Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk to Dunkin' Donuts

Meanwhile, the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.

So I guess it all works out!

Here's what she/I meant (she's also super annoyed that I'm bothering her with "nerds fighting about nonsense on the internet"):

The gist of her argument and paraphrased: "The problem is that CPS is by necessity anonymous. It's not that people aren't being punished for reporting false claims, it's that if you really wanted to catch everyone who was reporting false claims then you would have to make them present some form of identification. What if this is about a legitimate case of abuse from a scary motherfucker? Someone might not report because they don't want to realistically be murdered by said scary motherfucker. Also, the communities that have the most problems with child abuse also have a higher number of people who do not want to interact with law enforcement for a number of reasons. There is a trade-off with any situation that requires anonymous reporting."

Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that that would absolutely disincentivise me from reporting anything - some process I'm not privy to decides it was a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a very high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that's what you want, only something that's too heinous to ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an insane suggestion that there's a link there.

I feel that what you are saying is true, but I know that this would result in a system where the wealthy and connected would then run amok while their honest accusers sat in prison.

How about if we instead simply make the investigation process less threatening and terrifying, particularly at initial stages? For example, in the linked article, it's insane that the investigator required that the mother return to therapy because she'd been to therapy in the past for a bout of depression.

The actual problem, with the responsibility being laundered by placing it on random busybodies. Maybe have a system where anonymous denunciation doesn't lead to trauma and misery.

An ugly person.

Some parents get very, ridiculously caught up in the excitement of their kids' sports, and a very small number go too far. I have seen parents fighting in the stands at 10U football games (10 and under). I have heard parents screaming at coaches threatening to sue them. I have seen parents mocking and degrading the opposing team's kids. I have seen parents encouraging taunts and chants from the crowd to throw off a pitcher or a quarter back. I've seen a nasty, abusive man ejected from a high school building entirely for cursing and screaming at opposing kids. And of course we had CPS called on us.

It's only a very small percentage, but they really ruin the experience for everyone.

My brother in christ 3 years old is a bit young to hit the tables.

The government is a very, very scary thing. Because I'm disabled, I've had many encounters with the faceless and all powerful hand of the government, sometimes it feels like they'd want a medical certificate just to allow people like me to keep breathing. But paradoxically, I believe in a fairly strong government, I think it's best to have an organization at the top which is explicitly defined to serve the need of the people, rather than whatever would rise to the top in its stead. As long as one remains aware of how terrifying the government can be and is willing to go out and throw a few bricks at government buildings. I think it's served us well, comparing my country to the rest of the word.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_protective_services#Hist...

The stories of abuse and neglect were hair raising, and our kids had their own fair share before they came to us.

CPS exists as an alternative to cops doing this kind of work. When done right, they are compassionate and understand how to deal with kids in a variety of sm high stress situations. They do evaluations. They take kids out of homes safely. They do transport to foster care or elsewhere. They evaluate potential adoptive families.

When all done right. We know some fabulous workers doing incredibly hard work here.

We also know it’s easy to abuse the system, and they could use a lot more checks and balances.

Most families are good to their children. Foster homes only get the worst: most kids never go to a foster home. That means kids that are harder than normal to care for and thus their parents are also also going to get frustrated (in fact they often have: many kids in foster homes the parents just need a break), and in turn means the foster parents will face the situations where they are more likely to lose their temper in a bad way - but the real parents have likely done the same. There are also kids who are abused by their parents, and that abuse is likely to make those kids worse than normal kids.

As a parent I can assure you that taking care of normal kids is hard. I know other foster parents: enough to know that foster kids are even harder. Most foster parents are doing the best they can, but the job is a lot harder than normal kids.

> Society tends to observe almost any mistake of parents as reasons to remove children.

This really varies from location to location (and definitely varies based on race/ethnicity and culture of parents). Where I am there is such a shortage of foster-homes that they really push for in-home services over removing the child.

The only near-universal thing that will get a child removed is if the child themselves directly report physical abuse.

