he is also notorious for overstating things, and making claims about what "libertarianism" requires that are not endorsed by other prominent libertarians. The claim under discussion here is a case in point.
It puts neighbors in a bad situation. Yesterday there was a kid, probably about eight years old, outside my house wandering around by himself, yelling at passing cars. There are lots of kids in my neighborhood and I'm accustomed to them being loud when they're out playing but this kid was alone, going out into the road, and just acting a bit weird. It wasn't a kid I knew so I couldn't call the parents but calling the police also seemed like a questionable thing to do. I'm near a speed bump so cars generally go slow through here but there are other parts of the street when they often have more speed. I didn't want to approach him (all manner of trouble can come from an adult approaching a child they don't know), police seemed like overkill, but being out in the road, especially since he was walking away from the speed bump area, seemed potentially dangerous. Eventually he went into a house across the street five or six houses down which recently sold so probably is a new family to the neighborhood.
Still not sure what I should have done if he hadn't gone home or really if this is a problem waiting to happen. At his age I wandered much further from home and put myself in worse potential danger at times, though I probably never yelled at passing cars. No one ever called the police on me though there were a few times when an adult told me to stop doing whatever I was up to or go somewhere else.
Not too long ago, my son was riding his bike down the street (which he's not supposed to do, he's supposed to stay on the sidewalk).
A driver yelled at him, something fairly vulgar like "get out of the fucking road, asshole!"
He came home and reported this to me. I was more gentle obviously, and told him that the guy wasn't very nice for swearing at him.
But honestly, I don't blame the guy, and I'm happy he yelled at him. I'm sure he'll remember that incident next time he's cruising down the middle of the road.
If you don't know which house the kid belongs in, the first thing I would do is to find out. Start knocking on doors and asking if it's their kid.
Now that you do know, the obvious thing to do is to introduce yourself to the neighbors and describe what their kid was doing. They're new to the neighborhood so you can pitch it as letting them know that there are a lot of passing cars at that point and kids should be aware of the danger.
It sounds like you did the right thing, you were concerned and kept an eye on things. Calling the police would have been overkill and maybe wrecked this kids' family life (like what happened in the article). Other than that, I see no problem with approaching the kid and saying something like "hey, you can get hurt playing in the street, please take this to your backyard", or something like that. As long as you don't try and start a conversation it's not going to be weird. If you have a kid he may even know who you are already. All of the kids in my neighborhood know me as "Edward's dad", even though I wouldn't be able to pick most of them out of a lineup.
> all manner of trouble can come from an adult approaching a child they don't know
If you do it by yourself. But you can always try to recruit another adult--a neighbor you know, for example. Having an independent witness makes a big difference.
Perhaps OP is a man. I wouldn't approach a strange child outside my house, either, unless they were on my property doing something destructive. Better to let my wife handle such situations.
> the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place
Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this. Lots of people are to blame here, but the cops escalated by arresting her on a flimsy basis. The incident could have stopped there.
> Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this.
The article points out that that Texas law did not change the criminal code, so even though it was no longer a family law violation (hence CPS dismissed the case), it was still technically a criminal violation (hence the mom still had to plea bargain or go to trial).
> What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house?
Well, what decent neighbour isn't able to, at the very least, recognize his neighbors?
Maybe this child's parents have kept him locked in the closet, never seen by anyone before, until this one time he emerged unto the world and the police were called not because he was on the street, but because he's never been on the street before.
But more likely this person isn't a neighbor, at least not mentally.
You can't be a decent neighbor if you have no concept of who your neighbors are. You may not be best friends or know their entire life story, but if you can't even recognize them then there is simply no neighborly connection to work with. Without that, they're just people, same as any other found the world over. You can try to be decent to all, but that's not quite the same thing.
> It isn't the neighbors job to be mentally functional.
I'm not sure I agree. One of the requirements for an adult citizen in a civil society is to be reasonable in your dealings with neighbors.
> It is, however, the police's, DA, and CPS's job.
"Mentally functional" does not necessarily mean "giving citizens a break". The criminal law that the mom was charged with is a law, it's on the books, and law enforcement is supposed to enforce the law. They do have a certain amount of discretion, but the incentives they are facing, particularly in a community which is strongly in favor of "law and order" (which I suspect the one in question is), are against their exercising discretion in favor of a citizen. And putting the "sex trafficking" thing into the mix just makes it worse.
The only real way to fix this is to remove things like this from the discretion of law enforcement by not having a law like this in the first place. (Unfortunately, it appears that when the law was revised to allow kids more independence, they only revised the family law code, not the criminal code. They should have revised both. So I would say the ultimate fault here is the legislature, for being incompetent when making law.)
Should someone get a ticket for going 66 mph in a 65 zone? I don't really think officer discretion is avoidable to a certain degree. Laws can never be written perfectly. There are always going to be ridiculous edge cases like this where a reasonable person would know the law shouldn't be applied. This is why so much legal precedent is based on what a reasonable person would do or what a reasonable person would assume given a certain situation.
I do agree that the neighbor should not be let off on this, nor am I trying to excuse their behavior. But there are always going to be Karens that call the cops for no reason and the system has to be able to deal with that.
> Should someone get a ticket for going 66 mph in a 65 zone?
Speed limit laws should not even exist in the first place. They are a paradigmatic example of laws that are unreasonable and should not exist. The fact that it is impossible to enforce them as written, or even with light-years of as written, is one reason for that.
> I don't really think officer discretion is avoidable to a certain degree.
To a certain degree, yes. But it should be limited. In the system we have now, it's not; the scope of laws on the books is huge, to the point that all of us are probably technically violating multiple laws every day, and we are all relying on a huge amount of discretion on the part of law enforcement to allow us to go about our business without continually being interrupted. That's not good.
> there are always going to be Karens that call the cops for no reason and the system has to be able to deal with that.
Yes, and the way to deal with it is to have the law be reasonable. It is not to have lots of unreasonable laws on the books and then hope that law enforcement exercises discretion in practically all cases, only actually prosecuting the "really serious" ones. It's to not have unreasonable laws on the books at all, so when a Karen calls the cops for no reason, the cops can just say "Ma'am, that's not against the law, nothing for us to do."
So you think there’s nothing wrong with blowing through a school zone at 150mph? Speed limit laws are clearly flawed in many ways but there is a clear reason why they should exist.
> So you think there’s nothing wrong with blowing through a school zone at 150mph?
I have said no such thing. Do you really believe that the law is the only thing that defines what's "wrong"?
> Speed limit laws are clearly flawed in many ways but there is a clear reason why they should exist.
No, what is clear is that the law should be written to penalize actual harm. Speed limit laws don't do that. They penalize people who have caused no harm, and because they can only be enforced arbitrarily--who gets stopped for speeding has nothing to do with actual risk reduction--they reduce people's respect for the law in general.
A properly written law for "rules of the road" for speed would be something like this: The posted "speed limit" on any public road is advisory; you cannot be stopped or ticketed simply for driving faster than the posted limit. However, if you are in an accident and it is found that you were exceeding the posted limit, you are presumed to be at fault. (You can still rebut the presumption, but that requires going to court and presenting evidence and having the judge rule in your favor based on that evidence.)
By this logic they should let you drive drunk until you hit someone too. I think doing things in your car that have substantial and easily preventable risk to other people should not be allowed.
> By this logic they should let you drive drunk until you hit someone too.
I have said no such thing. The only implication of my position for drunk driving is that the law should not be able to punish you for it if you cause no harm. But that in no way means that, for example, a cop who sees you driving erratically can't pull you over, give you a breathalyzer test, find out that you're too drunk to drive, and lock your car, making sure that it's safely parked, and then ask you who to call to come pick you up and take you home. He just can't write you a ticket that forces you to either come to court or pay a fine.
It also in no way means that other people have to let you drive drunk. Bars don't have to sell you drinks if you're going to drive. Friends don't have to let you drive drunk. And in a sane society of responsible adults, those kinds of preventions work better than any law possibly can. The fact that our society has so many nanny state laws that micromanage all aspects of life is a sign that we don't live in a sane society of responsible adults.
> I think doing things in your car that have substantial and easily preventable risk to other people should not be allowed
I think you are way too ready to give power to the government, which will abuse it, and the costs of that abuse of power will far outweigh any possible benefit from such laws.
I am not sure why a cop pulling you over for driving erratically is any different in principle than a cop pulling you over for traveling at an unsafe speed (again, for the purposes of this example, imagine a truly unsafe speed, not 5 mph over).
First, if a cop pulls you over for speeding, it's not for "traveling at an unsafe speed". It's because you were going faster than the posted limit. The law says nothing whatever about such a speed being unsafe. In practice, cops usually don't pull people over just for speeding, but only for going significantly faster than the general flow of traffic. But that's only usually; cops in most jurisdictions have monthly or quarterly ticket quotas, and if it's getting close to the end of the quota period and they're behind on tickets, it's simple to go out to places where people routinely speed and start pulling everyone over. I have seen this happen.
"Driving erratically", unlike "going faster than the posted speed limit", is always a subjective judgment on the cop's part (in most jurisdictions it's something like "reckless driving" or "driving in a clearly unsafe manner"), but the whole point is that it's supposed to be rare; by definition most people on the road will not be driving recklessly and this kind of law can't be abused in the way I described above just to make a ticket quota.
However, the important difference I was talking about was not between speeding and "driving erratically", it was about under what circumstances the cop can write you a ticket that forces you to either pay a fine or come to court. Under our current laws, a cop can do that whenever he pulls you over--there will always be some traffic law you were violating. ("Driving erratically", or something similar, in itself is a traffic violation under current law.) Under the libertarian system I have been describing, the cop could not write you a ticket that forces you to either pay a fine or come to court unless you actually caused harm. He could take steps to prevent you from driving if you hadn't caused harm but were clearly not capable of driving safely, by an objective test (such as a breathalyzer), but he could not impose a fine or court appearance on you.
My entire point here is that just because the system now allows the cops to be capricious doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say there is no speed that is so unsafe that it warrants punishment.
Speed limits (in North America) are simply the 85th percentile speed of drivers on a specific type of road. The onus should be on the civil engineer who designed the road to make it physically impossible to go 150 in the first place - e.g. narrow/curved lanes, speed bumps, concrete bollards, trees on the sides, etc. If roads are actually designed properly, then speed limit laws are unnecessary because drivers will naturally slow down to avoid damaging their vehicle or themselves.
To some extent I agree with you but I think intentionally wild, reckless driving would still exist and need to be controlled even with smarter road design.
The actions of the neighbor is something we can't control for, because we can't control the attitudes and behaviors of people. We can only influence them to some degree. What we can control is the law, and law enforcement response.
Don't get me wrong, I would love it if people everywhere acted rationally and only stuck their nose into other people's business when it is actually necessary and useful to do at. But it's not realistic to expect that we can "fix" everyone, so we should focus on the things we can fix instead.
> The actions of the neighbor is something we can't control for, because we can't control the attitudes and behaviors of people. We can only influence them to some degree.
I agree, but this is perfectly consistent with what I said. Not every adult meets the requirements for an adult citizen in a civil society. That doesn't mean those requirements don't exist.
> What we can control is the law, and law enforcement response.
To the extent this is true, it does not preclude also expecting adult citizens to be reasonable. Indeed, the more we can count on that, the less people will feel the need to invoke the law. Which makes it much easier to make the law more reasonable.
It's also suburban Waco, Texas. That's not exactly the epicenter of education in the US, much less even in Texas.
Ironically, more rural Texas regions tend to ha√e more independent kids; after all, you'll see 10 year old kids driving the family truck on farms and ranches.
Yes, this seems to be what is happening. I now think that on rare occasions the side of my left hand may be brushing the opt key while I type. Until today, it has only been a very rare † instead of t. √ is a new one for me.
That's the first time I've gotten that instead of a V. I didn't bother editing it because I thought it was amusing.
More often (but still rare), I'll end up with a † instead of t. As someone below mentioned, it appears to be (on Mac) opt+key.
I use a Razer Blackwidow something something mechanical keyboard, and it sits pretty tall. Only just now I figured out how I think this opt thing is happening. The side of my left hand appears to sometimes sit low enough that it may be bumping the opt key. Prior to this moment, the whole † thing had been a mystery to me :P.
>> > As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace
Then go downtown and.. do some police work? What the hell man, stop harassing an innocent mother.
The counterpoint to this is that this is exactly what the police do in downtown Waco as well. It just doesn't normally happen to "respectable" society, so you don't hear about it.
This is crazy. No one is out there kidnapping and sex-trafficking 8-year olds in any numbers more than typical child kidnappings. That's a politically-motivated myth.
Minor sex-trafficking is almost always done by someone known to the child, usually a relative. And the child is usually in their teens, although occasionally younger.
Just a warning, more than a few of the videos on AuditTheAudit are infuriating due to the level of arrogance, incompetence, negligence, and abuse of authority displayed. But, it is nice that there is a way to air this dirty laundry in public. As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle".
Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful.
To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and 99% execution.
In general I agree that execution is more than "just" half the battle. There's exceptions though, especially on the audience of HN, which includes a lot of knowledge workers.
For us, it often comes to "I spent 2 weeks investigating this issue, and at the end it was fixed by changing one line of code".
In this case execution was trivial, but knowing what to execute was the 99% part.
Audit the audit is great because it's actually very balanced, and they spend equal if not more time digging up laws that might justify the police officers actions, often with some surprising results.
Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them.
If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it.
Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
> Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
>> the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 ... clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger.
The police did not enforce the law. Hence the anger towards the police officers and the DA.
Edit: I stand corrected, this is family law not criminal law.
> If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it.
Easy to say, but you're voting for them for a lot more than that. If that's the only thing you care about, you can easily vote for that person. If you care about other things, it gets a lot, lot harder.
> Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them.
But this way beyond what the law was intended for. It was passed in 1973, and there's no way that in 1973 lawmakers would think it should be used against this mother. Any law can be overzealously enforced.
As someone who has been constantly annoyed for 20 years by Fortune 250 corporate IT policies, I see this slightly differently. All the confusing, contradictory, usually-non-specific-yet-sometimes-wildly-specific polices the IT department decrees come from some nice-sounding reason, usually from some white paper or consultant, or just some major screwup that caused embarrassment. But, like ISO9000 and SOX and all the rest, they inevitably wind up, as implemented, as make-work policy.
