Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile | Hacker News Reader

Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

reason.com

759 pointsleephillips726 comments

> 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.

> 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.

>> > 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.

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.

Youtube keeps suggesting https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit to me. In many of the videos the officers just make up what they think the law is.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Curious how the justice department has decided the solution to sex trafficking is to make walking outside illegal…

Texas is so insane. SO INSANE

>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.

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.

> but there's a group of people who see children playing outside of direct parent supervision as a categorically dangerous activity

We can broaden that a bit to: “There’s an ever growing group of people who think they can and should be the arbiter of other people’s behavior.”

Everyone needs to learn to mind their own fucking business.

My son is expected to walk to and from school without parental support once he starts kindergarten.

We don't live in the states.

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:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310218/time-spent-using...

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.

This, unfortunately, mimics my experiences. No idea when or how it happened, but it is noticeable

> My children have had the cops called on them for playing in our front yard.

Where do you live?

Whenever I read these stories it feels like I live on a different planet from everyone else.

Is there some type of penalty/law for intentionally using the police to harass people?

Kids from the project/poor neighborhood in metro cities still do this to a dangerous extent. I dunno what's a good balanced approach ..

We basically jail our children at this point.

It was like this when I was in high school as well: There is no place where young people are allowed to gather and explore their personalities.

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".

> smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.

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.

"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.

“we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats”

no you didn’t you were just too afraid to tell her to fuck off like any normal person would do in that situation

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.

Don't forget about the child safety services/social workers - they should have to be reasonable too.

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.

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 had neighbour, who lives across the street, call the police because my dog barked when he walked up my driveway. We weren't home at the time.

He called because there was "an animal in distress."

We pulled into the driveway just as an RCMP officer was arriving "on the scene."

She entered the house with us, petted the dog, and rolled her eyes. And "closed the file."

The dog was doing its job.

Asshole neighbours (even in Canada) are a real problem.

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.

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.

This is very common. We used to get harassed by old farts and security when we lived on a golf course.

One came up to our back door ranting and screaming, and my dad had to tell him to fuck off.

> 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.

She probably “didn’t cooperate”… “she wouldn’t lift her sack and spread her cheeks, so we took her to jail.”

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.

> 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.

The same type of person who likely is on the HOA board for their neighborhood in order to create their own pathetic little fiefdom and sense of power.

Half the problem, no? The other half being the police.

> 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.

Interesting that her child actually told a stranger where he lived. No real street smarts in Waco children cause it's too safe, I guess.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I walked 2km every to and from school, albeit in a small rural european town. Sometimes when the weather was bad parents would come to pick me up.

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.

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.

Please consider donating what you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...

> 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.

I’d even kick in a little to file a civil suit against the neighbour.

There could have been multiple calls.

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.

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.

Car-centric Suburbanization is the root of almost all problems faced by the US today.

Of course, nothing is monocausal. But if it were, that faulty would be 'car centric suburbia'.

Here's a really good video on this exact topic: https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw

When I lived in Manhattan I didn't know any of my neighbors. It's more cultural than it is environmental.

I don't have anything to add, this is just a really important point.

Japan has entered the chat...

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.

A recent podcast episode from 99% Invisible explores this contrast in societal norms:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/

They've even made an adorable Netflix show out of the concept - "Old Enough".

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.

I was wondering how many comments I'd get through before see one such as yours. Japan always comes up when these things happen. Glad to have you here.

Maybe people in America have gone off the shallow end and bonked their heads.

Japanese parents reading this story: "???"

Fox news will do that

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.

Your kid is 3x more likely to be struck by lightning than kidnapped. Literally.

> 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.

People are downvoting you because the one in a thousand number is off by a few orders of magnitude.

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.

First of all, "one out of a thousand" is grossly wrong.

And yeah, of course nobody wants that, but you can't take away a healthy part of growing up because of that.

You think that 0.1% of kids are kidnapped while walking?

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.

We do get some information from the other side.

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.

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.

Current DA looks to be Barry Johnson: https://www.co.mclennan.tx.us/282/District-Attorney

Not sure if he was the DA for this case.

*Yes I'm fully comfortable publishing a public link for a public official.

> 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.

