Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone

I've lived in dangerous places. North Americans take very few safety precautions. In general:

  * People aren't aware of their surroundings. Often have headphones.
  * People wave phones around in the air, hold them loosely, or leave them dangling out of back pockets.
  * People use public ATMs, in insecure locations, and don't pay attention to machine safety or who is nearby.
  * People will walk down a street with no one on it without increasing their vigilance level.
  * They carry no cash to hand over in the event of a mugging

As far as child safety goes, they were never at much risk in public from strangers then or now. I'm prepared to be proven wrong by stats on that point, since I haven't looked it up, but IIRC most crimes against children are done by family or people the child knows.

CPS is responsible for things like foster care, finding if parents are (truly) neglectful and abusive, helping teach ignorant parents how to not kill their kids accidentally, and other related things. In most of the work they do, it is just due process - Our society has decided that when a parent goes to jail, or is ordered into an institution, or what not, and does so while caring for children and having no backup means for caring for those children, we shouldn't throw those kids out on the street and hope they survive.

In the case of neglect and abuse - it's apparent to people trained to find it (even in clear cut cases) but not as often noticable just by a quick glance: A common tactic of abusers is to hide it to the outside world, and scare the abused into lying about it - cops are trained to handle one situation, CPS investigators are trained to handle this different one. (Much like we have forensic accountants investigate financial crime and homicide detectives investigate murder).

When cops overstep and murder random people - the response is "well they have hard jobs, and they are trained to be safe", but when CPS oversteps and asks some uncomfortable questions, its "busybodies". Why does no one say "well they also get kids into homes rather than putting them on the street, and they see a lot of horrible abuse cases and are maybe a bit overcautious"?

Do you in general disagree with the notion of specialization and division of labor, or is it a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that "government" is doing it?

Why do you want to automatically shut down an agency that does a lot of good, because some bureaucrat is overstepping (or legally mandated to do so, whatever the case may be)?

On a more serious note, the size of the state is enough to pretty much force people to own cars/drive on a daily basis. At least that's been my experience.

I think everybody feels this way. I have a hard time imagining that anything but the vast majority of parents would agree. So that makes we wonder if there is some agenda behind this? A gas lighting effect maybe? People would say "well things may not be ideal where I live, but at least it is not like over there", and so they are less likely to act to change things locally? I don't know, maybe I'm just being paranoid.

> * They carry no cash to hand over in the event of a mugging

Can you elaborate on this point? I'd be surprised if thieves thought, "Jeez, nothing to steal from this one, I'd better at least stab them or I won't have done anything wrong..."