It's the same in government. Government is so large now, that every law that gets passed is now make-work law. And for all the same reasons that people with no critical thinking make it their job to enforce stupid ideas like "all code used for authentication in web apps must be written in C", people in the legal system, including and ESPECIALLY "soft" jobs like CPS, have to justify their existence by making the most work out of the least situation.
So I'll do you one better: it's the fault of politicians tugging on heart strings to pass overreaching, touchy-feely laws, that give government too much power, in order to get themselves reelected.
I tend to agree. Its a departure from the common sense, middle ground. This is symptomatic in American culture and politics, at least from what can be observed from afar.
The Waco justice system was the one who open fired on that biker meet up at Twin Peaks, arrested everyone in the area, and held them on million dollar bonds to send a strong message.
Another observation is that this doesn't prevent kidnapping or sex trafficking. Individuals choose to do those things to other people, and those actions are illegal. We don't blame the victims for this reason, we don't blame prey either for their availability to be preyed on.
> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.
there is not a finite supply of culpability. they can _all_ bear (varying degrees of) responsibility for it.
>A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.
this is the real problem here. who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
> who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
I wish I knew. My children have had the cops called on them for playing in our front yard. I wish they could spend their afternoons climbing trees and playing in the grass like I did growing up, but there's a group of people who see children playing outside of direct parent supervision as a categorically dangerous activity.
I'm always struck when I take my kids to school and see the high schoolers gathered around waiting for their bus to pick them up. You wouldn't even know they exist otherwise - there's no other signs of their existence, no groups of them playing at the park, no sounds of games in the streets, no hoots or hollers from down the block - just nothing, silence. Each house is an island and each teen a castaway from 4pm when they get home to 7am when they leave for school, severed from the neighborhood and each other while the same folks say, "How come kids don't play outside anymore?"
Kudos to you for bucking the trend and encouraging your kids to do things like spending afternoons romping around outside!
Complete anecdata, but the parents in my close friend group are split between "parents with a more free-range kid mindset" and "typical upper-middle-class parental paranoia."
The free-range kids are mostly happy-go-lucky, emotionally stable, and thriving. Almost every single kid over the age of 10 with paranoid parents is diagnosed with a mental health condition of some sort. I mean I literally can only think of one who is not in therapy or taking medication. I think the isolation and lack of unsupervised group activities that you describe is a big part of it.
One of my more paranoid friends made a judgmental comment recently regarding my other friend's daughter not being in therapy. I was extremely confused and asked if the kiddo was having emotional issues. Her response was, "Well not yet, but 12 is a very stressful age, and I think that when you have the money to do so, it's just good parenting to ensure your kid is talking to a therapist on a regular basis."
The level of paranoia needed to believe that every single perfectly stable 12-year-old needs weekly visits with a mental health professional to ensure their health and safety, and that not supplying this is neglectful, is just... bizarre.
I cannot help but believe this sort of behavior is severely damaging the psyche of these kids. And I also don't see how it can't be hurting the parents as well. Imagine how incredibly stressful it must be to be a parent who believes every stranger, every walk around the block, and every pre-teen mood swing is a serious danger to their child.
Our society is way too tolerant of that kind of behavior. It's similar to how there are still occasional people wearing masks, even outdoors. It needs to become socially acceptable to tell people they're being paranoid and weird, in the same way they feel it's acceptable to tell others they're not paranoid enough.
Masks are a bit trickier, since some people are severely immunocompromised or have loved ones who are immunocompromised. If you are undergoing chemo, or your parent is on hospice care, it actually makes sense to keep wearing a mask everywhere, and doctors are encouraging this (not just to defend against COVID germs, but all germs).
But as for outside masks, I agree, it's just straight up unscientific. Especially when people are wearing flimsy cloth masks that do little to ward off COVID germs in the first place! Although I know some people keep them on outside if they're walking between buildings, just because it's easier than taking it on/off constantly.
So anyway, masks kind of fall into that category of "I ain't gonna judge if I don't know your exact situation."
But I agree, it would be nice to be able to tell my friends who are perfectly healthy with no at-risk loved ones, hey, you really don't need to keep wearing a mask outside for the rest of your life. Both because it's silly, and because it seems genuinely damaging to their mental health... I have a couple friends who still get anxious/upset when someone gets within 6 feet of them without a mask on, and it's just a needlessly stressful way to live that is taking a very, very serious toll on their mental health.
This is a serious worry of mine. I often let my elementary kids walk home from school by themselves because we live close enough and they have good sense around what little traffic there is. But I always worry that someone will throw a fit about it. I worry about that a LOT more than kidnappers.
Same. I let my kids walk about 0.5mi to the park and I'm more afraid of some nosey busy-body calling CPS on them than I am about traffic or kidnappers.
When I was growing up in the 90s, I'd routinely bike many miles away from home and disappear for hours before I came home. Nowadays letting your kids do that is liable to get CPS called on you.
In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11. What you're seeing is a symptom of this. It isn't like this in other countries: kids walk around by themselves all the time.
> In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11.
Oh, it was on this track well before 9/11. Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger as concepts were there long before terrorist attacks on American soil, for a lot longer duration, and were largely explicitly about the dangers to children.
I don't know how accurate it is, but an FBI investigator by the name of Ken Lanning links Satanic Panic to the development of X-Rays and the discovery by doctors of evidence of rampant child abuse.[1] The idea being that people just couldn't accept that kids were being abused at such high rates at home, therefore there must be this secretive "other" harming the children.
People have been primed by the media to be this paranoid for a long time, because it gets attention.
If it's the suburbs effect, then it's been very slow to come to this point, because America has had subdivisions since the 1950s. Back in the 80s and 90s, what we're reading about here never happened.
Do you do a school walking train? If not, be careful. Under 14 unsupervised, even walking home, is illegal. Some parents have started reporting this to schools in AKL and WEL.
They only legislated this in the 80's directly after the US serial killer craze started. Golden State Killer, Son of Sam, Hillside Stranglers, Ted Bundy, etc.
Richard Ramirez became popular a few years after the law was enforced, and at that point it solidified for everyone "this was the right decision".
Many parents in the 90's let their kids walk home alone, and explore their neighbourhoods on their own.. And even today it's popular in rural areas. But the nature of where people live now is more related to cost of living and jobs, which everyone changes every few years - so nobody knows their neighbours or their community.
Now it's normal to shame parents who do this. And schools automatically notify the authorities if they're told about it.
Would kids get taken away from parents for this? Unlikely, legislation only pushes a $2,000 fine.
Yes, kids have been abducted in New Zealand. Yes, kids have been assaulted in New Zealand. It is a possibility.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 90s and we were allowed to roam as free as we wanted. Sometimes we were a bit naughty but nothing too too crazy.
Everything is a possibility, it's all about the statistical probability of a bad outcome actually happening.
Someone could break into my house and murder me at any moment. I still don't wander around with a bat or a club because such events are sufficiently rare here in West Menlo Park.
When I was a kid, it seemed like adults were idiots by and large.
Now as I'm getting a bit more ahem, experienced, my perception is regressing back towards this hypothesis.
I grew up on the countryside. Elementary school was in a different town. I had to walk 500m to the bus station and then take the school bus each day at age 7. At age 11 it was then secondary school, which included a longer walk to a different bus station and taking a public bus instead of a pure school bus.
Some of my kids 7yo classmates already walk to school ~1km in Prague by themselves in pairs, I guess alone it would be boring, personally I don't mind having at least morning walk to/from school since for the rest of the day I may sit next to desk, asked my kids if he wants to go by himself, he said no, but I guess when I will walk my younger daughter they can go back home together. Only thing I am really affraid is them crossing the road, I am certainly not affraid about anyone kidnapping them or other nonsense.
Recently when going by tram with kids somewhere I saw ~8-9yo girl travelling by herself seeing her confused started to cry, so I approached her, she said she is going wrong direction, told her to get off with us and then just directed her to right tram in different direction and went with my kids own way. Told her it's not big deal, she just lost few minutes and it can happen anyone to confuse tram numbers. Before COVID I used to approach tourists going in direction to my home since many of them went wrong direction, but surprisingly often I am met with German tourists who like riding trams whole line back and forth, I've had this hobby with Beijing subway lines when I lived there.
Actually my father (from small 40K town) came to visit just yesterday and he also took tram in wrong direction, realized it after 3 stops, but had problem to get back since there was no stop in opposite direction nearby, which happens with some stops, usually you just need to cross the road/tracks.
I'd go even that far that 7-9 yo kids in Vietnam, Laos or Thailand already ride motorbike (scooter) at that age, I crashed because of them once in Laos (on the way to Plain of jars), just suddenly stopped in front of me on dusty road, I stopped as well, but sadly I had passenger behind me who balanced in other direction, so we flipped to side when bike slipped a bit.
Of the high school and jr high kids I know, for most of them their life is on their phone. It doesn't cover that age group but I thought this graph was pretty interesting:
Generally the younger you are the more likely you are to be a heavy user of your phone. There is no data for it but I would expect that high school and jr high kids are probably even higher users than 18 - 34.
Because what else there's left to do? Getting your family arrested for playing in the front yard or walking to your friend or hanging in a parking lot? So we destroyed all fun activities then we're still complaining they don't do any fun activities?
I agree that we've destroyed all of the third spaces. It's also important to point that those that didn't literally get razed to the ground have been monetized. There are very few third spaces left that are free to engage with. There's either the real threat of "buy something or get out," or the social expectation to do so. This impacts teens especially so because their money must either come from their parents ie: "Mom can I have five dollars to spend on going to <place> with <friend>?" which is an impediment to spending real relationship building time with peers or they have to get a job to earn such money which precludes them from going out in the first place.
As a footnote: Yes, I know this seems fairly reductive and there's a lot of nuance left on the table. A single counter example won't change my mind because I'm talking about tendencies instead of black or white expression.
LOL. We've got Gremlins here in Belgrade, Serbia too.
But in my kid's preschool (for 5-6 year olds), when they were presenting a plan for this year and how they'll be crossing the street to another of their buildings for a few hours, one of the parents was worried they'll do that even if it rains or snows!
When asked how will they bring their kid to preschool not dressed for the elements, it was (not-surprisingly) "by car". I guess going outside is limited to sunny weather for their kids!
Wednesday is forest trip day, weather schmeather. Once after a stormy Wednesday the kindergarten stayed closed for the rest of the week as most of the involved - kids and educators - got a cold. Still Switzerland yes.
To be fair I have nothing against this especially in kindergarten's muddy garden, everything will be completely dirty and kids wet, some of them may not have change and even in free time I am not really fan of playing outside in rain, everything is slipper, easy to fall down and make yourself dirty or hurt yourself when climbing on slippery stuff. I don't mind if they go for walk in waterproof stuff in rain.
Well, part of the problem is our infrastructure choices over the past many decades. When you build suburbs that are very isolated from places you need to go and then need to drive to literally everything you do, nearly everyone starts viewing normal activities like walking to a grocery store as abnormal. As a result, kids can’t actually go anywhere until they turn 16 and get a car. :/
But at the end of the day, when it’s not actually possible to be independent every day, you just loose this culture. And countries that made different infrastructure and development decisions 6 decades ago are in a much better place today — it doesn’t have to be this way.
I live in a vast Californian suburb dominated by single family residences built in the 90s. The homes are priced around the median for the area. The residents are split about 50/50 politically and racially plural. The majority are married and earn ever so slightly below median income. It's about as average as you can get.
Note: I looked up these stats to make sure I got them right. They are mostly at the voting precinct, and census BG level, but I'm abstaining from posting them for obvious reasons.
I live in the midwest, in a smaller town. You still see kids playing in the neighborhood and parks and running around. Kids walk and bike to school. Nobody would call the cops over a kid walking by himself unless he looked to be lost or in distress.
Sorry, but my life is more complicated than "move to a sane state." I would have to put a child of mine into an abusive household and subject myself to fewer legal protections because if who I am. It's ok to live somewhere and observe and critique it. I'm a multifaceted individual whose writings on a very narrow topic cannot be reduced to "move." Thank you for sharing your experience though.
I live in suburban Ohio and had the same thing happen to my family. My son was playing by himself in the front yard. Someone called the cops, they walked him to my door and they lectured me about "watching" my kid.
It’s a shame you can’t press charges on or sue that person for attempted child abduction. Sure, they took the child to your front door, but you didn’t give them permission to do that. They are not the guardian and they had to trespass to do so.
Yeah I lived in the midwest and there are roaming bands of ~10 year olds who are legit criminals, ripping off and stealing things from myself and other neighbors and basically living independently outside of school and sleeping at home.
Cops and CPS can't be bothered (note I never personally called them, although I have had to address the children directly to ask them to stop stealing from my house). I still prefer that to a "safe" place where my kids have to risk getting ripped away from their parents for walking to a park.
The key to not dealing with police is moving to a high crime area with a weak police presence. These kind of CPS paranoia stuff is generally not enforced in places that are actually less safe for children. If the area is safe, that's when CPS/police will have the time to focus on you to call it unsafe. That is, kids aren't really safe from CPS of accusing them of being unsafe unless it is actually unsafe, in which case authorities never responded in the first place because CPS and the police are busy visiting an abandoned crack-baby.
Fwiw, I live in California as well, Bay Area specifically. My elementary school kid walks ~2/3mi from school (with a friend) and my middle schooler bikes a few miles to school solo. So do many of their friends. It’s the norm in my neighborhood.
Reminds me of the time my son finally gathered the confidence to take the training wheels off his bike and learn to ride it without them. My wife and I were walking, and he was on his bike, and he was so happy and pumped about his achievement, that he asked to ride farther away, out of our sight.
Now, this is a peaceful suburban neighborhood we're talking about, and we're on a stretch between his school and a park near our home. He's riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he's being careful about it.
Off he goes, and the two of us stroll peacefully until we see him stopped, with an old lady talking to him. He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
Somewhere along the way, our society blurred the line between "stepping in to prevent child abuse" and "thinking you're entitled to being hostile and sanctimonious to other parents".
That attitude, while perhaps more comfortable in some ways, just enables the sort of behaviour you encountered, and apparently disliked, from that woman.
A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future.