Cops do a lot of persecution. They don't do prosecution though (unless they decide to be judge, jury, and executioner that day.)

DAs don't have cases to prosecute if cops don't make the arrest.

Cops don’t prosecute cases, they definitely persecute though.

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.

Interesting, isn’t Texas a state with laws to protect “free range parenting”?

https://www.treehugger.com/children-protected-reasonable-ind...

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.

"We can have freedom for them to play outside if we only live in a rural area (...) where the politics of everyone nearby will be opposite our own."

Have you ever considered the remote possibility of your politics being the reason behind the dystopian future you see arising around you?

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.

Weird country where kids can’t walk a mile alone.

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 did the same from the age of 7 and I turned out fine you know.

> 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.

As an American I can also say this is completely balls to the walls nuts.

As an American I can also say this is completely balls to the walls nuts, AND NOT SURPRISING IN THE LEAST.

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.

>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.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/virgin... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/cop-who-wanted-t...

>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.

Have you ever looked a prosecutor in the face and just said 'what the fuck, dude?' when they pull something stunning like this?

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.

Something that makes frontpage on Hackernews certainly should be newsworthy and not seeing other media or bloggers pick it up is a little surprising.

This is ridiculous, kids can (and should) be a little bit independent. It was in his own neighborhood. And 20 years in prison as a maximum punishment?

Popehat has a good article on maximum sentences and why "faces a max of x years in jail" tends to be nothing like the actual probable consequence.

https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

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.

He is referring to federal sentencing.

If the kid is going to spend 30 minutes unsupervised anyway, why not bump it up to 20 years?

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.

https://www.co.mclennan.tx.us/directory.aspx?eid=185

https://www.waco-texas.com/Departments/Police-Department/Chi...

Which one of them has "and decide which laws are too stupid to enforce" in their job description? :/

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.

[1] https://www.fox29.com/news/truck-driver-rogel-aguilera-meder...

That's not actually their role. It's not what we pay them to do.

It may be how they view their role, and it may be how their incentives line up.

But it's not actually their job. I bet you know this, I'm just clarifying.

"The DA's role to win as many cases as they can."

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...

Yes, but that is not in the DA's interest unless there was political pressure to drop the case.

What about our interest? We pay that DA's wage!

We paid, and pay, the wages of everyone involved in locking that woman up - the police, the prosecutors, the jail staff.

It shouldn't take forming a political action group to fix things like this. That DA is unfit for purpose, his interest be damned.

> 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.

Most of my daughters' friends do the same.

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.

What kind of neighbourhood isn’t safe for an 8 year old to walk 800m? This makes me sad.

The neighborhood was safe, but the cop made the strawman argument that the kid could've been kidnapped for a sex trafficking Ring Downtown

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.

I don't want to be one doing the "Don't Trust reason.com to report news" schtick, but...

The only independent verification I can find on this story is a GoFundMe launched by a relative: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...

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.

Reason has a bias for the stories it chooses to cover, but I can't find any examples of it misreporting a story. Can you provide any?

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?

Have you never been outside the US? It's only the US that's like this.

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 think you have it backwards. This kind of nonsense doesn’t happen in third world countries. (Other kinds of nonsense, for sure.)

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

For parents here that want to see local US laws:

https://letgrow.org/resources/state-policy-maps/

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:

https://www.google.com/search?q=parents+arrested+for+kids+wa...

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.

Fuck this.

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.

> It's why I think ordinary cops shouldn't carry guns.

And neither should ordinary people, generally.

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.

Realistically, it's a Texas cop. They talk a big game but when the rubber hits the road, they're going to be hiding.

The most accurate model is that this cop is terrified of the kidnapping gangs himself. Which is why he is unable to enforce anything against them.

Consequently he enforces where he can.

Gosh, that sounds like the police in Uvalde…

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.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...

An that plea links back to the Reason article.

There's a big overlap between the plea on that page and the Reason article.

It's possible there's more going on here than meets the eye.

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.

My 8yo walks half a mile from the bus they took across town.

Are there really that many kidnappings in the US? (Let’s say, compared to some other relevant risk such as being run over by a car).

A list of outrages by authorities worthy of a failed police state.

