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

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

#431

Post by indrora »

ch4s3 wrote: post #61
monological wrote: post #24

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.

In Seattle and some of its extended metro, 10yo kids on the bus isn't uncommon.

There's packs of them that transit their way to local skate parks near me.

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

#433

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

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

#434

Post by tsol »

psychlops wrote: post #184
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The fact that the system can force people to plea guilty, be found to be wrong-- and there's no way to undo that. That's more the system running us than us running the system

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

#435

Post by spfzero »

pessimizer wrote: post #373
andromeduck wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those "nosey neighbours" are why these stupid rules exist in the first place

No, child abuse is why these rules exist. They may not be calibrated well because they overreach from prevention to prescription (from telling you how not to treat your child to telling you how you should treat your child), but they're a necessity. The first people to decide that child welfare was important were anti-animal cruelty organizations, so any protection for children is new and not at all obvious or intrins…

I think humans discovered child welfare was important long before there were any organizations at all.

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

#436

Post by pdonis »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #406
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

Well, I personally believe that the logical outcome of libertarian thought as it regards kids is that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder…

Your claim about the logical outcome of libertarian thought is wrong, because it fails to consider a key fact: the child is there because of the parents' choice. They chose to bring the child into the world. Or, if they adopted the child, they chose to do that. And when you make that choice, you accept the obligations that come with it. There is nothing in libertarianism that prevents people from making choices that come with obligations that they must accept. The only thing libertarianism would be against would be forcing people to raise children they did not bring into the world or did not adopt.

There are edge cases, such as a woman becoming pregnant against her will (rape, for example); but those are edge cases and don't change the basic principle.

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

#437

Post by sokoloff »

yucky wrote: post #393
fluidcruft wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was only while they investigated (which I'm fine with). It's annoying but it's NOT a CPS horror story.

Anybody who thinks parents being prevented from being alone with their own children for 2 weeks due to an unfounded complaint, is far too comfortable with authoritarian government. That sort of thing can cause irreparable harm in the development of the children as well, causing trust issues and fear of government to be deeply ingrained.

I don't think that the ends justify the means, but the outcome of having people have more fear and mistrust of government over-reach is at least a thin silver-lining.

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

#438

Post by vkou »

libraryatnight wrote: post #117
Arrath wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> > 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 made me sick to my stomach to read. We're down a very dangerous road these days with FUD.

You're just getting a few glimpses of what less-than-affluent communities have been eating from the police for a very, very long time.

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

#439

Post by csours »

monological wrote: post #24

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.

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.

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

#440

Post by woodruffw »

rootusrootus wrote: post #424
woodruffw wrote: post #139

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 an…

I've lived in the city, and I currently live in a suburb. I know a lot more of my neighbors here than I did in the city. And my neighbors know my kids. On top of that, the sidewalk is filled with kids going to & from school each day, and it's noisy all afternoon as they run all over the neighborhood riding bikes and playing. So I get that you want to find car culture to be the root of all evil, but I don't buy it.

"Evil" is not the world I would (or did) use. And as I said: there are lots of places that buck the trend; I'm glad you live in one.

For every place like yours, there are suburbs like the ones that most of my friends grew up in: ones where everybody drives in and out, where sidewalks exist primarily as a vessel for dogwalking, and nothing can be reached on foot (parks or basic living amenities).

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