Depending on where you are, she might have gone decades without any kind of resistance to her behaviour.
Too much politeness can be worse than none at all.
That's the worst response. It puts them in the defensive.
If there is any "good" way, it is to be incredibly obsequious and deferential. Most of all, these kind of people just need their tummy tickled. "Yes, ma'am, will take it into consideration next time, ma'am".
Works great with cops too. They totally love that shit.
If you can, you can then nudge in right direction. "Have you met little Timmy yet? He's such a sweet little scamp, always wanting to ride his bike like his poppy". "oh you live here, i love that spicebush in your front yard. we've wanted to plant one too".
We have a busybody neighbor, she's always calling code enforcement on neighbors. I'm just really sickly sweet with her, I loath every second of it, but I don't think now she'll ever call inspections on us since we now have an expectation to chat when we cross paths.
Anyway, it's hard, and there is no "win" here. But if there is an angle, the angle is to treat them like dumb, stupid babies.
LOL, let me tell you what happens if you say "fuck off" to an elderly lady if you are a normal dude.
The retired lady, with nothing to do with her time all days, will sit back and scheme about the interaction. She will decide you are an adversary, disrespectful man who needs to be put in his place after 'abusing' an elderly citizen and a child.
You have maybe 1,2 free hours a day to deal with unexpected things that come up. SHE HAS ALL FUCKIN DAY. She will calculate and connive, and avail herself of every authority and ear and talk to them like a sweet concerned grandma who is bearing witness to an evil child abuser. And they will believe her. Every lie she spends 5 minutes conniving, will take days to months to disprove while CPS tries to comb through your personal life.
You have a kid and thus exposed to CPS complaints at anytime. She has no underage kids. You have a job to lose. She does not.
In any verbal conversation, you are the automatic loser. In any physical confrontation, you are the automatic agressor. You cannot win. Literally the only way to win an argument with an elderly lady is to walk off if the situation doesn't call for polite chit chat.
IANAL but I think there also are no legal penalties for filling out a restraining order for crazy old ladies who threaten your family. In some states, the judges apparently issue them "because it was filled out right" [0], and a after it's ordered the bitch could be thrown in jail if she accidently gets with X yards of your family and could have her gun rights taken away.
> A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future.
Or it means she's definitely calling CPS next time.
Or calling them this time, immediately, and mentioning "belligerent parents" who "may be intoxicated". CPS starts up a file on you and now you have a lot of people looking into your house, kids, and family. Maybe the police see an easy arrest, or easy fines. Is it worth it to make a point here? Even at the potential cost of your or your family's freedom?
Play the same game. "I was concerned this woman was talking to my son, I couldn't hear her but the conversation seemed to be something about how she wanted him to come over to her house and how handsome he is, and then when I came into her eyeline she suddenly started ranting about helmets and CPS. I'm really confused about the whole thing officer, I assume she is just elderly but can you ask her to not talk to my son further?"
I'm sorry, are we honestly entertaining this idea? I try to write measured, patient replies on this site, but holy crap, it's hard sometimes.
Think about what you're proposing. You want me to drag my son, a kid who was little enough back then to still ride a bike with training wheels, into a tense argument between a weird lady, some scary-looking adults, and his parents who suddenly decided to lie through their teeth for some reason? Aside from what example I would be setting for him, how do you think a kid would handle a situation like that?
It wasn't enough that this lady already pissed on his parade, I'm supposed to compound it and put us all at risk of having him taken away because we were "negligent" and also falsely accused someone of being a pedo?
Have we forgotten that the #1 priority in this whole situation is the kid, not our pride or out desire to put someone in their place?
Nope it goes like this. Weird stranger wants to parent your kid, tell her to pound sand. They call the cops and portray you in the worst light possible, making thinly veiled insinuations that you are not providing a safe environment for your child.
You don't know this person. A little old lady is unlikely to be a child molester statistically but it has happened. So when the cops knock on your door, maybe that's the concern that leaps to the front of your mind. Don't accuse anyone of anything just mention details, for example perhaps she touched him on the stomach to stop him "she placed her hand near his penis". Get creative. "Obviously a sensitive topic like this can't be discussed in earshot of the child victim".
You may say "I want to do the right thing" and that's fine, but personally I want the right thing to happen (ie. Kids being allowed to play outside) and I'm willing to bend the rules in the very same way that the people trying to prevent that are.
I want to be dead honest with you: The Internet is full of "I would have said X" situations where everyone acts like X is this big gotcha. It will make you outraged, but these people are all paper tigers. Drop the argument. Walk away. Your life will be better for it. Their advice is worth nothing.
While I don't agree with the person you're replying to exactly on tactics, I think they have a point.
The #1 priority should not be the kid.
The #1 priority should be the benefit of all kids.
In this example risk is introduced to the custodial relationship of the immediate child for the hopeful benefit of all children. It's possible this could be a rational risk. Whether it would be effective I have my doubts.
If we use some arbitrary numbers perhaps it would be just to risk 1/1000 chance your own kid gets tossed in foster care by CPS if it means 10 unknown kids end up with 10% longer lifespan because they built healthy habits by being able to play alone outside because a threatening old lady got put in her place.
> A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future.
No, it would solidify that persons' belief that the people were bad people and embolden her to act more swiftly next time.
Confrontation and escalation with swearing doesn't teach people a lesson. It makes them dig their heels in.
> No, it would solidify that persons' belief that the people were bad people
Stop giving a shit about other peoples opinions. Responding aggressively to a threat from someone is perfectly valid, and if that impacts their opinion of you, that's their issue.
It's easy to call someone an enabler, but it might be more generous to assume they have reasons other than being "comfortable".
The first thing you learn as an immigrant to the US is to avoid escalating conflicts, especially with Americans. Even a perfectly legal immigrant like me, in a "blue state" like Washington, will avoid rocking the boat. You don't have a safety net to fall back on, you don't have extended family to help you out and support you, and you already have too many other things to worry about, so you try to avoid the risk of having a random stranger make your life a living hell because you misjudged how safe it is to tell them off.
I disagree. I think a slightly better way that just politely nodding is to say "I stand firmly by my decision to allow my child to roam freely within my neighborhood."
"I will call 911 right now as a stranger is trying to abduct my son" should be the correct response.
Not a jab at you, but so tired of random people thinking they know what is best for my son from a 3 second interaction. We really need to bring back some shaming as I truly believe that is how you get a community to work together again instead of against each other.
> He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
You shouldn't have had to endure a lecture or be threatened by your neighbor. If the kid is just learning to ride a bike without training wheels, it would have been worth it to go back and get his helmet. I hope the lesson isn't "you shouldn't tell people when they are doing something dangerous," but that you shouldn't be a complete prick about it.
I mean, yeah, we should have brought his helmet, even with training wheels on. You can still fall and crack your skull. I know that and I don't dispute he should've been wearing his helmet.
As for why we didn't go back, his decision to try taking the wheels off was completely unexpected -- he had been dead set against it for quite a while -- and I didn't want to take the wind out of his sails by saying, "Okay, but you have to wait 15 more minutes while I quickly hop in the car, drive back home, get your helmet, and come back with it."
It was a calculated risk, and you can always argue that we shouldn't have taken it.
The point of the whole story is exactly what you said in the last sentence. It's not so much what people think they're entitled to say, it's how they say it. Just look at the replies to my story: you've got a whole bunch of people who think it's perfectly fine to lecture me about how I'm part of the problem here and to do so in a rather hostile manner.
This is the kind of thing I was trying to point out in the first place, the fact that the more and more people these days feel entitled to be crappy to other people in order to prove some point.
There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
> There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem.
It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
> The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
Yes, but what's their incentive to do so? The more I look at the society in this country, the more I see that the incentives for LEOs are perfectly aligned with corruption and abuse of power.
The check and balance part isn't working. Any decent judge should see this lacks probable cause. But judges are not impartial and instead side with the DA/police by default.
Judges, DAs and by extension any public arm including police should remember that doctrine coming from Roman law "It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished" (John Adams, 1770) or likewise "the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer" (William Blackstone, 1769) or "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent" (SCOTUS, 1895).
DAs more than judges, since DAs need successful convictions on crimes important to their constituency to get re-elected, and they need police cooperation to get successful convictions.
A judge may well throw this out on its merits, but the case has to progress far enough that a judge has the chance to consider it on its merits. A DA offering a plea deal "so you avoid risking jail time" is basically circumventing that, as the judge doesn't have the resources or authority to investigate every plea deal that comes their way.
> But judges are not impartial and instead side with the DA/police by default.
Anybody, and I do mean ANYBODY, who has been to traffic court knows the courts are the extension of the cops. Worse yet, in criminal court, judges tell the jury that "being a cop doesnt give any more or less truthfulness or power on their words".
The judges work with with cops and prosecution on a daily basis. They work against you extremely rarely.
> It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
There's one reason: that overreaction is retrospective, and that if you can't cure cop overreaction (when you have complete control over training and livelihood), and you can't cure the entire system's overreaction when they have all the time in the world to think about what they're doing, you have no business dictating to individuals whether they're overreacting or not.
Blaming CPS overreactions on nosy neighbors is just like blaming SWATting on SWATters: an excuse for law enforcement failure, and in that an encouragement to law enforcement to continue to fail in exactly the same way.
Not only that, they have a reverse incentive: Say something bad happens to that kid, now the cops will be on the hook for letting them alone.
The real problem is that the fabric of society is mostly gone. In years past, those cops would be chewed out by the old ladies at church the next Sunday. No wonder there is such a backlash building up in conservative areas of the country.
In fact, I’d argue that is part of the problem here: there is no liability for police, CPS agents, prosecutors, or judges for overreach and absurd enforcement actions.
> It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
There's problems, and then there's unavoidable problems. Failure to design a system with checks and balances for the unavoidable problem is an avoidable problem. ;-)
My armchair analysis here is that behaving in a reasonable fashion would not result in being able to obtain and exercise more power.
The desire for more power, and thus funding, and thus better career aspirations is as relevant to CPS as it is the local PD.
Of all the spilled ink on the topic of how this stuff happens, there seems to be a culture of, "We lock up the bad guys and throw away the key". It doesn't take much to put you into the "Bad Guy" territory, and once you're there, you're not a person, a mother, a son or spouse with a life all your own. You're a threat to the societal order (no longer a human being), and deserve the full weight of punishment regardless of its implications.
The police departments which manage to actually take high crime areas, and turn them around into lower crime areas despite widespread poverty have undertaken a paradigm shift from, "Putting away bad guys" to "Building a community". Getting to know the community, its problems, its major players and learning what their struggles are and trying to find a way to integrate into solving those problems, using law enforcement as a tool and not its own pursuit.
I suspect child services / social workers are punished far more severely for false negatives than false positives. I think it is safe to say the outrage of failing to save a child would outweigh the embarrassment of a false positive such as this. I could easily see major news outlets and local politicians raising hell for failing to stop abuse but raising far less hell for something like this.
I have had multiple experiences with multiple CPS departments through multiple friends and family members. CPS hardly ever does anything and are largely useless. The only time they did anything was when the police opened up a second investigation because of the problems, and they told them "Don't talk to CPS talk to the cops and have them talk to CPS".
Assume the default for these kinds of agencies is false negatives.
No one wants to be the weak link that gets their name blasted in newspapers when a kid gets harmed. Not that it would really be their fault, but the incentives are obvious to "play it safe".
I feel like "playing it safe" could have been accomplished with the officers just dropping the kid back off back home. I don't see why it would escalate to pressing charges.
2 months later when something happens to the kid this entire thing will get replayed in the media and everyone that didn't do anything will be made out to be a villain.
Correct! There's a lot of crazy people out in the world who'll call the cops for all manner of things. The correct response would have been to ignore the call following a couple questions by the 911 operator. "Is the child in danger in any way?" the response would be "No." and then hang up on them.
The problem is the person calling will lie or exaggerate instead of saying no. If questioned later, they can fall back on claiming they were just trying to help and avoid getting in trouble.
Angry or nosy neighbors, police and social services can get each other caught up in a cycle of escalation that lasts years for some unfortunate families.
In that case the police should investigate and then rightfully conclude there is no danger and leave the child alone to continue walking in the street. After that they should arrest the caller for exaggerating (i.e. lying) regardless of their claimed intentions.
This assume some sort of rationality in our legal bureaucracy of course. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to exist.
> The problem is the person calling will lie or exaggerate instead of saying no.
The person calling is likely not "lying" about anything. If they believe it is dangerous for a kid to walk in the street, then the answer is a truthful "yes".
"Yes" is not an answer that should be responded to. Details are what should be responded to. Cops shouldn't be asking the neighbor's approval to investigate. They should treat a report as a witness, and refer to a checklist of types of observations that need to be investigated.
If a neighbor makes up details in a report to police, they should be charged with a crime. If the cops are asking "do you think we should investigate" to private citizens, they have abandoned all responsibility as law enforcement.
Imagine crowdsourcing your authority, making the justice system a militia for lazy mobs. Completely upside-down.
I agree. The problem is that police in much of the US are poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly managed, and increasingly marginalized. The US system of strong local governance means that only the nice neighborhoods get nice public services.
Part of it is the procedural philosophy on crime that simultaneously makes crimes easy to prosecute, and demands the police act on any letter-of-the-law violation, without thinking.
You can get phony DUIs now too. How many people are on some pharmaceutical? Well if so, you’re automatically guilty, even if your doctors tells you that you can drive, and must take the meds.
I am with your neighbor, I hate dogs left alone which annoy all neighbors with constant barking, while their owner doesn't have to listen to it. It's less of an problem in the house, but huge problem in residential apartment building, so obviously you call cops to annoy neighbor to force him to do soemthing about it by police harassing him, not that because you would genuinely think there is animal in distress. If your dog barks at everyone passing around your house, there is something wrong with your dog and you raising it. If you can't take care of dog and raise it properly, don't get one.
To be clear, he doesn't bark at people walking by the house. He barks at people who walk up the driveway, open the gate, and walk towards the house. He didn't bark until the guy was a meter or two away from the house.
That's his job.
He was left alone in the house for an hour. I have video surveillance showing the neighbour skulking around on my property.
Sorry, this is the reason we got a dog.