> Which brings is to harm. Removing a child from a home can be life altering dramatic.

Agreed; if the child wasn't traumatized before being removed from their home, they definitely are afterwards.

> Even if a child experiences some abuse they may also experience love in a home.

In my experience neglect is actually far worse for the child than physical abuse (though it's not like abuse is sunshine and rainbows). Each child is different, but given a child who was beaten for minor infractions and a child who was often left strapped in a car-seat for an entire day with a sippy-cup and a box of cereal, I'd wager on the latter having more issues.

Sexual abuse has its own, separate set of issues that this margin is too narrow to contain...

'Imagine' is a nice pre-amble to a strawman: that didn't happen.

What did happen is ridiculous, and regardless of the citizens having a very indirect say in the laws that get made to make them first cause rather than the police officers (and their immediate superiors) is - frankly - ridiculous.

I really wonder why you would bend over backwards to find excuses for something like this, it doesn't pass the beginnings of a common sense test. Having your parents arrested because you're walking on the streets as a child makes zero sense, no matter what the law says and no police officer with half a brain should make that arrest. Arrests are for criminals, worst case if they really wanted to test the law they could have simply cited the parents and then they'd have their day in court, this is simply a power play of the very worst kind.

Oh, and it is 'scapegoat'.

The fact that charges were never brought means that the law very likely wasn't written in a way that a reasonable person would believe a crime had occurred. Certainly the DA's office did not believe a crime worth indicting had occurred.

FWIW, I'm not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm simply withholding judgment, which (hopefully) is more neutral.

But, that's probably true in mid eastern and western countries.

Father of 5 here and you are fully correct. Our kids are not meaningfully safer with constant supervision - and by mandating it, we're knee-capping their ability to develop problem solving skills.

My kids are very very little now, but it's something my partner and I discuss how to handle in the future. We live in a typical suburb now, but we're planning a move to the city for several reasons. Counterintuitively, we think this will provide our children more freedom to grow. Our impression is that police authority goes unchecked in the suburbs, while the city resists police overreach (sometimes).

(If this incident had happened in Yugoslavia, or something similar with unjust police harassment, would anyone have heard about it on the news? Of course not.)

Unless the EB was radically different from the rest of 1970s Earth, nothing.

In the US, pre-1980s kids knew not to take any kind of abuse to the police. At best they'd be gaslit or outed to their abuser (who was commonly family). For most of LEO history cops (who reflected society in general) were not there to protect kids. Perps certainly knew this.

Source: We kids talked to each other and figured out reality pretty fast.

Arguably the most painful aspect of survival in our late-stage capitalist society.

I guess this is polar opposite: the situation is like this because kids are not allowed outside. Since kids are not allowed outside, you build "suburban sprawls": rows of houses with literally nowhere for those kids to go even if they wanted. And then you transport them directly to school and sports with a personal car. So the kids do not have interaction with other kids, because they are neither allowed to nor there is a field to play in. Naturally the other parents don't know the kids further than immediate neighbors.

The twist is that now the infrastructure is suddenly lone-kid-hostile.

And how do we contribute to it ourselves? Lately I've been wanting to be intentional about getting involved, getting to know people, etc. I came across this blog post on the topic from HN a few months ago: https://www.seanblanda.com/its-time-for-localism-in-america/

All other developed nations have big, urban areas where people don't know all their neighbors, yet they don't have this weird problem America has. I live in Tokyo, the most populated metro area on the planet, and I see little kids riding around on their bikes, by themselves, at night. Little kids riding the subways to places far from home, by themselves, is perfectly normal. I've also seen kids walking by themselves in Europe.

This is uniquely an American problem. IMO, Americans are simply paranoid.

I have no issue with my kids (8 and 9) playing outside alone provided they don't venture out onto the thoroughfare street. My concern is with irresponsible and inattentive drivers, including residential construction traffic.

For police to come and arrest parents for trusting their children with some basic freedom is unbelievably oppressive. It's bizarre to hear this coming from a country that once claimed to be the "land of the free". And this is hardly the first story like this.

