Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk to Dunkin' Donuts

https://reason.com/2023/01/30/dunkin-donuts-parents-arrested-kids-cops-freedom/

by jseliger • 3 years ago

819 798 3 years ago

reason.com

anm89• 3 years ago

God damn this is fucking insane.

Our society is broken

matt123456789• 3 years ago

Ah, I see you’re somewhat disillusioned by the legal system. Allow me to introduce you to the healthcare system.

manojlds2• 3 years ago

They said society is broken. Broken healthcare is within that already.

Lapsa2• 3 years ago

it's like paying taxes. even when able to afford them - effort, struggle, time, irrational fear. whole thing suddenly requires so much that it's just not worth it and you end up sailing to thepiratebay

John238323• 3 years ago

When I was a kid, I spent 3 hours outside with the neighbors kids every weekday after finishing my homework. On weekends it was more like 8 at the park. I consider it a forming experience for me as a person. I was safe but also was able to explore and get exercise.

Society’s urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is detrimental. It has negative health effects. It also removes any idea of community when you can’t go out and explore what is around you. That’s even before you think about freedom of movement.

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

This specter of unlimited liability must make the idea of becoming a parent quite daunting.

You need to secure not only housing, food, and energy, but also 24/7 supervision, in the form of daycare, after daycare activities, after school activities, or one parent being with the kids at all times. Which means you are especially screwed if there is a divorce, so you probably want backup grandparents and aunts/uncles, if they can afford to be available and near you.

eftychis3• 3 years ago

I agree this is detrimental for current and future generations.

Also stupid (my opinion).

zaroth• 3 years ago

So true and very well put.

I often tell people that a child takes up an infinite amount of time and resources.

But one counterpoint on divorce. If you can manage to do it well, split custody, and continue to co-parent effectively, then you get to be a devoted parent spending every waking moment and spare penny taking care of your kids… for half of the time. And then you get to spend the other half of your time as a single adult.

It’s not a sales pitch, and I think in most cases it doesn’t work out so well, but getting divorced and equally sharing the children has been world-changing for me in terms of balance and getting time to focus on myself and fulfill my own dreams in terms of travel, hobbies, bucket list, etc.

In our case there was never any extended family who would ever take the kids, which is another thing that’s becoming more common. So basically from Day 1 until off to college you are providing full-time child rearing, which can be quite the crucible.

Lapsa2• 3 years ago

forming experience, idea of community - those seem to be overlooked arguments [citation needed]

vidarh4• 3 years ago

I don't know how old you are, but I did much the same quite often and want to add: For me at least, it was without a cellphone.

I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.

nullc8• 3 years ago

I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.

How so? they would have grown up that way themselves? -- I don't think it was common for children to have cell phones until after 2000, no? Median age for first time mothers in the US is 30.

insane_dreamer4• 3 years ago

I used to take the train to another town and then a bus, just to get to school every day, as a kid (i.e. 10-12). This was before cellphones, and I doubt I even had money for a payphone on me. I was fine and it was perfectly normal. Of course this was in France, not the U.S. so quite different in terms of cultural acceptance. It was before the concept of sex offenders (and a host of other dangers) really exploded in the media, which I believe was the big shift in everyone's minds (this idea of a pervert or kidnapper lurking behind every corner).

cjrp• 3 years ago

Society’s urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is detrimental

Indoor, sedentary and with a price in general.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips. In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society. There should be quick and immediate recourse against police officers acting like this. No police officer should feel safe or beyond swift reproach when making comments like the ones in this article, yet there is absolutely no justice available for those affected. Even in a best-case scenario where charges are dropped a few days later, this is the psychological equivalent of a home invasion, and attempted kidnapping of their children. Dropping charges is not justice. Those officers should lose their jobs (but won't, because Killingly, like all of the 'Quiet Corner' is a complete boys club), and everyone involved in the decision tree should be heavily scrutinized. The town should issue a public apology. And whoever may or may not have called 911 should be publicly berated.

This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.