If the neighbour had a problem with the dog barking, he could have asked me "hey, when I come on your property and walk around your house, why does the dog bark?"
why do you keep gate unlocked when nobody is at home then? seems like easy solution to stop people trespassing and annoying the dog unnecessary and if it was locked and someone was there he can bark as much he wants because nobody should be there, obviously this doesn't work for people without gate
It may come as a surprise to you, but I don't even lock my front door.
If the dog is inside the house, you can't hear his barks from outside of our property, by the way. Neighbour only heard him because he was right next to the house.
Easier solution: don't be an asshole neighbour.
Not sure why you want to regulate what I do with my house and dog, which isn't harming or annoying anyone, while completely missing the point -- the neighbour shouldn't be there.
And he certainly shouldn't have called the police for something that he caused.
My neighbor (not old) threatened to call the police on my 12 year old daughter because she didn't stop for him... to scold her. On the surface he's a reasonable, responsible adult but for some reason was/is triggered by neighborhood kids simply "having fun". People can be strange.
You usually only notice people when they do something weird-- maybe 999 days out of 1000 that neighbor is perfectly normal, but on that one day they were having an off day. That's the day you notice them.
An advantage of living further from people is that just fewer interactions with strangers and near-strangers so fewer opportunities to be the victim of someone's off-day.
Paranoid suburbanites. In the US, happened to me twice as an 11/12 year old north of Chicago, just for walking down the street - and once in Charlottesville, in the burbs, aged 24 - again for walking down the street. Once in Germany, aged 10 in a suburb of Frankfurt - I was sitting in a park with a book. Oh, and once in the U.K., in Hatfield aged 22, waiting outside my girlfriend’s house having arrived a bit before her.
Only got put in a cop car in the US - in both Germany and the U.K. they realised I was just doing normal human stuff - both childhood occasions in the US they gave my parents a talking to, as an adult they were unreasonably suspicious as to why I would be walking rather than driving, but let me go with a warning to drive in future.
So - the problem is the police, and the justice system, as curtain-twitchers live the world over.
It sounds like the cop had the discretion and chose to arrest her after she answered a question negatively. This seems to be another big part of the problem.
IMO, too many people took the wrong lessons from being ignored as children themselves, and they swung too hard into "Watch over your children 24/7 or you're hurting your children."
They're watching the same newscasts and true-crime documentaries that are leading to perceptions of nonexistent "crime waves" with all the pathologies that come along.
Also don't forget the inflation of the term "sex trafficking" which has been twisted to apply to things that most people would not ordinarily apply it to, so that police departments can look better in the news. They bust a prostitution ring, and every prostitute gets counted as a "sex-trafficking victim" so they can spin it as this great liberation of people. Reading the headlines it sounds like Taken, but the reality is much less black and white.
I think it's mostly an artifact of 1980s and 1990s daytime TV hyping every single missing child and making a generation of parents think this was happening everywhere all the time.
Doesn't help that every few months a certain political party screams about a 'caravan' of migrants coming to the borders with the sole purpose of causing crime.
> who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
The profoundly innumerate, that’s who. They overestimate the risk of an adverse event because they rely solely on media reports of child safety events to anchor their estimates, never stopping to consider that the media doesn’t report on children safely walking home.
Had the cops called on me for wearing a hood and walking home at 7:30PM from my friends house, gun put in my face and told to get on the ground. I was 10.
Low and behold a few years later I find out that its my highschool police officer I get to see every day!
The real problem is the cop finding a perfectly fine child walking home in his own neighborhood and arresting his mother like a violent criminal for such a grave offense.
Yes, I was talking about an article describing a specific incident in a specific country.
But I agree that there’s a real problem with the police in the US, one that most US citizens seem not to be able to see clearly (except for people in black neighborhoods, who know what’s up with the cops—but the rest of the country hasn’t been listening to them). I was born and raised in the US, but I’ve been living outside the country for a few years, and the cop problem is one reason I don’t think I’ll be moving back.
> who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
This really depends on your life experience.
For some this is no big deal. For some this means the parents are in a drunken/drug stupor. For some taking care of a kid means being instantly labeled as a pedo by parents, police and neighbours.
No, the real problem is that we continue to elevate low stakes local issues into high stakes national / international news because it advances our own preferred narratives.
In my twice-the-size European city, kids walk twice that distance to school and back home again, alone. Every. Single. Day. If this place isn't safe enough for kids to walk by themselves, maybe the question should be raised whether the police and municipal government really is doing their job the way they're supposed to.
The irony is one of the officers claimed the boy could have been kidnapped or taken into a sex trafficking ring. And their solution is to arrest the mom, not to take care of the kidnapping or sex trafficking.
This is kind of funny. At what age does that stop being a possibility? At least in my country kids are kids until 18... so it would just as illegal let a 17-year old walk alone? He _could_ be kidnapped. Nobody can say it's impossible, however improbable!
The same concern can be voiced for 16 or 20 year old women and men. All of them can be abducted with ease by 2+ trained people. Should they also be accompanied by their moms at all times?
The cop just demosntrated himself that he isnt doing his job and that there is something deeply wrong with society if a child cant even walk half a mile at 8 years old.
Recursive problem if that parents are young: a 2 year old in public with its 20 year old father could be required to have a 50 year old present at all times.
50 year olds are getting on the old side. Could easily be taken down by an in-shape mid-20s person. Best solution is for everyone to just travel with their own pack of trained wolves.
An unsupervised pack of wolves could always be attacked by a bear or hunted down by mistake, a clear case of animal negligence. Wolves should be accompanied at all times by armed midgets.
See, with rugged individualism the consumer needs to be on the watch for the brands that might kill them and just vote with their wallet. Why would we regulate something when the free market will do the regulating?
This parent was not exercising their responsibility as an individual to watch out for anything and everything that might hurt their child, in the US that is illegal because the free market ideology rules all.
It's commentary about attacking symptoms rather than the root cause of the problem based around the flawed "choice of the individual" and "rugged American individualism" ideologies present in the US.
Cops think the neighborhood is dangerous for kids because of sex trafficking? Arrest parents for allowing kids outside instead of stopping the sex trafficking.
Consumers get harmed and workers get taken advantage of by corporations? Vote with your wallet instead of actually regulating companies.
The thing is that the US has much greater freedoms than Europe, after all, we did fight for them. It's every US citizens understanding that with greater freedoms come greater responsibilities to raise children to be future leaders. This can't happen if a child is mowed down in a driveby or if they accidentally trip over while walking.
I feel compelled to comment on this because it comes up occasionally.
We normally describe America as being prude and cite anti-nudity policies of broadcast TV. However, America pioneered modern video pornography, going far beyond any country for decades.
Similarly, while in some places you need to put your beer in a paper bag but we also have open-air drug markets and streets filled with people openly taking hardcore drugs.
Every police interaction in the US bears the risk of death. Police will stop kids on the street with or without being called. Ergo, it is unsafe for children to walk to school in the US.
Sure, that's all a bit circular, but good luck breaking the spiral with a "law and order" mentality.
That is everywhere. For that matter every interaction with someone with a little martial arts training (even what you can find on the internet, though you will also find bad training) can be potential deadly. Most people have the ability to kill another human, few attempt it.
It is practically zero almost everywhere. Iran is the only exception I can think of, and even then it is only protesters. (I'm sure there are other corrupt countries that I'm not aware of)
This strikes me as crazy. Every interaction with any human or inanimate object bears the risk of death, it's just so low it's not worth thinking about it.
U.S. police kill about ~1000 people per year, and the vast majority of those aren't at all questionable. If there are 330,000,000 people in the U.S., that's 0.000303% of the population per year. Each person has, on average, maybe 10 contentious police interactions in a lifetime of 75 years? That's 0.134 interactions per year.
So, given on this Fermi estimate, you have about a 0.00226% chance of being killed per contentious police interaction if we spread it completely evenly, or 2.26 in 100,000. And spreading it evenly doesn't make any sense at all.
So, if you're young, black, male, and running around Chicago dealing drugs carrying an illegal gun--yeah, maybe worry about it. For everyone here on HN, it's a stupid thing to worry about. Worry about your sedentary lifestyle. Worry about driving safely if you drive a lot. Worry about diabetes. Worry about whether your relationships with friends and family are good. Worry about your diet. Worry about exercise. Worry about falling down the stairs. The cops aren't going to kill you.
The worry about police violence is really misplaced worry about the effects of a broken justice system. It's not just that police kill unarmed, non-violent black teens. It's that "they" (the justice system as a whole) also lock people up for non-violent drug offenses, put a felony on their record, condemning them to a life without job opportunities. Then "they" kick them out of their homes when they're late on their rent. Then they forcibly break up homeless encampments so people without homes can never feel safe or settled or have somewhere to sleep.
Police shootings are just a potent symbol for a much larger issue with the Justice System. The problem is that conversations about complex systemic issues become circular and conversations about symbols often don't.
I think we agree. The justice system could be a lot better. We should incarcerate many fewer people. The War on Drugs should end. We need to figure out a way to reduce crime in black communities that doesn't involve intense policing and locking so many people up.
As for police shootings being a symbol, I see your point. I would make the alteration that it's unjust police shootings that are the symbols. Most are some variation on, "Crazed knife-wielding man shot down by police after stabbing two".
> So, if you're young, black, male, and running around Chicago
I did this without the drugs and guns part, and had guns drawn on me three times growing up in Chicago for the crime of walking. If I had been killed, I'm sure it would have been coded in a way for you not to see it as a problem.
It’s unusual for white people. Every black and Hispanic person I know has stories about how they had to worry about violence while living their lives normally.
For example, a friend’s partner shared a story about the time he went to a big conference (maybe the VMware one?) in Atlanta. He was fairly senior at HP and no more threatening looking than any other middle-aged IT guy … and was the only pulled over on the way back to his hotel by a cop who was suspicious about a black man driving a nice rental car. His evening involved a very tense hour sitting on the side of the road while a southern cop straight out of a stereotype asked a ton of questions and “asked” to inspect the car while patting his gun.
Table 3, "Residents who experienced nonfatal threats or use of force during contacts with police, by demographic characteristics, 2015 and 2018"
Of people who report having police contact within the last year (~18% of people), 2.0% report "Experienced threats or force at any time during the year". 1.5% for white people, 3.8% for black. This is 2018.
Any way you slice it, having a gun drawn on you by a cop is exceedingly rare--even for black Americans. And, of course, "gun drawn" is going to be a small subset of that 3.8%.
No, his experience isn't necessarily very unusual. You are comparing apples (deaths) and oranges (guns drawn) here. I'm willing to bet an order of magnitude of people more have had the police draw on them vs. shoot them. No one in my family has been killed by the police, but I, my mother, and my uncle have all certainly been drawn on.
I think you're making the argument that GP's experience isn't necessarily unusual conditional on being black, male, etc.. It's not the point that I was making. I was making the point that GP's experience is unusual for people in general, or for HNers in general.
I think it makes sense for third parties (us) to "care" when something like the headline happens. We should make it clear to those involved that it's not acceptable (we should try to punish them), and we should try to help aggrieved parties.
But no, you should not "care" in the sense of worrying about it happening to yourself. The probability is so small it's not worth it, along with an infinity of other freak occurrences.
> We should make it clear to those involved that it's not acceptable (we should try to punish them), and we should try to help aggrieved parties.
Here, we agree. But when you cite statistics in the manner you did, you're arguing against cloistering myself and my child in our home, quaking in fear of the improbable: beating on a straw-man.
If you re-read the last line of my first comment, you may notice that the "law and order" mentality that I'm railing against is fear-based governance. We have equipped and trained our police to be paramilitary forces that are nearly unaccountable for their misbehavior: a resounding success of fear-based governance. De-escalating the cycle of violence requires vacating fear-based governance -- convincing the police to over-react less, convincing citizens to call the authorities less; convincing voters to react to broken windows with investment in fixing windows rather than jail time and extrajudicial killings. And in the meantime, we need to hold people accountable for perpetrating administrative violence against innocent people like in TFA.
Yep, we need to make the police more public servants and less a paramilitary force. I think it's probably going to mean we build a society that shares more values in order for that to happen. That's going to be hard. In my mind, a lot of the problem is that the U.S. is a very large country with very different sub-populations with very different values. It's a challenge. Running New Zealand or Norway is way easier.
Sorry, I don't have one to hand. It's a reasonable request, though. I've gone through the data carefully in the past, and I can say the vast majority are variations on, "Knife-wielding man shot down by police after stabbing two". They don't make national news because they make perfect sense. It's just cops doing what they're supposed to be doing. The ones that do make the news are killings where there are indications of impropriety, and those make up the set of examples you carry around in your head, which is why you're suspicious.
Yes, it's basically bullshit in most of the US. Even knowing that the media feeds on clickbait and routinely hypes up everything that even smells like it could be controversial, people just lap it up. Even people here on HN.
Right in the middle of a similar sized European city, very built up, loads of traffic - the children have to walk to school, from aged 6. Parents are actually not allowed to take them in.
This article is complete nonsense and I’m glad I don’t live in Waco, Texas. Your experience was similar to mine I used to walk a mile to school or ride my bike to a friends and then walk. I pick my daughter up near a private school everyday and there are 100 or so kids walking under 13.
There are 8 year olds walking around my neighborhood every weekend and nobody bats an eye.
I took the bus to school in London from age 8 onwards, i.e. not a school bus a normal red double decker bus. It was only two stops, but mum thought it was safer than crossing the busy road.
In most areas it is probably safe enough... but they like to keep the population scared as they are easier to control that way... and the police budgets keep increasing.
On average, the cops are nuts in the US... It just take one hot head in a group to make them all act badly...
To be fair, here in Menlo Park, CA, children of this age bike or walk half a mile to school all the time as well. It's not very different from when I lived in the London suburbs and walked myself 30 years ago. This isn't really a US/Europe split.
I just did a google maps search. In kindergarten at 5 years old I walked approximately 1/3 mile each way. I live in an urban environment now and outside of legal ramifications still would not think twice about allowing my child to do the same.
I live in Seattle. 8 year olds walk past my house to-and-from school every day without parents. I can't say I've seen this in any other major US city though.
I used to walk around 1 mile to school every day along a very busy road when I was 8 years old and nobody batted an eye. I lived in Texas at the time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the point is that the place is plenty safe for the kid to walk by himself, it's just a perfect storm of officious cops and bureaucrats and a nosy neighbor.