I think this is the root of it. Before the advent of mass media, you would hear about crimes if those crimes happened to people you personally know, but probably not otherwise. Rare crimes were rarely heard about and therefore people had an intuitive understanding that those crimes were rare. Mass media changed all of this. The most rare sort of crime is the most newsworthy because novelty sells newspapers. So the media has people fixated, worrying, about very rare sorts of crimes and this has made the general population much more irrational about rare crimes than it ever was before. Journalists may sometimes say that their job is to inform the public, but very often they induce a perception of reality that is less accurate than what people would have formed on their own with no journalist around to make a huge deal out of freak rare occurrences.

In the US, flashing a PBA card[0] or the fire department/ambulance alternative will get you out of most of what police consider ‘low-level’ infractions(ie. Covering a license plate, speeding, etc…).

Or in less corrupt cases(like the ones I unfortunately have used mine for), it gets the cops to leave you alone or listen to you when you get profiled for no good reason.

I guess it’s technically not a bribe since no money is exchanging hands, but last I checked, each PBA card raises ~$150/year for the police union.

[0] https://www.the-sun.com/news/4212777/what-is-a-pba-card/

Also: I've seen this many times, foreigners from rich countries get completely different treatment.

It's not that it's impossible for me to manufacture an illegal gun for myself. What's the point of doing that? I'm not a criminal. I don't plan to overthrow the government or anything like that. Why risk getting a criminal record for no gain?

I don't mean to be rude, but this phrasing makes you sound like an addict trying to work out if you can smoke banana peel to get high. You can just .. not have a gun for a bit on holiday? Rather than engaging in illegal activities? Heck, several countries have tourist hunting industries! (The tourists do the hunting, not hunting the tourists)

Turkey is a much freer country than the US. If the people of Turkey were to enjoy seeing their leader (Erdogan now) being ridiculed, this guy will be showing in circus shows.

We have a uniquely-bad electoral system, which is why so much of this day-to-day stuff ends up so insanely dysfunctional compared to most other developed democracies, and we've had mass-media special interest propaganda running rampant in a way it doesn't elsewhere, since the 80s (loss of the fairness doctrine—which, admitted ickiness aside, did seem to keep things on the rails a bit—and deregulation of media outlet ownership leading to unprecedented, extreme levels of consolidation; hard to tell which of those is most responsible, since they both happened around the same time) and that propaganda's able to be unusually effective in part because of our bad electoral system.

The result is that as long as factions in favor of these shitty things can stay under one of the two big tents, they get the tacit support of all the rest of the factions under those tents, even if most of them don't like that first group of factions. "Of course civil forfeiture's bullshit, obviously it is... but I can't vote for a pro-choicer/communist/whatever!" et c. (and, yes, the effect is on "both sides"—it's why we hear a ton of noise from "no abortion ever!" and "zero restrictions until the baby takes its first breath!" while the majority of voters, who just want more-or-less what Roe guaranteed, get little attention)

So, our freedom to vote is even, arguably, quite a bit less-free than for a fair proportion of our peers, since our ability, in practice, to express our actual desires through the electoral process is much more curtailed than in most of them—though, obviously, that part doesn't apply to authoritarians states.

This is possible in most of the developed world. You don't have to have the peculiarities of the American concept of "freedom" to have this one. Someone in Norway gets to enjoy both healthcare and being able to make mean comments about the Prime Minister.

People are flocking to all kinds of places you are apparently not aware of:

> Saudi Arabia is among the top five immigrant destination countries around the world, currently hosting 5.3 million international migrants in its borders

That's just one example even though this one is probably not the "feel freer" type. There are others.

Republican controlled states don't want people's votes to count, so none of them have passed the bill.

Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to vote for one party regardless of what they or the other party does, of course neither party is going to bother catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you will always buy apple products, then complaining that apple doesn't address your grievances.

And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.

If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.

That's the case of every state which is away enough from swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential elections.

Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few months every 4 years.

[0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter

More generally, any single-winner election system is prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%. This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy" Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly my whole life.

Additionally, the US' kinetic operations in the Middle East have shrunk substantially as the drone strikes have been substantially curtailed, again under the same president that recently extracted the US from a long-running foreign war. He got no credit for that either; it turns out nobody in the US really cares very much, and even the people who generally disapprove of US foreign military involvements don't seem excited to give credit to the current guy.

The US has always ping-ponged between loving foreign wars and hating foreign wars. Not having a reliably anti-war party is not great, but that's at least as much the fault of the voters.

> He had zero due process.

Are you saying that Chinese law wasn't followed?

People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).

A lot of things were worse, but a lot were better. You're definitely not going to be arrested or harassed for letting your kids walk alone. Not sure how good their record is for actual child abuse (bad cases would make the news, so there was some enforcement).

While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists, and I believe many more were impacted from the latter than prevented from leaving that country.

No one is disputing things can get really bad in those countries. It's more about probabilities. One thing that becomes very clear in the US if you poke around: It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges, and I know plenty who faced them (some convicted). The number of people I knew in the authoritarian country who had a criminal record? Miniscule. Raising my kid here, the chances of him getting a criminal record is significantly higher here than there and is a source of worry.

And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.

And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).

> someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great place to live?).

Classic false dichotomy.

That's in addition to the hard-to-quantify harm to freedom from having to worry about terrified, trigger-happy cops.

Got half a mind to research it and write a book about whatever I find....

Actually that semi quote is typically used in relation to the Spanish civil war and it's an old lady saying "the anarchists were certainly a weird bunch, but they did make the trains run on time).

Also the correlation between harsh punishment and lower crime rates is dubious at best. The US has harsher penalties than most other Western democracies, but higher crime rates. This applies in particular to murder, where the rates are higher despite the death penalty. To add some anecdotal evidence, the only place I was ever pickpocketed was in Shanghai (where punishment is extremely harsh) and I have visited places like Nigeria which has a much less functioning law enforcement system.

It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here. And if they were, then it would do a whole lot more to dissuade other police officers than any official department policies.

And that is exactly what qualified immunity keeps from happening.

That's not how the courts have treated it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1047085626/supreme-court-poli...

> In practice, the doctrine has shielded officers from liability in hundreds of civil cases, even when accused of destroying property, killing innocent people they mistook for suspects or stealing thousands of dollars.

(I would presume stealing thousands of dollars is forbidden by most department policies.)

(I live in Boston. The accent is crazy.)

Not trying to agree/disagree but just sharing what I noticed.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/free-range-pa...

A curious mind would encourage learning more about something you likely have had no real world experience with.

How is shooting at someone crossing a border illegally reasonable use of force? It's a nonviolent offense that doesn't harm anyone directly.

Maybe I don’t understand the distinction you made then. If you can’t distinguish them legally, then what is the difference you’re talking about? Are you saying that well-being is safety, and police can and should be able to arrest people & parents for failing to be well?

There is an article that describes what happened, which included the department officially stating the event was over-reach.

Maybe some people do think children shouldn’t be allowed to walk outside, and maybe those people are causing us to raise children ill-prepared for adulthood. I did not question whether such people exist, what I questioned is your conclusion that the existence of such people suggests the police were justified. The police should not be those people, and they do know better institutionally, even if individual officers overstep. The U.S. police force has no legal basis for threatening or arresting parents when kids are unaccompanied, there’s no law requiring parents to accompany kids, whether or not there is concern for their well being. Which is why their department admitted they made a mistake…

Whatever his intentions behind that statement, that’s what someone on a power trip would say. Not in any way caring about the content, just the utterance of another word would have caused her arrest and the kids taken away.

Forgetting the fact that someone was already arrested as is. For this.

This is prime epitome of a power trip and it amazes me to see someone try to defend it as anything but.