No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control

CoastalCoder5• 3 years ago

This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips.

Without talking to them, I'm not sure that's a fair conclusion.

Regardless, IMHO the real culprit is vagueness / ambiguity in the applicable laws. Which means the legislators are at fault. And in a democracy, ultimately the voters.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

Sorry, but no. Common sense is enough to realize that this is a ridiculous situation, no matter what the law says. You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the door of legislators and voters. And if their concerns were real rather than just a pretext for a powertrip they'd keep an eye out instead of making it impossible for children to lead a normal life.

thebooktocome• 3 years ago

Police still have very broad discretion in what laws they enforce.

colpabar3• 3 years ago

Bullshit. Police in america are able to exercise discretion, which means they could (and should) have laughed at the order to arrest these parents and not carried it out, or at least just went and talked to them instead. They decided to arrest them instead, in all likelihood because it makes them feel powerful.

How can you seriously think this is anyone’s fault but the cops? Blaming politicians is one thing and they absolutely are to blame for a lot of our policing problems, but blaming “voters” for cops being assholes is just ridiculous.

kelipso• 3 years ago

Saying vote better is the I will pray that things get better of our times.

spamizbad• 3 years ago

You’re getting downvoted but what you’re saying is kinda true. What typically spurned these laws was an actual tragedy: a parent had their child run to the store to buy something, child was abducted, family was devastated, and then worked to pass some law that makes it illegal for children under a certain age to be unaccompanied by an adult. Well-meaning but ultimately way too restrictive: what happened to their child was a freak tragedy, not a common occurrence.

Personally, as a parent, I hate these laws. I want my son to be able to explore the neighborhood, have fun, do outside chores etc without myself or my wife monitoring him. Imo forcing parents to be glued to their kids 24/7 makes life more stressful for everyone.

ShrimpHawk• 3 years ago

The police (executive branch) are the ones who decide what and how to enforce as evidence by the fact they dropped the charges. We live in a very vague world and have to use our own judgement on things as laws cannot contain the full context necessary to make those judgements. Do you truly expect an elected official from a city across the state or across the country to understand the relationship between you and your neighbors or the structure of your town? If there is truly so much crime that it is unsafe for children to walk to a store unsupervised than that points more at a failing of the police but we know that police do not prevent crime[1].

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when...

John238323• 3 years ago

Most of our cops a no longer people who want to protect their communities. They're losers who like the feeling of power. The ability to impose their will on others is a rush.

Eupraxias2• 3 years ago

I love the idea that things were different once...

powertrips123• 3 years ago

My freshman year roommate at university (who was a random assignment) ended up dropping out of his science major our first year and decided he wanted to pursue being a cop. When I asked him why he said "I just want to be able to fuck with people", sort of jokingly, but also you could tell he meant it.

He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash and arrogant. If you put someone like that in an environment with other people that are also there for the power trips, these sorts of situations are the outcome you get.

andrew_4• 3 years ago

Some, agreed. Most? How are you quantifying that; feelings and anecdotes from your own experience or some hard data?

MSFT_Edging5• 3 years ago

If the cops wanted to protect their communities, they would have spent 15 minutes keeping an eye on the kids, see they're buying donuts, and go about their day.

Instead they made their community less safe by creating even more doubt and distrust in police, in their community, and psychologically injuring the parents and children.

hpen6• 3 years ago

This mentality is dangerous and only drives the thing you are getting at.

notch898a17• 3 years ago

I'm no fan of cops but I blame the system as much or more. Police are designed to arrest evict and cite, and little more. Make the rewards revolve around protection rather than punishment and the people currently police would go back to a more suiting pursuit for their personality which is likely violent crime.

sitkack• 3 years ago

Eastern bloc level authoritarianism

That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.

I'd recommend people skip the article and go directly the advocacy site it links to and affect change locally. The event happened in 2019, involves the typical dumb ACAB trope and then is swept away.