In my experience it is fairly normal in the US, too, which is why stories like this are newsworthy. Also, Reason is a libertarian political rag and they have ideological motivations for sharing this particular story.
True, which is why you should always consider the source along with their probable motivations. When a publication that is openly promoting libertarian philosophy writes a story about abuses by government, it's worth considering that this is probably the most egregious abuse they could find. It's in their best interest to focus our attention on the most convincing evidence.
Most mainstream media isn't overtly political, so their motivations are usually more monetary than ideological. Following the money is always a good idea.
Note she also has a GoFundMe to help cover her legal expenses to right this wrong. It's a pretty severe miscarriage of justice that has grievously altered this innocent woman's life going into a recession.
> has a GoFundMe to help cover her legal expenses to right this wrong
To be clear, Wallace "is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program" and "hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again." The GoFundMe is to pay for those costs. It won't do anything to undo the original miscarriage.
Part of the problem is that she pled guilty, thereby endorsing the position of the police and creating a larger problem in the future. I don't know what the correct response is when looking down the barrel of a 2 year sentence for nonsense, but think this publicity battle should have been before the plea.
That's the problem with the legal system. It's extraordinarily common to plead guilty when innocent because fighting the charge is more damaging than accepting a deal.
I even had this happen to me with a traffic ticket. It was way too expensive to fight it even though I could easily proven my innocence.
This lady probably would lose at trial and then have to appeal. The judge could instruct the jury that they have to adjudicate whether she dropped off the child or not regardless of whether that should be reasonable. You often can't argue constitutionality and some other factors until appeal. That would bankrupt the family.
The fact that the system can force people to plea guilty, be found to be wrong-- and there's no way to undo that. That's more the system running us than us running the system
This is (one of) the logical conclusions of suburban, car-enforced social alienation: if you don't know your neighbors and your neighbors don't know you, then everything that isn't immediately familiar to either party is treated with suspicion. And this holds for the entire "food chain": police who don't live in the areas they patrol, DAs and CPS employees who don't understand their communities, &c. It's civically and socially poisonous.
It would of course be ridiculous to claim that these things don't happen absent of car culture: it's a broader trend than that, and there are suburban areas that buck the trend. But the urban/suburban divide here is stark: I grew up walking to school and riding public transport alone, and it's normal to see kids running around my neighborhood without any supervision. That kind of freedom works because nobody is surprised to see a 6 year old running errands; they're seen doing the same thing every day.
Excellent point.. in these places it is not normal to ever travel from point A to point B without getting in a car. Anyone walking is suspect.
It's bizarre. Where I live the police are not insane like this but people will still be shocked if they find out you walked 1/2 mile instead of taking a car.
When I went to the US for a research visit, I didn't have a car, because my bed and breakfast was in walking distance to the lab (there was even a bus). So, naturally, I walked to a nearby restaurant in the evening, and was stopped by the police, asking me what I was up to. It didn't have any consequences, but still.
That must be common. I remember many years ago I was walking to the Google MTV campus from a corp apartment in Mountain View itself. It's a fair walk, maybe an hour. I was doing it because it was sunny and why not. A cop car pulled over and asked if I was OK. They were friendly but the only apparent cause of this visit was that I was walking. I found that deeply strange.
I've lived in the city, and I currently live in a suburb. I know a lot more of my neighbors here than I did in the city. And my neighbors know my kids. On top of that, the sidewalk is filled with kids going to & from school each day, and it's noisy all afternoon as they run all over the neighborhood riding bikes and playing.
So I get that you want to find car culture to be the root of all evil, but I don't buy it.
"Evil" is not the world I would (or did) use. And as I said: there are lots of places that buck the trend; I'm glad you live in one.
For every place like yours, there are suburbs like the ones that most of my friends grew up in: ones where everybody drives in and out, where sidewalks exist primarily as a vessel for dogwalking, and nothing can be reached on foot (parks or basic living amenities).
In Japan, children are encouraged from early age to be independent. They even take the subway and bus by themselves, albeit it's significantly safer there than in other parts of the world. Still though, I think people in America have gone off the deep end.
Its funny, because I see young-ish kids alone or in small groups walking around all the time in Brooklyn. Between 2:30 and 4:00 PM the sidewalks around my apartment are choked with unaccompanied kids.
I live in Manhattan and my wife and I just had our first kid a few weeks ago. We've been talking about it for months now, but we want our kid to have that kind of independence and familiarity with the city. On one hand it's good for their development and on another hand it just seems practical that they be able to navigate the city on their own for safety reasons.
I've offended a lot of suburban friends and family though, because they don't understand how we could raise a child in NYC let alone give them any kind of independence. I've been told that it's irresponsible, that I'll be endangering him, and that I'm crazy to think the city is a safe place for a child, among other things.
IMO it's exactly the other way around. Raising a child who can't do basic things like run errands or get to school on their own until they are well into young adulthood is a wildly insane way to raise a child.
>I've offended a lot of suburban friends and family though, ... I've been told that it's irresponsible, that I'll be endangering him, and that I'm crazy to think the city is a safe place for a child, among other things.
We live in Hong Kong and think that it's a great environment (albeit insanely expensive) to raise our one-year old child but heard the same reaction to friends and family. Some people get obsessed with the idea of safety and can't understand the value of freedom to explore, easy access to culture in the form of theatre, art, museums, ... Instead they only optimise for that single dimension of safety and are offended whenever someone challenges their obsession by making a different choice than them.
I grew up on a farm and was out roaming around alone from probably the age of 5 or 6. Kids are pretty capable if you raise them to be a little self reliant and resilient.
Yeah I personally view suburbia writ large as a cultural backwater and site of psychologically stultifying sameness. Rural and urban places are endlessly interesting to me.
Japan is extremely culturally homogeneous compared to America. As far as I know, this doesn't actually affect kidnapping statistics all that much, but it does affect perception.
Kids in Washington, DC, often enough get themselves to school via Metrobus. I see them walk to the stop by themselves, three or four blocks in a quiet neighborhood.
Vaguely relevant, from Peter Grey's book "Free to Learn":
> In our culture today, parents and other adults overprotect children from possible dangers in play. We seriously underestimate children’s ability to take care of themselves and make good judgments [...] Our underestimation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—by depriving children of freedom, we deprive them of the opportunities they need to learn how to take control of their own behavior and emotions.
Nobody wants to be the one parent out of a thousand who has their kid scooped up off the street because they were letting their kid explore and be free.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, this comment isn't a judgment on anyone or promoting any type of child-rearing philosophy. It's just an obvious truth. Nobody wants to be that parent, and that obviously influences behavior.
It's safer to be around strangers than relatives in every study's sampling, because most people don't leave their kids with strangers. They spend most of their time with relatives, friends and acquaintances. If they did spend as much time with strangers as with relatives, you'd conclude it's safer to be around relatives.
It's like saying cyanide is safe because most people don't die from cyanide. Yeah, because most people don't take cyanide.
Children spend waaaay more time around parents and relatives.
Same reason why you are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than a stranger. (This is not monocausal, and I do not mean to imply that simply spending time with someone will cause a crime)
It really depends on the exact framing of the question.
Are children safer ALONE with a random stranger or with a family member? Why is the child alone with a random stranger?
There are some broad daylight kidnappings, but they are relatively rare. They are relatively rare because it's much easier for a kidnapper to abscond with someone who trusts them.
I'm not sure of the statistics, but even so, it's something you have more control over than a lightning strike.
Edit: at first glance I'm not sure the numbers are right...
Google says: "Lightning damage in the U.S. [...] In 2021, there were a total of 11 fatalities and 69 injuries reported due to lighting in the United States."
Also: "In the United States, an estimated 460,000 children are reported missing every year. Federal Bureau of Investigation, NCIC."
Edit again to be more specific: Many of the "goes missing" doesn't mean kidnaps, and according to wikipedia, "The vast majority of child abduction cases in the United States are parental kidnapping".
However it also says: "Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year, on average, between 2010–2017."
This number is still a high multiple of the number of people (not just children) struck by lightning each year.
My uninformed guess is that a not insignificant percentage of "children reported missing" are teenagers who run away or stay out past the time they were supposed to return home.
One must remember that about 11% of children are eligible for a drivers license.
So we shouldn't allow children to go outside where the lightning could get them! (/s, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone seriously believes it is what we should do..)
I know a guy who continually insisted he was doing the right thing telling his child to get out of the pool if there was thunder. You know what? Far more people die from accidental pool electrocutions due to bad wiring than lighting (yes, I know this may be due to people getting out of the pool and avoiding death).
> Nobody wants to be the one parent out of a thousand who has their kid scooped up off the street
I agreed with you ... because I misread your comment as being concerned that the cops would come pick up your kid (like happened here in TFA). My (semi-legitimate) fear is that I'll be harassed as a parent for letting my kids do normal things like walk around the neighborhood. That'd be the only reason I might not encourage it.
Your kid is much more likely to be picked up by the cops over handwringing like this than to be kidnapped.
It's true that parents live in fear of their child being taken (and blamed for some action/inaction that allowed it to occur). Generally it seems like Americans have developed a strong aversion to 'being considered at fault for an adverse event'.
It took me quite some effort to overcome that but I made it easier by reading the statistics on child deaths and other crimes.
The odds of winning the lottery are better. The odds would be one in millions for getting scooped off the street by a random person and slightly more common if the kidnapper happened to be a parent.
Yes, I don't want to be this one parent. But it's many orders of magnitude more likely that I handicap my kids if I don't let my kids explore the world with (reasonable) freedom.
PS. I'm a father of three girls and live in Europe. Kids here navigate on their own with public transport if needed between home/school/etc since the age of 6.
Worth noting that child was literally safer walking home alone than being in the car, since the odds of dying in a vehicle related death are multiple times higher than odds of being abducted and killed by a stranger; odds of being abducted and physically harmed by a stranger are even less likely than being injured in vehicle accident.
Would not be surprised to learn that school districts in area even require children to walk to school if they are within that distance to their schools.
Anyone involved in this should at very least should lose their jobs and family should be awarded significant compensation for the harm done to the family.
I don't know... the story as written does sound really bad. My similarly-aged kids walk about half a mile to school by themselves, as do dozens of other children that live in my neighborhood, and it would be crazy to arrest parents for this.
But we're only hearing the mother's side of the story. The neighbor who called the cops, the actions of the police, it's possible they saw something that wasn't reported here. And something about this story sounds a little off to me. A kid is peacefully walking a half mile home, someone calls the cops, and the cops actually show up and intercept the kid before the kid gets home?
Perhaps the kid wasn't actually okay with walking home, perhaps the mom was kicking him out of the car as a punishment, perhaps the kid didn't know what to do and asked a neighbor for help, perhaps the kid told the police that he didn't feel safe with his mother, perhaps some other stuff happened that the mom wasn't willing to tell Reason about, perhaps the police made a judgement call based on interviewing the neighbors and child that the mother had behaved inappropriately here.
But maybe the story is completely accurate and this is just bad by the cops. So I hesitate to judge either way.
The giant delta between the possible prison sentence and the consequences in the plea deal is a signal that the prosecution thought they would do poorly at trial.
The choice is to avoid prison time entirely, or be willing to spend at least 2 years in prison if the jury gets this one wrong.
The woman has already been failed by the police who arrested her and the prosecutor who declined to drop the charges. Who's to say whether she'll be failed by the jury as well?
Problem is there is always the mispricing of the cost of having pled guilty to a felony. In the US the hard part is after prison from my understanding. Maybe I am wrong though.
Also if your neighbors got you into this state now, what are they going to get you into the future, after you have been "guilty."
Nothing is gained without risk, and this woman likely now regrets accepting that plea deal. Her attorney should have explained to her what the outcome would have been for taking this deal, and clearly had she known she would not have, since she is now attempting to have the verdict expunged from her record.
I like the way you think. It's a thin article, written by someone with an agenda (albeit one that I generally applaud). Whenever people tell me stories like this, I too start asking questions that can only be answered by someone on the other side. Your point about the police response time is interesting.
My own neighbors (who I like, but they make a good example here) had an incident recently. Their elementary school-aged kids play outside from dawn to dusk if they're not in school, which is cool. One day they built a fire in the woods behind their house, which backs up to 10,000+ acres of public woodlands and grasslands, in the middle of wildfire season in California. An hour after the kids "put it out," it was unattended and still producing large amounts of smoke. Someone walking by finally called the fire department, and the police also arrived to give the parents a citation. Anyway, to hear the mom tell the story it sounds outrageous that someone made the call and that emergency responders showed up, but everyone else who saw the situation unfold was pretty concerned about the fire.
I also wondered how the police got there so fast. My thoughts are that the boy wasn't very happy being made to walk home and so looked angry or distraught and that triggered the response from the neighbor and then the incentives to not be the person that drops the ball when a kid could be in danger drove it as far as it did.
I'm not saying it should have gone as far as it did, but I also agree there might have been more to it than we know about.
Police just power tripping as usual. I wonder why they don't name and shame the officers - clearly these are the people doing wrong and should be removed from their positions.
The local DA is the person to look to here. Cops don't persecute cases.
Clearly the cops started this stupid ball rolling, but anyone at the local attorneys office could have just chosen not to persecute. Instead they offered the plea deal.
> The local DA is the person to look to here. Cops don't persecute cases.
More than one person can be at fault. I would place some of the blame on the neighbor, the police officers, the District Attorney, and the CPS case worker for this.
The blame is on the DA and the cops. Even if the DA had dropped the charges, the cops still kidnapped the mother and traumatized the children.
And sure, the ideal DA would have charged the cops for the kidnapping and child abuse. But we're quite far from reforming the system so that cops are actually bound by the law, and focusing blame on both is needed to move us there.
There needs to be some sort of back pressure. A list of things the government can't take from us. Maybe a Bill of Rights? After this is created, let's hope the Supreme Court doesn't legislate from the bench and invent "qualified immunity" where people in government can't trounce on these Rights with zero fear of retribution.
The warped perception of child kidnappers hiding behind every bush not only obscures real dangers like unsafe crosswalks but also outright creates a real legion of kid-snatchers. Horrifying.
