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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

#651

Post by giantg2 »

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.

"causing trust issues and fear of government to be deeply ingrained."

Is that actually a harm, given the evidence?

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

#652

Post by fanatic2pope »

SoftTalker wrote: post #462
kelseyfrog wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a vast Californian suburb dominated by single family residences built in the 90s. The homes are priced around the median for the area. The residents are split about 50/50 politically and racially plural. The majority are married and earn ever so slightly below median income. It's about as average as you can get. Note: I looked up these stats to make sure I got them right. They are mostly at the voting preci…

Move to a sane state. I live in the midwest, in a smaller town. You still see kids playing in the neighborhood and parks and running around. Kids walk and bike to school. Nobody would call the cops over a kid walking by himself unless he looked to be lost or in distress.

I live in suburban Ohio and had the same thing happen to my family. My son was playing by himself in the front yard. Someone called the cops, they walked him to my door and they lectured me about "watching" my kid.

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

#653

Post by ownlife »

rufflez wrote: post #612
nineplay wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s part of the problem… everything can’t be reduced to if-then-else; situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing. In this case, how helpful is it to the child to remove the mother from the child, to teach her a lesson not to remove herself from the child?

My guess is that the mother was removed from the child not as a punishment to her, but in order to ensure the safety of the child. In other words, deterrence rather than retributive justice. FWIW, I do agree that this is a huge overreach on the part of the police and that "situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing."

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

#654

Post by BeefWellington »

otikik wrote: post #505
sdsd wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle". Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful. To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and…

In general I agree that execution is more than "just" half the battle. There's exceptions though, especially on the audience of HN, which includes a lot of knowledge workers. For us, it often comes to "I spent 2 weeks investigating this issue, and at the end it was fixed by changing one line of code". In this case execution was trivial, but knowing what to execute was the 99% part.

This reminds me of the old fable about the repair guy and the hammer where the bill reads:

   Hitting the machine with the hammer                   $1
   Knowing where to hit the machine with the hammer      $149

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

#655

Post by tikiman163 »

bhelkey wrote: post #69
nineplay wrote: post #38

> 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 > "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'" Let's quick…

> 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…

People are idiots, but the cops and everyone else in the justice system had a legal requirement to actually know the law, and letting their kid walk half a mile straight up isn't child endangerment. These people had thier lives turned completely upside down, over the dumbest shit I've heard all year.

It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.

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

#656

Post by kthejoker2 »

My grandfather was born in Waco, had a paper route when he was 7 and hauled ice to factory workers when he was 11. All of which he did by himself.

My dad was also born in Waco and spent his latchkey days roaming the neighborhood and nearby pastures, complete with BB gun and pocket knife.

Amazing how society can evolve in a few generations.

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

#657

Post by midoridensha »

tensor wrote: post #125

As a Canadian this is like a story from some 3rd world country. I remember frequently walking to school that distance as a kid. It wasn't abnormal nor dangerous. That it would be "illegal" is some crazy stuff.

>As a Canadian this is like a story from some 3rd world country. I remember frequently walking to school that distance as a kid. It wasn't abnormal nor dangerous.

I'm American, and grew up there several decades ago. I also walked/biked that distance to school as a kid.

Things in America are completely different from those times. That's one of the big reasons I left.

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

#658

Post by BeefWellington »

midoridensha wrote: post #628
ajford wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I let my kids walk about 0.5mi to the park and I'm more afraid of some nosey busy-body calling CPS on them than I am about traffic or kidnappers. When I was growing up in the 90s, I'd routinely bike many miles away from home and disappear for hours before I came home. Nowadays letting your kids do that is liable to get CPS called on you. How the heck did we end up here?!

>How the heck did we end up here?! In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11. What you're seeing is a symptom of this. It isn't like this in other countries: kids walk around by themselves all the time.

> In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11.

Oh, it was on this track well before 9/11. Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger as concepts were there long before terrorist attacks on American soil, for a lot longer duration, and were largely explicitly about the dangers to children.

I don't know how accurate it is, but an FBI investigator by the name of Ken Lanning links Satanic Panic to the development of X-Rays and the discovery by doctors of evidence of rampant child abuse.[1] The idea being that people just couldn't accept that kids were being abused at such high rates at home, therefore there must be this secretive "other" harming the children.

People have been primed by the media to be this paranoid for a long time, because it gets attention.

[1]: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/satanic-panic

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

#659

Post by Vespasian »

potbelly83 wrote: post #467

It looks like a lot of the EU crowd have jumped in here with the usual US sucks, everything about the US is crazy. Just to give some perspective, I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia and the kids in my neighborhood are always outside, no parents in sight, riding their bikes around, going down to the creek etc... Same was true when I lived in upstate NY. The US is a huge country and comparing Texas to other parts is…

If it's any consolation I think we are seeing the flip side of the occasional "EU is gonna outlaw the Internet" thread that happens whenever a new regulation is proposed/implemented.

There is a legitimate issue but the situation overall is much more nuanced.

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

#660

Post by cbsmith »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #641
autoexec wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that sometimes pro-active measures are prudent, but "hey, police, I saw my neighbor's kid walking outside unattended" is not one of those times. It's possible that "I saw a kid walking alone" isn't enough to justify an CPS investigation but "This child's parent was just arrested and is being charged with a felony for endangering this child" is reason enough. At the point CPS got involved, they were investigat…

You are the reason we have a violent oppressive police state (and one that’s racist to boot). Look at the hoops you’re willing to jump through to apologize for this behavior… the banality of evil. “Of course it’s reasonable to report a parent because their child went for a stroll. Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law. Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids co…

You're reading a lot into autoexec's comments that aren't actually there (maybe it's from this ProPublica story that I can't find a reference to?).

There was no comment about how it was reasonable to make the phone call, and there's specific criticism of the police conduct... All they said was that at the point CPS got involved, it's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have.

I would point out that all we know that CPS did was a) require that the parents not be left alone in the house with the kids while they were conducting their investigation (and even for that, it's not clear from the story that that requirement came from CPS, but it seems likely that's the case) and b) perform an investigation that concluded there was no observable risk to the kids. They weren't involve in the decision to perform the arrest, not involved in setting bail, not involved in any strip search, etc.

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