They most likely dropped charges because it was an unlawful arrest and the parents could have sued and most likely won. When the DA found out they most likely shut the whole thing down.

https://letgrow.org/resources/state-policy-maps/

roywiggins2• 3 years ago

Not obvious to me that they could have sued and won, people sue for much worse things and lose under "qualified immunity." The bar is very high.

ch4s36• 3 years ago

You’re leaving out the part where the police got COS involved who then harassed the family for months. As others have mentioned, they’d have no ability to sue for the actions of the officers unless there was existing case law about almost the exact situation. Qualified immunity protects officers who do stupid shit like this.

sasawpg5• 3 years ago

Fully agreed here - I grew up in ex-Yugoslavia, which while it wasn't part of the Eastern bloc, it wasn't too dissimilar. It was perfectly acceptable and expected for kids to be out and about without direct parent supervision. Neighbours knew kids from the surrounding and would take care of them as needed. At 11-12, I walked to the store by myself or with similar aged friends many times to buy beer for my dad. The store owner happily sold it to me as he knew my dad and knew if I did buy it for myself, it would take no more than a day or two to find out. Police would have never questioned any part of this behaviour, it was fully normalized. I'd say it definitely resulted in children being more independent.

EGreg• 3 years ago

Throughout most of the USSR at the time, there was actually comparatively very little violent crime, including child kidnapping. Kids roamed freely.

It is just as well, because USSR preceded USA and Europe by a few decades to have BOTH parents work and thus the actual neglect of the kids began. Under socialism this was “emancipation of women” and proceeded also in Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, where women now worked all day in the same professions as men. Socialists were far ahead by decades in this regard.

But of course, this leads to a generation of kids who grow up without any parents most of the time, and raised by the state and the street — it is also what we have in the USA now too. The only difference is that most people work for large corporations instead of socialist cooperatives or government jobs:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286

NikolaNovak• 3 years ago

Agreed. I am from ex Yugoslavia and for many... interesting things that growing up there entailed, my childhood was free. I walked to school starting grade 1! In a city of half a million I and all my classmates safely crossed intersections and walled to school every day.

Now I'm in Ontario and statuary limit for leaving child alone is... sixteen years :O

We can see school from out house but do not dare let our (independent safe and bright) child walk, not due to fear of crime, but the real fear of some overzealous bored neighbour calling it in.

Boo.

oldsklgdfth• 3 years ago

Tangent here. I grew up in Greece. Policing, but the culture of government in general is don't sweat the little things, but you better get the important stuff right.

I went to a hospital and the building looked in rough shape not really clean. The examination room had a leak in the corner. But you bet the doc knew what she was doing, was thorough and sterilized everything. It's not pretty, but gets the job done.

In the 2000s we used to pirate like there was no tomorrow. But cp is taken seriously.

yamtaddle11• 3 years ago

I think a lot of folks in the US don't realize that even some (some!) countries we think of as authoritarian feel freer, day to day, than the US does, let alone other liberal democracies.

We have elections... but having some wine at your picnic in the park may get you a citation.

We have elections... but, this article.

We have elections... but civil forfeiture.

We have elections... but you'll spend tons of your "free" time fighting with our healthcare system, should you ever actually need to use it. Ditto the time and contortions required to navigate our benefits systems if you ever hit our "social safety net". In either case, you're not gonna be feeling all that "freedom".

We have elections... but an LOLWTF-high incarceration rate.

We have elections... but are constantly scared shitless of civil litigation and liability and there are rules and disclaimers posted on every flat surface.

We have elections... but no mandatory annual leave, with the result that for most people 2 weeks off a year is considered decent. How many people feel "free" at their job?

But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)

COGlory10• 3 years ago

That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.

Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

petre• 3 years ago

Babushka's Dumpling Shop

Except babushka didn't have a dumpling shop because private enterprise was outlawed. You probably mean the Pastry Workers' Cooperative, an organization that didn't actually make dumplings because flour and vegetable oil was ratoinalized. The state was exporting those ingredients to the West at a loss in order to obtain dollars and pay back the IMF loans. Instead, the PWC shop had lots of vinegar and pickled cucumbers for sale. Which was too bad, because nobody wanted to buy those things.

ninjagoo10• 3 years ago

> Eastern bloc level authoritarianism
That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.