It's in the story, which is written by a co-founder of one of the NPOs that supported the Texas law:
> "Wallace believes this could be due to the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 with the help of Let Grow, the non-profit I co-founded. It's part of HB567, a larger child welfare reform bill, and clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger."
But as the story notes, that bill did not affect criminal law, so the cops can still do this.
CPS still put this woman--and inexplicably her husband--on a "safety plan" requiring supervision of other family members for two weeks. I am actually amazed that the author thought this would be a good time to plug her legislative work.
The attitudes on childhood independence vary wildly based on density and penetration of car culture.
For example: I have a neighbor whose 10 year old rides the subway, alone, to and from school. This includes some amount of walking on either side -- something close to half a mile in aggregate on google maps.
In the suburb where I grew up, parents are now required to meet their middle school children at the bus stop or arrange for alternative transportation.
In middle school, in the same community, which hasn't changed much, I rode my bike several miles. So this is a recent change. AFAICT it's because of some pedestrian fatalities and injuries a few years back.
Raising children in a car-dependent suburb seems like a good way to set them up for a few years of stunted adulthood while they learn basic "how to operate without an adult literally physically present" skills... I'd like to move to the suburbs so I can have a nicer house and a yard, but I don't think I want to subject my children to that environment.
This story is, in a nutshell, why me and my family have a plan to leave the US permanently within 2 years. We have a 4 year old and a 6 year old, and the possible futures we can see for ourselves and our children as they grow up are all dystopian to us.
We can have freedom for them to play outside, if we only live in a rural area where my wife and kids will be the only non-white people around, where we will be bound to use a car for every errand, and where the politics of everyone nearby will be opposite our own.
We can have a walkable neighborhood if we sacrifice safety and health (density in US cities is built on the busiest, most polluting roadways), or all of our savings to live in one of the very very few walkable, safe urban communities in the US.
These things don't appear to be improving. We have half the country engaged in absolutely insane conspiracy mongering including human trafficking stories that spark the behavior seen in the article (when the woman calls the police on the child walking alone outside). We have cities and states that prioritize the car over every other means of transportation, which creates unhealthy air, unsafe urban environments, and fractures communities as highways get wider and wider. We have defacto segregation in schooling and housing, coupled with rising nativism, that means if you are non-white, your options for where to live without sacrificing your basic dignity are severely constrained.
I'm not anti-US in a general sense, but I do think the above factors make it a sub-optimal place to choose to permanently settle at this point. The only reason I can see at this point to live in the US is the higher salaries, but once you've got enough where you can choose to forego that, I can't see good reasons to stay.
I have considered that the political party most aligned with my beliefs has made mistakes which have exacerbated the issues in some cases. However, I believe the other party would make things worse in important ways.
As far as my personal politics, no, the things I believe in do not drive us towards this dystopia. I believe in urbanism (including public transit, cycling and other micromobility, higher density, and other related policies), less power in the hands of local police and district attorneys in favor of public safety being managed at a higher level like the state level (including things like putting traffic enforcement in the purview of an unarmed and mostly automated traffic enforcement service), better social safety nets in the form of public health care and better employment protection and welfare benefits, and a few other things.
Many of these problems derive from the structure of our political system. For instance, urbanism is largely impossible in much of the US due to the structure of who determines land use policies, which is largely individual municipalities, where voters are voting in their own self interest (which tends towards keeping their own property values high). Similarly for the public safety issues I mentioned, much of the abuse we see around the country is due to the people with the most power in this space being largely unaccountable to anyone. These things have nothing to do with party, and everything to do with structure.
My house was 0.99 miles (seriously) from my kid's elementary school - the cutoff for bus service was 1 mile, so my kids were classified as "walkers" to elementary school. I went ahead and drove them myself anyway, but the school seemed perfectly fine with them walking 0.99 miles each way every day.
Grew up on a road with an old, weight-limited bridge. Bus stop was about 0.7 miles from my house. Walked there every morning, and walked home every afternoon.
In kindergarten (age 5), walked with older siblings in the morning. School let out before my siblings, so I was on my own on the way home, though I think a parent would come get me most of the time (but not always!) At ages 6-8, had at least one older sibling with me in the morning and afternoon. Ages 9+ walked alone.
I moved around around a lot as a kid, immigrant family & all, but one year we lived in a house whose back yard opened up to a big park with a small playground, 2-3 minute walk from the gate and visible from the porch which I'd sometimes occasion while my parents were busy studying or doing paperwork of some sort and couldn't take me.
It only took 2-3 weeks before some Karen called the cops on me and CPS got involved. The process was insane and honestly pretty traumatizing to both me & my parents. The people were awful. the process was stupid and traumatizing and I suspect the stress it created, and missed work/study opportunites that it resulted for my parents had quite a bit to do with their falling appart & divorce a year or two later.
> Her diversion program required 65 hours of community service, which Wallace completed at an early childhood center. The program mandated that she only work there during the weekends, when there were no kids around for her to endanger.
"for her to endanger"‽‽ The craziness started with the neighbor, continued with the cops, but then also through to sentencing!
What kind of Orwellian dystopia. To protect kids from sex traffickers, you lock up their parents, force them to perform unpaid labor, and then you convince them to confess their sins because they are terrified what the judge might make them do.
Coming from a european perspective this is just completely balls to the walls nuts.
Reminds me if that Danish mother who was arrested in N.Y. For leaving her kids sleeping in a tram outside a cafe window (with her on the other side)
You guys (as a general completely unfounded generalization) live and breathe fear.
Because of all of these news of arrests, cops shooting someone unarmed, or people getting easily labelled as felons or sex offenders, US has become synonymous with "trigger-happy" (literally & figuratively) for me. Are people (and specifically cops) in the US really that quick to judge? Does it depend on the state? Or do these cases make the news exactly because of how outrageous and rare they are?
From what I read online (and I can be very wrong) people are trained for 3 to 6 months in the US and then they are cops. It’s a least 2.5 years, 3 years, or 5 years (depending on your career choice) for police officers in Germany.
I also hear that in Germany you actually require people to know how to drive before you give them licenses. We could learn a few things from you. Cops in the US frequently shoot themselves in the foot, shoot blindly into buildings, etc. Yes, hordes of untrained armed police with emotional problems are a big issue in the US. They are empowered by the knowledge that the legal system will almost never hold them accountable.
Yes, but the tests are cursory. Just drive on the highways in the US and you’ll immediately see that the testing regime doesn’t work. Also, you just need to pass the meaningless tests once, and then can move from state to state and retain your license well into your oblivious years of senility.
Yeah. The test is harsh, but you get really good drivers out of it. Driving in the US isn't bad, but it's noticeably worse than in Germany.
If you want to have fun, compare how many bullets are fired by cops in Germany to how many people are killed by cops in the US. Those numbers have no business being this close to each other.
>Are people (and specifically cops) in US really that quick to judge? Or do these cases make the news exactly because of how outrageous and rare they are?
(With the obvious caveat that I do not claim to represent the entire American population) I think it is the latter. This kind of thing is newsworthy precisely because it gets people riled up (as it should). It is pretty shocking to me as someone who has lived in the US my entire life. As other commenters have said, I also walked to school alone as a kid with no issues.
Kind of. I don't think this kind of thing is typical. However, when it does happen, it's astonishing how many people in the system are just fine with it and go along with it. One neighbor acting badly, or one police officer crossing his boundaries, wouldn't be an issue if the rest of the system (other officers, DA, CPS, representatives in government, etc.) worked and said "this is clearly ridiculous, stop bothering the woman." The crazy thing is to see how, once initiated, the entire system is happy to go along with the farce and the persecution of the hapless individual.
One case I always think about is when a 17 year old sent a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. Then the police went after him for child-pornography (his own penis), and demanded he either give them a picture of his erect penis or they'd inject him with something to force an erection and take it themselves[1]:
> Virginia police have obtained a search warrant to photograph the erect penis of a 17-year-old facing felony child-pornography charges for sexting an explicit video to his 15-year-old girlfriend, the boy's lawyer says.
> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.
> Police already photographed the teen's genitals against his will when he was arrested in late January, she said.
Oh, and one of the main officers involved later killed himself after he was outed as a pedophile[2].
The authorities _eventually_ backed off after the media picked it up and there was general outrage. But it's insane that that's what needed to get people in these systems to stop clearly inappropriate behavior. The fact that the whole system is happy to go along with injustices unless there's a massive public outcry shows how broken things have become.
>Or do these cases make the news exactly because of how outrageous and rare they are?
It's that. I've lived in the USA my whole life in a big city and don't ever think about this stuff except when I'm online. There have been shooting instances in my city, but they're rare enough that I've never been around for them, so again I only think about them when online. The only time I physically feared (a little bit) for my safety was the height of the BLM protests when folks started smashing storefronts in my neighborhood. But that can happen in any country, obviously, and is not especially worse in the USA as far as I know.
I'm suspicious of the story, honestly. What are they leaving out? Searching for her name in google news, the Reason story is the only hit, and since this is the perfect piece to stoke their readers' engagement, I'm skeptical of their vetting. The GoFundMe was created back in September, and you would surely expect at least local news hits in google news by now.
I agree that Reason is pretty agenda-driven, and not really a reliable source of reporting, but I don't think there is a special reason to mistrust this story.
I have represented several hundreds of people in situations like this. This lady's story wouldn't be in my top quartile of stunning injustice. I have frequently called news outlets to tell them about outrageous cases, and stories like this just don't make news. It's not news that there's a child endangerment law in Texas, it's not news that the police make bullshit arrests, and there's not much else here.
The fact that there are no other mentions of this lady and her case on the internet is basically the hobgoblin of my professional life.
Local news? Is nearly extinct, supposedly. Will be in (what's left of it) shortly, as this article posted today. Articles about articles are news, right?
Based on the public info, the locations and stuff check out. In my experience, fakes are usually almost totally fake or unverifiable. I don't think this is fabricated.
This is bad logic. If it was real it would be on google applies only to conspicuous news stories that effect many people or happen to catch the spotlight. There are 338M of us here in the US. I'm sure for all of us there are events that are notable, terrible, extraordinary. People are in accidents, die, are wronged, fail, triumph and most of it never makes the news and isn't available on google. If I search for my own name all I see are far more notable Michael Roses.
This article looks good. I'll read below the fold later, but:
1) It's about federal sentencing, which is not the same as state sentencing.
2) Sentencing is complicated and often done wrong by practitioners. For example, in a situation where harm is greatly divorced from conduct (imagine the kid in this article died on the way home) mom could get 20 years for sure in some states/municipalities.
3) Most practitioners know that the maximum is way higher than the likely sentence, but judges and prosecutors (and sometimes certain wayward members of my tribe) insist on browbeating accused people with the possible maximum in order to procure a quick guilty plea. So I'll (always) accept some blame on e.g. the media for not communicating with reasonable clarity, but this situation where people focus on 20 years is actually the intended state of affairs brought about by prosecutors and judges.
The same thing happens in state sentencing. There's a vast gap between minimum and maximum sentencing. Most sentences fall somewhere in the middle, depending on the details of the particular act in question. (You stole from a little old lady versus stealing from a drug dealer, for example.)
Doesn't that lead to vastly unfair sentencing? For example you could target a specific group with harsher sentences, or use minor crimes to stick people with the maximum sentence. Everyone is guilty of something.
District attorney is an elected office in Texas. McLennan County DA Barry Johnson should be called upon to explain himself to the public.
Chief of Police doesn't seem to be an elected office, but Chief Sheryl Victorian is still accountable to the public, and she should also be called upon to explain the policies of her department and the actions of her officers.
Neither, but crimes like "child endangerment" are always a judgment call with regard to how dangerous the situation is and whether the caregiver's behavior was reasonable under the circumstances.
Does making an 8 year old walk half a mile qualify? In a quiet neighborhood, no. In downtown Waco where the cop's supposed sex traffickers operate, probably still no, but it's getting into more of a grey area. On a highway with no sidewalk or shoulder, yes.
What in the hell has changed in the last few years that suddenly there’s this moral panic over “sex trafficking”? Like somehow it’s become this massive concern recently with no obvious cause - there hasn’t been any indication there’s an increase of it, or that it’s gone unreported or unrecognized before. It stinks massively of satanic panic.
As someone who grew up near Waco: QAnon isn’t the complete explanation, but it’s a factor, along with the frequent screeching about caravans of illegal alien criminals.
It all kind of sloshes around in people’s heads around there.
I'm not sure (correct me if I'm wrong) but doesn't the district attorney have the ability to drop the charges or not pursue the case? If CPS dropped the case, why didn't the DA?
The DA's role to win as many cases as they can. They only drop cases they don't think they can win.
Threatening people with charges if they don't take plea deals is an easy way for them to win. That's what led to a news item last year of some immigrant truck driver getting over 100 years in prison (plus mandatory minimums) because he didn't take a plea deal after his breaks failed and he hit a car and killed some people accidentally.
For anyone curious, the governor commuted his sentence in that case to 10 years, eligible for parole in 2026 [1]. It wasn't a simple accident though - it involved a great deal of negligence at the minimum.
Yeah, I think it's a bit unfair to reduce this to the indifference of DAs. They focus on getting plea deals and convictions because that's what their constituents focus on. No DA wants to squeeze out a plea deal if their constituents are going to be angry & disappointed with.
When the San Francisco DA's office was run by Chesa Boudin, I spoke with an attorney there. That attorney told me that the role of the DA's office was to 'deliver justice', and he was explicit about that meaning they wouldn't pursue all cases they thought they could win, and wouldn't seek maximum sentences they thought they could achieve.
Prior to working for the DA's office, he was a public defender, so perhaps this attitude isn't universal...
> She obtained a lawyer, who told her that if she admitted guilt, she could participate in a pretrial diversion program that would close the case. On the other hand, if she went to trial and lost, she faced a minimum of two years behind bars and a maximum of 20. So she took the plea deal.
Nobody gets their day in court, it's just not worth it. I'd like to think a jury wouldn't convict but would you be willing to take that chance?
Is this state dependent or neighborhood-dependent? Interestingly, my son is 12 and he rides his bike absolutely everywhere. The only ask we have is that he should let us know where he is going and ping us once he reaches there, but he was out with his friends all the time. We seem to be an outlier though since none of his friends' parents seem to trust their kids that much.
