391–400 of 763 posts
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.
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.
Because there was no kidnapping or sex trafficking going on, they were just making shit up.
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What part of "Child services had the family agree to a safety plan" makes you feel that CPS is blameless here? It seems like they wasted two weeks of this family's time and added a ton of unnecessary stress, before even figuring out if the complaint was warranted. That seems deeply dysfunctional, and violently at odds with "innocent until proven guilty"
That was only while they investigated (which I'm fine with). It's annoying but it's NOT a CPS horror story.
> 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.
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How could CPS possibly know that before they investigate?
It seems to me that if CPS immediately and preemptively puts you under a punitive regime like this (what happens if grandparents don't live nearby or just aren't alive? Oh well, not their problem I guess) for merely being reported, then it is a highly effective vehicle for harassing neighbors you don't like.
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This strikes me as crazy. Every interaction with any human or inanimate object bears the risk of death, it's just so low it's not worth thinking about it. U.S. police kill about ~1000 people per year, and the vast majority of those aren't at all questionable. If there are 330,000,000 people in the U.S., that's 0.000303% of the population per year. Each person has, on average, maybe 10 contentious police interactions…
Okay, sure. What are the statistics behind TFA; how many moms are getting jailed for their kids walking to school? Should anybody care?
But no, you should not "care" in the sense of worrying about it happening to yourself. The probability is so small it's not worth it, along with an infinity of other freak occurrences.
I don't know what TFA is.
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Your kid is 3x more likely to be struck by lightning than kidnapped. Literally.
>According to statistics cited by the NCMEC, most missing children are abducted by relatives or parents It's safer to be around strangers than relatives, when it comes to kidnapping.
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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'm baffled as to why her attorney advised she take the plea deal.
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> 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 neig…
When I write software, I know that users will do dumb things and it is my responsibility to write my code in such a way that they can cause no damage. The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
Occasionally, we see well meaning policies going astray - the "must arrest someone" domestic calls in jurisdictions are a contentious-but-great example. Sometimes calls get put in spuriously and now someone must go to jail for a relative non-issue / non-altercation that a neighbor called in.
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...and really, CPS does need to investigate. Yes, most often it's just a nosey neighbour, but every now and then those nosey neighbours are on to something, and while unpleasant for the families, missing that one case is the horror story they want to avoid.
You can't just say the ends justify the means, without actually working out the price you're paying. Otherwise, we should be OK with the government monitoring us 24/7 so that they don't miss any terrorists or child molesters. What proper Good Thinking citizen would possibly object to Big Brother watching them, after all? When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standa…
I wasn't suggesting that the ends justify the means. I'm simply speaking to the realities of the situation. However, from an ends justifying the means perspective, if you're not going to investigate, there's little point in hearing the case, and more importantly in people making the call in the first place.
"When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint."
We do have a higher standard of evidence for that power to be invoked; that's what applied here, and why CPS ultimately passed on this one. If anything, the bar is generally pretty high, and you can get away with some pretty dastardly things with the odds of CPS taking any kind of "family destroying" action very low.
> Otherwise, we should be OK with the government monitoring us 24/7 so that they don't miss any terrorists or child molesters.
I think that's unreasonably slippery sloping this story.
Sure, there are horror stories about CPS being overzealous, but this isn't one of those stories. I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring... and CPS obviously wasn't worried about terrorist or child molesters in this case.
It's a hard problem to get right. There's a LOT of really bad stuff going on (estimates are that 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse or neglect at some point). No matter how you do it, families will be destroyed and children will suffer horribly. However, the system errs on keeping families together, which is what you'd want. Given that bias in the system, engaging in at least a lightweight investigation is entirely reasonable.
> evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.
I encourage you to look at the data on this. It's one sided.