I gently suggest that you might be missing the forest for the trees here. OP is referring to the well documented (Eastern block level authoritarianism) practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved).

btilly3• 3 years ago

You'd know what happened if you'd read the article.

The police did drop charges. But then a social worker got involved and they had years of grief afterwards because of it. Which couldn't have been reported on back when the event happened, and makes it a lot more than just "stupid cops got immediately corrected".

Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere. Which is another can of worms.

mikrl• 3 years ago

This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control

Outside of the Polish martial law I don’t think my family ever risked arrest for walking to a cake shop as kids.

Cannot comment on the USSR, but I highly doubt the authorities did that kind of thing either outside of, perhaps, the holodomor.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

I was more drawing analogy between how above reproach authority was (or at least how it was portrayed to me) than about whether or not children could freely explore.

mindslight3• 3 years ago

It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.

I wholeheartedly agree that the fundamental issue is the complete lack of judicial accountability. These people are getting paid a salary while they harass you, clock out at 5, and their morning routine is to get right back at it. Meanwhile your entire life is personally disrupted due to their power trip and/or malicious mistake, and the best case you can hope for is to be able to walk away?

Whether or not these officers' actions were in line with official department policy, there should be automatic compensation to the victims for their arrest and imprisonment, emotional distress, hiring attorneys and other expenses incurred. And if these officers' actions were not in line with written department policy, then they need to be treated as private citizens harassing people under the color of law, and be held personally criminally liable for the false imprisonment, etc.

ceejayoz12• 3 years ago

And if these officers' actions were not in line with written department policy, then they need to be treated as private citizens harassing people under the color of law, and be held personally criminally liable for the false imprisonment, etc.

Have to get rid of qualified immunity first, which we invented (in a total coincidence) at the same time cops really wanted to be thumping civil rights protesters without consequencews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray

spywaregorilla4• 3 years ago

It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.

Maybe in Boston. They're not THAT common in CT and other states.

briffle• 3 years ago

It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.

Interesting how that works. My state has zero dunkin donuts. But I live 3 miles from downtown, and pass 5 starbucks, 4 dutch brothers, and a few other independant coffee shops :) but sadly, only one donut shop

COGlory10• 3 years ago

I don't know which Dunkin they were going to, but the Dunkin I've been to the most in Killingly was near a major intersection. Depending on what side, they may not have had to cross one.

Growing up, I was allowed to freely travel within my neighborhood, but not cross the main roads. There was a Dunkin I could safely get to without crossing any big streets.

ajross5• 3 years ago

This makes my blood boil.

It's supposed to. This is Reason's schtick, publishing click magnets about terrible overreach by our evil Big Government Overlords, and you need to give this publication a ton of salt if you read it.

Like start out by noticing that this isn't journalism. It's written by Lenore Skenazy "president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement." Quite literally this is an evangelism and fundraising piece by a charity that benefits from exactly the outrage it's trying to drive.

If the guy was arrested, where's a link to the records? Where are the statements from police? This apparently happened four years ago. Where's the contemporary coverage? Why does a Google search for "Killingly CT parent arrested 2019" return a bunch of SEO cross links to the same story by the same person?

I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm saying we need to be a little more careful with what we get upset about.

ch4s36• 3 years ago

Oh please. They publish a lot of journalism and have been covering police abuse for decades including work by Radley Balko back in 2017 when no one cared. Senior editor Jacob Sullum has won awards for his journalism on drug policy. Elizabeth Nolan Brown does great investigative work around sex workers. It isn’t a click bait farm, even if YOU disagree with their politics.

tomcam2• 3 years ago

Mostly good points, but would you point me to a major publication that links to arrest records when an arrest is mentioned?

shrikant• 3 years ago

Unsure why you've been downvoted.