Another data point, I have seen more kids playing around in the streets in a working class neighborhood and the richer neighborhoods are empty. These kind of issues seem to come from the more entitled, upper middle-class people who have been primed to be paranoid through crime reporting.
I thought Texas was supposed to be a “free range kids” state. The article even mentions this:
HB567, a larger child welfare reform bill, and clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger. [...] Unfortunately, HB567 amended only family law, not criminal law. This meant the cops were still free to punish Wallace.
The solution is to create a law like HB567, but that amends Texas’s criminal law so frivolous arrests like this one can not happen.
Another thing would be for more states to have well defined laws which give children a minimum age when they can be left unsupervised.
There is no other press about this individual so it's hard to take this at face value without further context.
Nonetheless, I'm struggling to see how the case got as far as it did with her taking a plea deal. In particular, I'd expect that if this went to court and got more press, the DA or whomever is pushing this would drop everything immediately.
Or even before any of that happened, somebody just sort of said 'oh, huh, kids probablyh should be able to walk in a neighborhood on their own, and the police shouldn't arrest a parent for permitting it'
Instead of making sure it's safe for kids to walk outside, police throw the parents of the kids walking outside in jail.
Only in america..
Downvoted ? Really? People agree that it seems reasonable to put parents in jail for letting their kids walk outside ?
I walked to and from school when I was 6 years old, no problem...
If society has degenerated to the point where it's not safe for a kid to walk on the street, then we don't need to make it illegal for kids to walk on the streets, we need to make the streets safe.
You're probably getting downvotes from butthurt Americans who resent the "only in America" comment you made, even though it's generally correct (it seems like some of the Anglophone countries have copied some of this insanity though, to a lesser degree).
This lady needed a better lawyer. That section of law hinges on things being reasonable. Not only did the state pass a family law statute, but CPS determined the case was unfounded. These are evidence that the actions were reasonable.
> But in her pretrial essay, which required her to admit guilt and remorse, Wallace thanked the officers for teaching her how wrong she was to have her son walk half a mile on a warm day in his own neighborhood. From now on, Wallace wrote, "I will continue to grow more as a parent and a person."
This is creepy having to write this. It reminds me of the prisoner of war camp in north korea where prisoners of war were told to write essays criticizing their own position.
insane that she chose to plead guilty, here's the Texas child endangerment law that the prosecution would've needed to prove...
"Under Texas law child endangerment is "any act that exposes a child under the age of 15 to imminent risk of death, bodily harm or physical or mental impairment." The act may be intentional or reckless or may be considered criminally negligent behavior carried out by an act of omission.
For example, a person may be guilty of endangering a child if the child was not wearing a seat belt at the time of an automobile accident. Other acts that may be considered child endangerment include (1) leaving a child unattended in a motor vehicle, (2) driving while intoxicated with a child in the automobile, (3) hiring a person with a known history of sexual offense as a child care provider, (4) serving alcohol to an underage driver, (5) leaving a young child unsupervised or in the care of another young child, (6) unreasonable corporal punishment resulting in bodily injury, (7) leaving a young child unsupervised in an unsafe area, (8) leaving handguns within the reach of children, and (8) and failure to report suspected child abuse."
"unsafe area" is so broad and vague that who knows what a jury will deem unsafe enough for a conviction.
And you've got to remember that neither the arresting officer's actions nor the DA's actions were objectively reasonable, so why make any assumptions about whether the jury's actions would be objectively reasonable?
Holy shit. What did I just read?! Both the article and the comments in here describe some insane society that seems to come out of a dystopian nightmare. Neighbours calling the cops on each other for nothing and getting kids’ mothers arrested. Kids having to be supervised at all time. Police pretending like they never played outside when they were little. Wtf is wrong with the US?
Wow, I live in Berlin and both my daughters (7 and 11) go and come back from school on their own, since they are 6 yo.
The oldest one takes the U-Bahn (Underground) to school and the bus to attend her hobbies. Often we send one of them to the nearby supermarket to buy last minute stuff.
I like to think that I'm helping them to be independent and aware of their city.
I'm confused. I also "still didn't know it was illegal" after reading the article. What was the crime? Were my parents guilty of this every time I road my bike around the neighborhood as a child? In the street, no less.
Is there actually a law against children walking 800 meters from their home? If this was the law in the rest of the world, I think most parents would be in jail.
It looks like a lot of the EU crowd have jumped in here with the usual US sucks, everything about the US is crazy. Just to give some perspective, I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia and the kids in my neighborhood are always outside, no parents in sight, riding their bikes around, going down to the creek etc... Same was true when I lived in upstate NY. The US is a huge country and comparing Texas to other parts is somewhat like comparing France to Poland.
If it's any consolation I think we are seeing the flip side of the occasional "EU is gonna outlaw the Internet" thread that happens whenever a new regulation is proposed/implemented.
There is a legitimate issue but the situation overall is much more nuanced.
Man I walked home every day while in school about a mile or 2 (depending). I even took the bus. I hope my mom doesn't get the death penalty for this at the age of 75.
I walked this distance every day to school as a second grader and so did many other second graders. I crossed major roads, though there were crossing guards at some but not all intersections. This was 30 years ago.
Today I spend time in Poland. It is normal for elementary children to walk to school or play in parks unsupervised in major cities.
Even Texas seems to have lost it. What a sad and sorry state of things.
When I was 4, I decided to visit my mom. I knew the general direction, so I went few kilometers along the road until some driver stopped and took me. It was not an ordinary situation, but not a big deal either.
I went to school at 7 and everyone including me walked the way (around kilometer) every day forth and back. Around this age I regularly took bus to visit my grandparents who lived on the other side of the city. I remember that I slept in the bus once and went off in an unknown area and spent next 3 hours walking around until I recognized the area and found a way back.
When I was 12, I hopped on train and went to another country to visit my father. I spent a week in the train. Of course my mom asked some guy who happened to be in my cabin to watch over me. He was drunk almost all the time with some random girl who stole his money in the end lol.
Not a big deal. People are too protective about their children nowadays. Children are pretty capable when they're not watched over all the time.
This is why I like living in a neighborhood that isn't suburban and doesn't have nosy neighbors bothering you. Sure there's more loud noises like cars and motorcycles and parties, and there's a few more rusted out cars in yards, but I wouldn't trade my neighbors for 100 upper-middle-class yuppies who get into your business.
The solution is obvious: the kid should have been armed. The neighbor would not have approached him, and he would have been able to defend himself from predators.
Reason exists to flog stories about our terrible government overlords, and they've been caught pushing bad info in the past. This doesn't even report info that is publicly available in the arrest report and court plea!
I'd strongly recommend waiting for a general news organization like the local TV station to report this first before forming too many opinions.
Checking the GoFundMe page, I see it has a recent update: "Here is the news writeup that a journalist published about Heather's story. Let's get this viral!" ... which links to -- yes, you guessed -- this reason.com story.
There don't seem to be any other corroborating reports to be found. Make of that what you will.
I live in continental Europe, where kids being out is total chill pretty much everywhere. I remember being 10-12 y.o. going alone to school (15 min walk) every day, and hanging out with folks playing soccer until dark in the summer (~10PM).
While the US seems totally out of place with those laws, it seems UK is not far away. My brother's kids are 10 & 13 y.o. and it's real problem every time they have school vacation (several times per year), they must stay home all day because guess what, parents don't have unlimited vacation, and they're scared to let kids go out to play alone, not for something happening to them, but for someone noticing and reporting it. It's nuts.
On top of its overall surreal basis, this case once again highlights why I can’t take the USA justice system seriously. Guilty plea shouldn’t exist in a civilised country. When you had plea bargaining, what you get is a mockery of justice.
Is there anywhere in the world where people still practice "free-range parenting" — I can't believe there even has to be a term for that — on a cultural level? Where being a "helicopter parent" would be seen as ridiculous and uncouth by the locals? A community that's intentionally trying to set things up in such a way that their kids can be given historical levels of freedom to roam?
I know about the Nordic countries, but they still don't hold a candle to even how free kids were all over the world up through the 1970s.
Maybe some kind of cultural enclave? Maybe a tiny island nation? A commune? A cult? Anything?
I live in Canada, and that's where my experience comes from. Argument refuted! :P
But to be serious: yes, I've been outside of North America. I've been to Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, and a few other places. None of them are as bad as North America is with this expectation/nigh-on legal requirement of helicopter parenting... but they're all still far worse than what basically-everywhere in the world was like 50 years ago.
To be clear, my expectation for a place that is better, isn't just that kids there can walk to school on their own; but rather that kids in such a place would be allowed — and enabled, by considerations of forestry and wildlife management — to just walk/bike out of the town or city they live in to play and have adventures in the fields and parks and maybe a little bit of thornier wilderness around them, all on their own, for hours at a time. A.K.A. "just be home for dinner."
That's really how things used to be! Recently enough that anyone over 50 can tell you stories about their own solo wanderings of forests and mountains and streams as a child, in search of bugs to catch and birds to watch. Anyone under 50, though? Not so much. Not even younger people from supposedly rural areas in supposedly developing countries (that I've talked to, at least) have had a chance at this kind of youth. They might go out exploring — but parents insist that it be done with a group of friends, that they stay in cell-phone service range, and a dozen other things that mean that they have zero opportunity to clear their mind and actually take in nature for even a single minute.
If you really do insist that "most of the world" has this opportunity, though, then maybe the particular set of countries I've visited (and the people I've talked to on my travels) represent a bubble of experience? I think the countries I've visited have all been Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth nations. Maybe that's the common factor? Did the Brits invent helicopter parenting and then carry it with them wherever they went?
> to just walk/bike out of the town or city they live in to play and have adventures in the fields and parks and maybe a little bit of thornier wilderness around them, all on their own, for hours at a time. A.K.A. "just be home for dinner."
It sounds like you've never been to Japan. It's exactly like that here.
>I think the countries I've visited have all been Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth nations. Maybe that's the common factor?
I feel like the Anglophone nations have all been following America's lead in many ways.
As a Canadian this is like a story from some 3rd world country. I remember frequently walking to school that distance as a kid. It wasn't abnormal nor dangerous. That it would be "illegal" is some crazy stuff.
I was born and raised in a 3rd world country, this doesn't happen over there. Kids are pretty independent from a young age and learn to take the public transport at like 7 by themselves..
From what I can gather, Europeans doesn't have this issue either.. This kind of insanity is only an American problem AFAIK.
>As a Canadian this is like a story from some 3rd world country. I remember frequently walking to school that distance as a kid. It wasn't abnormal nor dangerous.
I'm American, and grew up there several decades ago. I also walked/biked that distance to school as a kid.
Things in America are completely different from those times. That's one of the big reasons I left.
so in merica, in land o da three, parents get thrown in jail for letting their kids walk alone? meanwhile here in scary eastern europe every non-rainy night i cant go sleep because apparently its ok that there are kids all over the place playing unsupervised ... you know ... having fun ... being kids ... not dogs on a leash
This is beyond disgusting. I hope they have the legal standing to file a massive lawsuit against all involved.
One of the first things that popped into my mind is the likelihood of psychological trauma of that child who, effectively, sent mom home and destroyed her career and family finances due to his behavior (which led to the "go have a walk" decision).
I also have to wonder if the parents relationship with their kids --particularly the mother's-- was permanently damaged by this incident. It's like your kids became radioactive and anything you do can land you in jail for 20 years if you are not careful. This has to be horrible.
Frankly, I would probably give serious thought to leaving the country and starting over somewhere else. Living an entire life with such a dark cloud over your entire family cannot be easy.
I understand protecting children. However, I also understand common sense. What she did was not wrong at all. What everyone else did was horrifically wrong beyond any possible justification. They need to get justice. I hope they do. I also hope her record is cleared.
BTW, this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. I remember other cases from many years ago:
In the meantime in Switzerland we've been summoned to the school to get a stern talking to. We have learned that our 7yo is too old to not walk to the school on her own.
> A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless
We need to name and shame this awful person who couldn't be bothered to walk the kid the half mile to his parents' house and have a human conversation. They need to be held accountable for the impact of their actions. Otherwise more people will do this.
And this is why you never, without any exception, make any sort of statement to police. It does not matter how friendly they appear, a police officer will NEVER be asking you questions for your own good. It's unfortunate we have a police force so corrupt and despicable that this needs to be our policy, but we do.
>She obtained a lawyer, who told her that if she admitted guilt, she could participate in a pretrial diversion program that would close the case.
I deal with similar worries every day (obviously not to same extent). I pick up one kid at school, then drive to after school care to pick up another. The second location also has a hockey rink and the zamboni drops their snow in the parking lot so there are snow piles 365 days a year. I let my 8 year old play in the piles while I go in and grab the other kid. I figure one day I will come out to someone wondering why this kid is playing alone.
The problem is CPS/DCS. They are a lawless organization that can take your child at based solely on their feelings at the moment and not from "probable cause", "reasonable suspicion" or any of the other standards that police are generally held to. In practice that means any neighbor can report anything they don't like about your parenting and it will be acted on just because a child is involved. This leads to the parents with the most strict and overly protective and cautious parenting strategy having their methods enforced by law since they can report anything they are a little uncomfortable with in other's parenting.
Why have we decided that the legal protections granted to us are only sometimes good? Why have we built in this loophole where if an accuser says the magic word "child" to the authorities they can remove our rights? When a kid is involved simply asking for a lawyer to help you understand your rights can be seen as trying to restrict access to the kid and can result in them being taken by CPS.
Please read the article before responding. The article says, quite clearly, that CPS dropped the case within weeks and that Texas family law was updated, so CPS cannot even bring cases like this against parents.
The problem is that Texas's criminal law was not updated, and the cops/prosecutors made the parent pick between a crime that had a 2-year minimum prison term OR taking a plea for 64 hours of community service (and other things, like writing an apology letter, etc).
This wasn't a CPS problem. It was a cop abusing their authority and a prosecutor who didn't drop the charges. Plus a hugely abusive plea system in US criminal cases (which is a whole huge discussion in its own right).
Thank you for pointing that out. I did not mean for my comment to be interpreted as being about this single instance. My intent was to comment on the general sentiment I was seeing in the comments that the US culture has turned to be an overly protective and restrictive environment for our children. I'm sorry I didn't make that clear.