Yes, I've witnessed this first-hand. My wife and I had our then-nine-year-old niece for the afternoon; we took her out to do a few things, played in the pool, ate dinner, and then took her back to her mother's house. At one point, she wanted some ice cream. Well, sure, why not. We happened to be very close to a grocery store and handed her some money and told her to go inside and get whatever flavor she wanted.

She kept saying we had to go with her, that there might be someone waiting to snatch her. It took a surprisingly long time to convince her that a small grocery store with one customer entrance/exit that we were immediately in front of represented the lowest imaginable risk for something like that. But, in the end, she went in and selected and bought her own ice cream.

By her age, both of us were riding our bikes without adult supervision (but usually with friends) to places a mile or so from the house to get - you guessed it - ice cream (or milkshakes, or whatever). I have read Ms. Skenazy's stories before, and knew how bad this was intellectually, but that was the first time I actually saw just how damaging it is to children to be raised as complete dependents on adults. If you're afraid to walk into a 1960s-size grocery to buy ice cream at age nine, how in the world are you going to be prepared for the maelstrom of your teenage years, let alone being an 18-year-old college student on their own?

It got them to back off even though they had the order in hand with the judge's signature.

Going by the percentiles here https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-data-2016.p... they are indeed below the Verbal and Quant medians, Writing is unclear. Overall it does not come close to the "literal moron" bar, especially since they are presumably aware that Quant skills are unimportant for the field so they don't need to focus on it much.

(You shouldn't read this as a fixation or totem: there are plenty of other problems in this country. But it isn't a coincidence that aggressive deurbanization/suburbanization is closely tracked by increases in isolation, which in turn is tracked by a decline in personal trust[1].)

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/the-state-of...

We're still not a safe country on an absolute scale (relative to our economic and social peers), but our cultural histrionics around crime are unsupported by the actual trendline.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270

All the places I played alone as a kid: the playground, the rural creek, the open fields. It was inconvenient for adults to snitch me out from there. Not so anymore.

Police training is garbage, and the police community is pathetic.

What makes me loathe it now is I can see the psychological impact it has on others. I won't name names, but I've known a fair share of women who got into the new wave of true crime content and have significantly skewed views on men as a result. Women should be well aware of what a man is capable of and what to do to mitigate risk, but true crime content can create this picture that more men are criminally capable than is actually the case. Simultaneously, entirely from the women I know who watch true crime, I hear views suggesting that the common man is too weak or incompetent to intervene and stop bad men, which is also not representative. I'm only being vague here because if any of these people happen to read my comments, they'll know I'm talking about them, but others won't know.

Some may disagree with my perspective, but it's my honest impression. I've seen women in my life who are family members and colleagues get into true crime content and notice their views shift as a result. If it's said that porn can damage the views that men have of women, surely it's not such a large leap to believe that watching women get victimized over and over again by a small minority can impact one's views on men without even realizing it.

[1] https://mynorthwest.com/3777835/rantz-brutal-bat-attack-susp...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10447987/Prolific-s...

The average cop probably quals once a year with his glock 19 and spends the rest of the year stroking it thinking about how he's billy badass because he has a badge. You can watch the videos, any real resistance and they go back screaming asking for 10 of their buddies to do the spray and pray. When they were hunting Dorner they were even unloading full standard mags on random trucks just loosely fitting the description and still not managing to incapacitate the occupants.

  LAPD officers were guarding one of the officers on Dorner's manifesto hit list on Feb. 7, 2013 when a blue Toyota pickup truck allegedly matching the suspect's vehicle drove up to the scene. Police opened fire and aimed at least 100 rounds at the occupants of the truck who they mistakenly believed to be Dorner's.


  Two women were delivering newspapers on Feb. 7, 2013, when LAPD officers guarding the Torrance home of a target named in an online manifesto blasted at least 100 rounds. Margie Carranza and her mother, Emma Hernandez, were wounded and rushed to local hospitals. Carranza suffered a minor bullet wound, and Hernandez was shot twice in the back and reported in stable condition.