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.

Here's John Taylor Gatto telling the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tEE8XoC0c

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?

This was regrettable and it shouldn't have happened. It also reflects a sort of safety-above-all note in the zeitgeist that's also regrettable.

But I want to point out that the reason you're all rubbernecking is that it's unusual. Mostly, this just doesn't happen. Mostly people are reasonable.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't help the lady with her gofundme and try to punish the other adults involved, though :-)

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.

This pisses me off. When I was 8, I walked several miles to where my mom worked after school let out. I wasn't the only kid who did this!

Right now, my neighborhood is a mile and a half from an elementary school. I see the kids that age walking to school.

There is ZERO reason for this to have happened.

I would sue the FUCK out of everyone who had a hand in this.

My grandfather was born in Waco, had a paper route when he was 7 and hauled ice to factory workers when he was 11. All of which he did by himself.

My dad was also born in Waco and spent his latchkey days roaming the neighborhood and nearby pastures, complete with BB gun and pocket knife.

Amazing how society can evolve in a few generations.

Meanwhile, a 5-year-old boy becomes one of the youngest people ever to hike the Appalachian Trail (2200 miles).

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.

I can understand that one person here and there will have a misappropriated sense of justice - we all have our weaknesses and odd perspectives.

What I don't get is how this could be systemic, or, that other reasonable minds within the system would have such awful judgment.

These kind of stories make me feel like the western world has failed and we should start over

Totally ridiculous. Again, police officers going over the top and making it up as they go.

WTF. And here I am annoyed that my 7 year-old son doesn't want to walk to school alone?

This is just so wrong. She needs to sue to make a stink and get it removed from her record.

My kids' bus stop (in Florida) is half a mile from the house. This is absurd.

She should be writing Governor Abbott about a pardon. He was just up for re-election last week and might have jumped all over this for the publicity.

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.

Let's look at the outcome of this case:

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:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reason.com>

I've no doubt that government overreach and overreaction is a Real Thing. But please, Reason is an entirely unreasonable exponent of such views.

Let's find better sources, please.

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.

My own mother (God rest her soul) made me do this for harassing my brothers. And I totally deserved it and learned my lesson.

I recommend Free Range Kids to parents.

And to observe how the French raise theirs.

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.

> Heather Wallace plead guilty to child endangerment and can no longer work with kids.

The real mistake was pleading guilty. She should have gotten better representation...

Something else is up here... If I may be allowed to speculate, perhaps she went full Karen on the police, and they got reactive.

Wow, this officer and the rest of the justice system ruined their family. Their tax dollars at work!

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.

man my kids walk home 1 mile from school on a daily basis, am I gonna get arrested?

This happened in Waco? These folks need their Texas cards confiscated.

If ever there was a bastardization of "justice"...

Horrifying. I would like to see this brought to Governor Abbot's attention.

ah yes, the limited government/personal responsibility state of Texas

Great system of policing ya got there. How you gonna pay for it?

Waco, Texas. Why does that city sound familiar? Oh, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

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.

Can't tell if you're joking. I hope you are

Long thread, anyone posted the brass eye episode yet?

This is fiction to rile up comment sections right?

Wow, this story is straight out of Black Mirror.

This is a joke right? April Fool's right?

Land of the free

Could the parents sue the nosy neighbor?

so the shitty karen neighbor should also get arrested right for letting the kid continue on his walk home?

There's a societal cost/risk to this coddling of youngsters that is probably much higher than the risk reduction of this mentality.

America is insane. Seriously insane

Did they mean 5 years-old.....

America is so fucking stupid

The USA is a strange land.

land of the free, home of the brave.

I guess parents can decide not to vaccinate their kids or have them wear masks that protect others, but can't decide to let them outside?

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?

The article links to the penal code.

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: -----

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

Texas.

> Waco, Texas

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.

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.

I'm an American and my first reaction was "of course this happens in Texas"

That state has a lot of distortions and issues. The only "freedom" that exists is around ensuring the NRA keeps making huge profits.

Apparently, except when you have to "think of the children", in which case they will go full Kim Jong Un on you...

...is happening in Texas, the land of the free...

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.)

No. It’s fine in other places.

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