I'm afraid that I've become hesitant to call the cops even when an intervention is required (e.g. minor theft, a person is walking around disoriented, etc.), for fear that someone will get shot or beaten or otherwise have their lives ruined. I don't want to think that way. It's why I think ordinary cops shouldn't carry guns.
Willing to bet there’s more to this story. From the article:
> Heather Wallace's oldest son, eight-year-old Aiden, was driving his two brothers crazy in the car as they all returned from karate one afternoon in October 2021. Wallace asked Aiden to walk the rest of the way home—half a mile in quiet, suburban Waco, Texas—so that he could calm down.
It’s not like the kid was happily strolling a mile home from school or the park. The article is downplaying the situation.
Sounds like she kicked her kid out of the car, and I have doubts that went down peacefully. She was probably angry and her kid was probably crying and panicking. From the neighbors’ point of view it probably looked very cruel, and perhaps even dangerous depending where he was left. (Many suburbs are polluted by “stroads” which have no sidewalks and lots of traffic.)
Granted, a felony seems extreme, even if the Mom was raging at the kid. But I’d want to hear the neighbor’s testimony before offering my sympathy.
What a sad society we live in when kids can no longer do things that were perfectly normal for ourselves as kids because of some stupid neighbor and abusive police / CPS.
As someone with elementary school children, I'm much more worried about police/CPS overreach than kidnappers. All I can say, is TG I don't (and never will) live in Texas.
> The result of the indictment was that she had to perform 60 hours of community service
I see a lot of discussion about who is at fault. Everyone sucks here, but my first question is who is this judge that did not throw this out in 2 seconds?? Cops, DAs, neighbors' bad behavior is one thing. Like what.
As a parent of three young adult kids, all I can say is WTF.
My kids were allowed to walk, scooter, and tricycle around our block from the time they were five years old. They were allowed to walk into town, as long as they were with at least one friend, from the time they were eight.
From sixteen up, as long as they were with a group of at least three, they could take the train into NYC.
When my son was sixteen, we put him on a bus with one friend (also sixteen), for a five hour bus ride to Boston so he could go visit his sister at college, and so his friend could visit her sister at college.
And this mom got arrested because he kid walked a half mile on sidewalks to get home?
In our town, there are no busses for the middle school, the kids walk, some of them over a half mile, every school day.
American suburban culture is embarrassing. Cities should be filled with kids living their own independent lives. Look how dutch cities are built and it's clear to see why dutch youth are the happiest and most free in the world.
When I was 8 I used to ride my bike all over town and was out from morning to evening on weekends. Are we really at the point where a half mile walk through the suburbs with sidewalk the whole way is considered dangerous?
It's puzzling that there don't appear to be any other likely-neutral accounts of this case. Nothing in a local paper or local TV news. No essays or posts. Zip. The case is a year old.
The only thing is the gofundme page linked in the article.
That's so insanely crazy.
In Switzerland it's normal for kids as young as 4 to walk few hundred meters alone to kindergarten (if the kid is courageous enough) even in the urban city center.
Richard Branson, in his autobiography, tells a story about his mother asking him one day while she was driving, if he thought he could find his way home from where they were, which was miles away. He got out of the car, his mother drove off, and he walked home. He was four years old.
like 30 years ago, when I went to elementary school. i literally went there by foot. a little more than one kilometer. alone. in winter it was dark - and cold. my parents being divorced and my mother being a yoga teacher giving classes in the evening I even had to to the breakfast myself. as far as I can tell I turned out alright. I have to wonder - what changed - is this "everything was better back then" trope really just a trope?
My mother-in-law, also from Waco, took a bus alone to Fort Worth, changed buses, and continued on to Witchita Falls. All at age five.
For all of our nation’s ills, a child walking on his own block outside is a crime that warrants this extraordinary attention? I can’t believe the family didn’t sue the county.
Offtopic: I'm seeing a trend of titles that, as a non native English speaker, always confuse me and take me a good couple of seconds to finally understand. This is one of them. It's like they use a comma where I would expect an "and" to be. I wish I had more examples to show, but I have seen a lot here in HN. Is this some new editorial style or was this always used?
When you write a list of items, such as, "one, two, three and four", you use commas instead of "and" or "or" between each of them except the last so people know whether the rest are "and" or "or". In this case, "or" doesn't make sense so the comma means "and".
It’s a common style of telegraphic English used in headlines. In normal prose we would write “handcuffed and jailed”. I don’t think the style is new. In fact, as a native speaker, I also sometimes have to read headlines three times to figure out what they mean.
I walked 7 miles to school every day, both ways, some uphills, some downhills, sometimes to karate, sometime barefooted, and sometimes in the snow … literally.
Now, I am fearless.
We don’t need to be scaring our kids into cowardly submission if they are trained in common sense and defensive protection.
This is yet another example of how f*ked up the US is. People are punished for being decent parents while lunatics still have the right to own guns. Land of the free indeed.
After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
Keep in mind that Reason.com is essentially an anti-government institution, for which such stories, often presented with an extreme slant or selective take on facts, are catnip. HN's own archives will show many instances of similar articles:
CPS closed the case, the DA didn't so the woman pled guilty to child endangerment and lost her job.
There's a bit more than "After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded." if you actually read the article to the end.
That said I agree with you that Reason is a bit biased.
Consider reading the article before you spend multiple paragraphs criticizing the source, because the actual outcome was that Heather Wallace is now barred from her career field and is considered a danger to children.
Also, for all of your hand wringing over the source, you failed to realize that this is original piece by Lenore Skenazy, probably the most well known advocate for the free range kids movement, and she has not only contributed to Reason, but also the NY Times, WaPo, the WSJ, NPR, and PBS, among others.
Blindly criticizing a source without either reading the damn article or caring about whether the piece was from an original source is incredibly intellectually lazy.
I had read the article, and cited material from it.
I'm not familiar with the author. Though I note that her principle publishing outlets both appear to lean strongly Right-Libertarian: Reason and the New York Sun (founded by Conrad Black), per Wikipedia.
My point about Reason's slant and bias remains. If the story has legs, it should be available from another publication.
government has gone way too far ... kids need the freedom and independence of exploring their neighborhood and surroundings ... when I was that age all the kids in town would travel as a pack sometimes riding our bikes 10 miles to the next village with our dogs running at our sides ... I do not buy the Oh restrict to save them mentality ... when gov imposes what has happened here it kills the future of our kids
Well I need to show this to my mom, who made 8-year old me ride my bike back to school (2.5 miles, admittedly on some busy roads) to retrieve my forgotten homework.
My four year old does scrambles and hiking trails to several mountain summits in our area. We get looks on the trails but he's very capable and loves it.
I can't explain it other than the media creating moral panics for decades because that's what gets people's attention. At one point the fantasy becomes reality and shapes law enforcement. When it gets really sad is when grownups do things to protect kids that are actually more dangerous. The classic example being driving them everywhere when the number one danger for any child is a car crash.
Under no circumstances do you ever talk to the police, child protective services, or any government official.
If you're being investigated, always communicate through an attorney.
Government workers operate with the apathy of any person at a regular job. They almost never think they're making the wrong judgements, and they can and will lie to you and misrepresent you in court.
I can only imagine the horrific consequences if she were Black. 1) Children would have probably been placed in foster care regardless of the father's presence. 2) would have probably been tased or shot because she would have rightfully mouthed offed and "resisted". 3)Would have been portrayed as a delinquent parent by the media.
I am not going to let my 8 year old walking alone, even in a safe neighborhood. You never know what is going to happen. If the bad 0.0001% happens, you will only live the rest of your life in regret and pain.
I think is a symptom of a larger problem - that kids today are treated like mindless idiots generally.
Adults today seem to increasingly act like kids are unable to do practically anything independently, and worse, they act like they can't be trusted to anything of any importance or with any level of risk. And I'd argue that attuite is having an effect on our children because they also seem to be less independent and less capable than I remember me or my friends being when I was a kid.
I suppose a good example of what I'm talking about was couple of years ago I was at the park with my family and one of the children we were with dropped a ball in the lake. As you can imagine he was upset so instinctively ran over to us crying about losing his ball. My girlfriend's response was to ask me to get his ball back, but in my opinion this is exactly the kind of situation kids should be encouraged to solve on their own. And more importantly that adults should give kids room to solve with supervision.
Before I continue, it's probably worth noting that this lake was very shallow and the only real risk here was him falling in and getting a bit muddy, and in any case we were about 10 meters away so nothing bad was going to happen. Given this I said to him I wouldn't get his ball, but that instead I'd come over with him and help him find a way to get the ball back himself. So we went over to the ball and I asked him to come up with a plan to get the ball back himself and within a few seconds he found long stick and fished his ball out.
In my opinion the only reason he didn't get a stick and fish it out to begin with was because like most kids his age he's been encouraged to see himself as helpless and incapable of solving his own problems. This wasn't a capability or safety thing, it was purely an issue of mindset.
I've told this story a few times before and it's interesting to me that a lot of people (including my girlfriend) think that what I did was irresponsible and have told me to stop encouraging stuff like this because I'm going to get the kids hurt. And I think that's part of the problem. As a society we tell ourselves (and each other) that we're bad parents if we put our kids in any danger whatsoever. But I think this comes at the cost of our children being less independent and less resilient.
If I recall correctly Richard Branson has an interesting chapter about this in his book, Losing My Virginity. In his case I think he talks about how his mum would kick him out of the car as a kid and make him find his own way home to teach him how to be independent and self-reliant. I'm not sure I agree with what she did personally, but it's interesting that Branson seems to attribute a lot of his success to his mum and how she raised him.
Hey, as with everything it's worth considering all sides. This exact scenario happened and the result was quite a nasty cut. Now you might say this is an essential part of childhood, but it was pretty bad.
Not sure how I feel about putting kids through it, though. I feel like much worse could have happened. I think he might have needed stitches anyway. What if he needed surgery?
I think they had a terrible lawyer. I also don't understand how a reasonable legislator could add "drug use in the presence of a child is an offense".
Also there is an affirmable defense since they were on the way home from Karate if the walking could be affirmed to be part of that practice. "He was cooling down from karate practice".
> It is a defense to prosecution under Subsection (c) that the act or omission enables the child to practice for or participate in an organized athletic event
Full Text:
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Sec. 22.041. ABANDONING OR ENDANGERING CHILD. (a) In this section, "abandon" means to leave a child in any place without providing reasonable and necessary care for the child, under circumstances under which no reasonable, similarly situated adult would leave a child of that age and ability.
(b) A person commits an offense if, having custody, care, or control of a child younger than 15 years, he intentionally abandons the child in any place under circumstances that expose the child to an unreasonable risk of harm.
(c) A person commits an offense if he intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence, by act or omission, engages in conduct that places a child younger than 15 years in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.
(c-1) For purposes of Subsection (c), it is presumed that a person engaged in conduct that places a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment if:
(1) the person manufactured, possessed, or in any way introduced into the body of any person the controlled substance methamphetamine in the presence of the child;
(2) the person's conduct related to the proximity or accessibility of the controlled substance methamphetamine to the child and an analysis of a specimen of the child's blood, urine, or other bodily substance indicates the presence of methamphetamine in the child's body; or
(3) the person injected, ingested, inhaled, or otherwise introduced a controlled substance listed in Penalty Group 1, Section 481.102, Health and Safety Code, or Penalty Group 1-B, Section 481.1022, Health and Safety Code, into the human body when the person was not in lawful possession of the substance as defined by Section 481.002(24) of that code.
(d) Except as provided by Subsection (e), an offense under Subsection (b) is:
(1) a state jail felony if the actor abandoned the child with intent to return for the child; or
(2) a felony of the third degree if the actor abandoned the child without intent to return for the child.
(e) An offense under Subsection (b) is a felony of the second degree if the actor abandons the child under circumstances that a reasonable person would believe would place the child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.
(f) An offense under Subsection (c) is a state jail felony.
(g) It is a defense to prosecution under Subsection (c) that the act or omission enables the child to practice for or participate in an organized athletic event and that appropriate safety equipment and procedures are employed in the event.
(h) It is an exception to the application of this section that the actor voluntarily delivered the child to a designated emergency infant care provider under Section
What? If this draconian policy is happening in Texas, the land of the free, can I assume it's even worse in the rest of North America? I hope Texans are up-in-arms about this government overreach.
It's frustrating because these kinds of overreactions are based on a perception that crime is much worse than it is. At the same time, the perception that these kinds of incidents are common is itself wrong. Both false perceptions are caused by the "man bites dog" effect, where the media reports what is interesting, and media consumers therefore overestimate the frequency with which these unusual events occur.
This kind of incident is NOT NORMAL. I have lived in various neighborhoods in Austin and a midsize city in Michigan, and kids walking or riding their bike around the neighborhood are common. The same is true of relatives' neighborhoods in Wisconsin, Arizona, and California.
> the perception that these kinds of incidents are common is itself wrong
I also thought this was extremely rare, but then when I posted about it on FB a friend commented that it had happened to them. Not as extreme as in the article, but still very traumatic for the family.
I don't think Texas or any other conservative state that touts "small government" in practice really practice this in any substantial way, especially as you start looking more locally.
You should generally assume that if something is happening in Texas that the other states are better, not worse. The government here is about as hyper hypocritical as it can get and no one actually cares about government overreach except when it has something vaguely to do with guns.
In dark blue WA for example this isn't really a problem nor are there any laws on the books prohibiting it.
It happens all over the country, which is why Texas is one of a handful of states that has an (apparently ineffective) law against it. Quite literally 30 seconds of Googling turned up egregious cases in Florida, Massachusetts, California, and Maryland; I haven't found Washington State yet but I feel reasonably confident I could with some more effort.
Hyper hypocritical is one way to put it I reckon. I'm more inclined to characterize it as an extreme, out-of-control right-wing sh1tsh0w at this point in the state's modern history. Born and raised Texan with very deep historical roots there ...
Meh, you're quoting their own press release at that point. It's like someone telling you they are a genius. If it isn't obvious, such that someone feels a need to tell me, then I'm pretty skeptical about the truth of it.
I read it as probably sarcasm, but no, in practice conservative state governments like the one in Texas like to micromanage your life (who to love, what you do with your body etc.)
> "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'"
Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.