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The day I left my son in the car

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Re: The day I left my son in the car

#161

Post by darklajid »

anigbrowl wrote: post #155
darklajid wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Track down the car owner - Call about the kid - (Optional) Visit owner (grandparents) in person and take an official statement - Drop the case And what is the danger we're protecting the child against here? People seem to like the 'baked in car' setup. You seem to fancy the 'kidnapped wholesale with car' idea? I mean - your neighbor is taking the kid to the car, and gets back in (probably forgot a thing). 30 sec la…

Again, the situation with my neighbor (someone I know well enough to trust my kid with) is completely different from that of seeing a stranger leaving a kid in a car in a shopping mall parking lot. The fact that you need to change the facts of the situation to make your point should be a clue to the inherent weakness of your argument. Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (e…

Aha! My argument is weak because your neighbor is more trusted than the general public.

Read that again.

Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person?

If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is shouted at, throws itself to the ground and needs to be carried, etc. etc..

It's not my argument that is weak (my example might be crap, if you happen to really like your neighbor. But that also means that you missed the point of my post though, inserting real persons wasn't part of the thought experiment and is entirely irrelevant).

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#162

Post by Nogwater »

joeframbach wrote: post #38
encoderer wrote: post #24

I once left my puppy beagle in the back of my car, windows cracked, while I ran into the restaurant to pick up takeout. I was not in there more than 5 mins. When I got out, started to pull away, and was stopped by a cop who then called animal services. This level of nanny-state-ism drives me slightly crazy. But the real issue for me was the person who decided s/he needed to call the police (the police for this). If i…

I once called animal control when I saw a dog in a car, in a hot parking lot. This dog was barking and running around the car. I waited in my car's A/C for 5 minutes before calling, just to be sure I wasn't overreacting. When I got through to animal control, I was told that the dog was not in distress. A dog in distress would retreat to a cooler spot of the car (near the passenger side floor) and not jump around bark…

Apparently it's hard to tell the difference if you're untrained. Seems like calling for help if you are concerned about the safety of a dog or kid is reasonable, even if it means you could be wrong.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#163

Post by mentat »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #72
encoderer wrote: post #24

I once left my puppy beagle in the back of my car, windows cracked, while I ran into the restaurant to pick up takeout. I was not in there more than 5 mins. When I got out, started to pull away, and was stopped by a cop who then called animal services. This level of nanny-state-ism drives me slightly crazy. But the real issue for me was the person who decided s/he needed to call the police (the police for this). If i…

To be fair, if I'm a passerby and I see a dog with the window cracked open, I have no idea how long he's been there. Calling the cops makes sense, they're the ones paid to made the judgement call and animal control should have the training to diagnose whether the dog is in distress or not. Whoever made the call chose to err on the side of caution out of humanitarian concern, not to get your goat or ruin your day. Sou…

So we're not responsible for making judgments and we should now call someone paid to do it? Really?

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#164

Post by mentat »

tptacek wrote: post #82
IanDrake wrote: post #44

Seriously, this is my number one reason for not having kids. For the younger crowd who may not understand, I was born in '77: - I rode in the back hatch (no seats) of my dad's corvette until I was 8, cops would wave to us. - At 6 I could ride my bike around pretty much anywhere I wanted, but wasn't allowed to cross rt6 (which I didn't, though no one checked). - Left in the car in parking lots for up to an hour. - Arr…

Putting children in the seatless back hatch of a Corvette was probably not a great parenting call either. Not everything that used to be S.O.P. for parents was good judgement. Not every safety concern we've developed over the last 20 years is wrong. Some of them are very valid.

Risk minimization as an overriding strategy is fundamentally flawed as it is never complete. It also appears that people are really bad at understanding the costs for very small benefits.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#165

Post by anigbrowl »

nickff wrote: post #138
anigbrowl wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent The second half of your premise contains two completely unwarranted assumptions. How exactly were the police supposed to know the now-departed child was a) safe and b) with his parent? Recall that the Mom who wrote the piece was driving a vehicle that wasn't registered to her and so therefore didn't match the description on the registered owners'…

The police would have been completely justified in assuming that a parent had taken the child, and that the child was safe. Abductions (especially unreported ones,) by strangers are so uncommon that the officers would have to be suffering from acute paranoia to believe that a stranger had abducted the child.