I haven't been able to find any reporting about this story[0] till this Reason piece, so I'd be curious to understand their journalistic process in putting this together.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=Killingly+parent+arrested+20...

Edited to remove flamebait swipe at Reason -- I'm better than that. For now.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

These are all good points, but I spent many years living in the town in question, so I am perhaps already biased.

u801e• 3 years ago

And whoever may or may not have called 911 should be publicly berated.

They could file a FOIA for 911 call recordings during that timeframe. It's likely no calls were made.

DrThunder7• 3 years ago

If this is a law in the area the police officers enforcing it aren't the main problem. They're a secondary issue stemming from government overreach.

bentcorner• 3 years ago

Whether there is a law or not doesn't matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heien_v._North_Carolina

confidantlake5• 3 years ago

My parents are from an eastern block country. This never happened.

MSFT_Edging5• 3 years ago

Its like that classic tweet that went something like American's seeing something happen that's uniquely American: "What are we, a bunch of Asians??"

It's amazing how effective propaganda can be.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

Again, to clarify, I was not saying children in Eastern bloc countries were arrested for exploring. I was saying that authority was (at least viewed as by Western countries) beyond reproach.

The infuriating thing isn't that the police made mistakes or were jerks. It's that the family can do nothing to achieve justice against the state/the state has no consequences.

rootusrootus4• 3 years ago

This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism

OTOH, you could argue the opposite. It made the news (even if the source in this case is especially biased, I will assume good faith). In a country the size of the US, some amount of official misbehavior is going to happen with some regularity, it's just a numbers game. I'll worry more when we stop hearing about it.

nosianu3• 3 years ago

This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism.

I know several other people already commented, but still I want to add my own view because this pains me.

I grew up in the 1970s/80s in an area of two 35 thousand people towns (plus lots and lots of smaller towns and villages - rural but it's still all densely populated).

We had all the freedoms to go anywhere except doing school hours - as long as we didn't drive (pretty far) to the German-German border area. Which I would not even have been able to point out the direction. I was in the forests and out alone ALL THE TIME, and so was everybody else. I also was a "key child", this too was very common, I had a house key and was left alone in our house all afternoon, and again, that was common.

Independence, education, sports - the East did not want to raise feeble people. Daily life was NOT some dystopian thing. Youth life was full of biking around in the afternoons, visiting friends all over the place or into the fields and woods, weekend parties, and we were mostly left alone, by parents too.

When I visited the US for two months, driving around in an old car I had bought (~20 - rental car was too expensive for that long, surcharge for being young too) - and sleeping in it most of the time. My impression afterwards was that the US was quite the police state. Sleeping in the care alone, never mind driving in an old car near the Mexican border once, got me lots of friendly meetings with ne police friends... never had any problems and it was all friendly, with my German passport and my story of driving from New York to Alaska to San Diego to Key West to Washington D.C. and lots of loops for scenery and NPs on the way, but I don't think I had a SINGLE encounter with East German police in all my life. Okay once, visiting the East Berlin airport, when I was with a friend who looked "non-standard", they only checked his ID and nothing from me.

And when I saw "Employee of the Month" parking at the very first McDonals I drove by in my new (old) car I could not stop laughing. THIS was sooooo East German! And we even had jokes about it, assuming such a thing would never exist in the West! And here I was in the capitalist mother country and saw a key component of "socialist" worker life.

jmnicolas• 3 years ago

I don't think OP referred to authoritarianism about children, but authoritarianism in general.

If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned. And they probably would have been suspects for the rest of their life.

I'm pretty sure you can find happy kids in North Korea too, it doesn't mean they're not living in an authoritarian society.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

Just to clarify, I will paste what I wrote above:

Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

You could even extend this and say that the level of authoritarianism on display is what I was told Eastern bloc countries were like (and why they were bad).

vxNsr2• 3 years ago

As a counter to your story I grew up in the US, in a largish city, my friends and I also had basically total freedom to wander around, we mostly spent time in the nearby parks/playgrounds (of which there were 3), but we had quiet a bit of autonomy.