No they wouldn't. The police are paid to check those things out, not to make facile assumptions. When they are the license plate they would have noticed that the person they saw in the video was not the registered owner of the car. That was absolutely something worth following up, which was why the author's mother found a police car waiting for her when she returned from dropping her daughter off at the airport.

The probability of a crime occurring is not the only factor that has to be taken into account here. There's also the severity of the possible criminal outcome. Kidnapping is actually relatively common in the US by international standards, and it is among the most aggressively prosecuted crimes. Until 1972, kidnapping was a capital crime, ie you could get the death sentence for it.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#166

Post by IanDrake »

anigbrowl wrote: post #157
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article appears to indicate that the person capturing video saw the lady leave and return. It is not clear if the video was rolling the entire time but certainly as the video-taker was giving the video to the police, they may have mentioned that the same person who left the car also returned. I don't see why the police would be more worried about an abduction in this situation than in any other "person with child…

Because the person in the video doesn't match the description of the registered owner of the car as recorded on their driving license. Think about it.

I've thought long and hard about it... Still makes no difference.

For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves.

I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids and only 1 in 10 of those steal cars. So there's only a 2% chance of that happening at once!

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#167

Post by anigbrowl »

darklajid wrote: post #161
anigbrowl wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the situation with my neighbor (someone I know well enough to trust my kid with) is completely different from that of seeing a stranger leaving a kid in a car in a shopping mall parking lot. The fact that you need to change the facts of the situation to make your point should be a clue to the inherent weakness of your argument. Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (e…

Aha! My argument is weak because your neighbor is more trusted than the general public. Read that again. Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person? If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is sho…

No, your argument is weak because you changed the facts to fit your narrative.

Why? Why would a random parent

Yet again, the assumption of parental status based on hindsight. The police who answered the 911 call at the shopping center had no way of knowing that the author was the parent of the child in the car, and given that that person did not match the description of the registered vehicle owner, such an assumption would have been entirely unjustified. In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.

Downvote away, but every single argument you have posted in this thread is built upon hindsight bias.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#168

Post by anigbrowl »

IanDrake wrote: post #166
anigbrowl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the person in the video doesn't match the description of the registered owner of the car as recorded on their driving license. Think about it.

I've thought long and hard about it... Still makes no difference. For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves. I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch ki…

Considering the possibility isn't the same thing as leaping to the conclusion. It's not like the woman was pursued, arrested, and thrown in jail before she ever got near the airport. Rather, the police did the sensible thing and followed the matter up by checking with the owner of the vehicle that was seen in the parking lot.

Are you saying that if there's only a 2% chance of something odd being a criminal incident, they should just blow it off?

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#169

Post by scotty79 »

tptacek wrote: post #144
notdonspaulding wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you don't flag down cops for parents driving their children down the road , which is the bigger risk to their safety.

That's not true , but the fact that you think it's true is one of the reasons I find this article so off-putting, because the article tries its hardest to set up that bogus comparison. I want to say something here about the base rate fallacy, but I'm too tired and impatient to figure out how to articulate it.

I don't see how would base rate fallacy apply if you compare child death rate per hour of being driven around and per hour of being left unattended in a car.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#170

Post by DanBC »

anigbrowl wrote: post #125
DanBC wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approaching a young child who has been left alone in a car is foolish in today's paranoic society. Also, the returning parent is unlikely to be grateful to the comments of "I was just making sure your left alone child was not dying".

The person was near enough to spot the child and take a photograph, so they could have remained at that distance and call the police if they feel it's necessary, not least to advise the returning parent/guardian that the police were called. In that case the police would probably have arrived and written a ticket or something. Although this would have involved a delay and frustration for the temporarily unattentive pa…

Your firs para: could you imagine the situation where you tell a parent that you called the police because you were worried about their child? That's not an easy conversation.

I agree that people should report early and report often; and allow experts to make decisions. Sadly, reporting early and often just swamps people who are already far too busy dealing with children who are being abused, or it dumps reports with police who take action when they don't need to do anything more than have a chat.

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