I’m sure there were children in Moscow, Kyiv or Cracow who had very different experiences from you. Whose parents did something that caught the KGB’s attention and then they were in for a world of pain.

I think it’s very accurate to say that for most people living in a relatively rural area anywhere in the world, they’ll be pretty safe from this sorta attention. The big difference is the degree to which your life is ruined. In China (or USSR) any sort of individual disagreement with the police would virtually guarantee a trip to an undisclosed location, bribes and probably torture. Here in the US you still have to deal with people and their egos but many of the laws will protect you from the worst of other peoples’ power trips.

hosh11• 3 years ago

This is not necessarily a power trip. There are people who genuinely feel that way, and are doing this for the public good.

I think there has been a confusion in our society between well-being and safety. There are definitely circumstances where one is unsafe, but this is for their well-being (letting the teenager drive by themselves for an errand), and there are circumstances where one is safe, but someone’s well-being is degrading (helicopter parenting).

dahart3• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean? I not certain, but I don’t think any U.S. police are legally allowed to demand well-being without a safety concern. What laws require well-being, and justify police threats?

Why do you think they might not have been doing this capriciously in this specific case? The department admitted the stop was over-reach, even before the parents found out the officers had called child proctective services on the parents over walking outside. Is that demonstrating a reasonable concern for well-being? I surely want to have the right to let my kids walk around outside, and I believe that there is no U.S. law that limit this right, nor should there be one.

dahfizz3• 3 years ago

If the cops were truly worried about the kids safety, they would have gone to Dunkin with them and made it into a positive experience.

Instead, the cops left the children who were supposedly in mortal peril to go harass the parents.

mynameisvlad5• 3 years ago

Did you read the article?

The one where the cop straight up told the husband 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'

Yeah, totally not on a power trip. Definitely. Just doing it for the public good.

btbuildem• 3 years ago

This is police statesque, authoritarian and bureaucratic nightmare overreach, a direct assault on your well-being and safety.

denton-scratch3• 3 years ago

There are people who genuinely feel that way

You mean there are people who genuinely feel that it should be an arrrestable offence to let an 8-year-old out on their own?

Well, sure; that doesn't surprise me. But what some cop "feels" bears no relation to what the law is.

indymike2• 3 years ago

Dropping charges is not justice.

Agreed. This is one where qualified immunity needs to go. This is a rights violation all the way... against the kids civil rights and against the parents. Also, I'd love to listen to the 911 calls.

user39393823• 3 years ago

It's not justice at all, the parents now have an arrest record. Hopefully they never have to fill out an application that asks about that (e.g. pistol license).

pjc507• 3 years ago

It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips

I thought this was going to be about various killings by cops, but it turns out to be a place name.

Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America. I suspect if you went looking for anecdotes involving black children you might find far worse outcomes. Nobody in this story spent even a whole night in jail! Nobody was injured! Nobody had to pay bail fees! No property damage by police! They didn't even shoot the dog.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America.

I mean, I'm not a huge fan of that stuff either, but I lived in Killingly for a number of years, so perhaps this one caught my attention for that reason?

droopyEyelids• 3 years ago

In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society.

Your axe grinding doesnt make sense here. Police powers are one of the most federated types of power in the country! And these sound like they were the smallest unit of police, town police.

In fact, its difficult to imagine the more centralized police causing this type of trouble. Can you imagine a state trooper wasting time with this? Or the FBI investigating a child walking alone?

yamtaddle11• 3 years ago

France has "federalized" police in most of the country and they don't have this problem. I'm with you, that doesn't seem to be the causal factor.

I don't have great insight into police, but I've had a little into a few county governments and school districts, and the impression I've gotten is the opposite: the more local interested are insulated from state or federal oversight (de facto, if not de jure) the more wildly-corrupt and tyrannical they get.

epolanski2• 3 years ago

This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism.

Nah, my family is from eastern Europe and the stuff that happens in US was never seen here, ever.

furyg3• 3 years ago

No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control

This is what gets me. Even if this town is as dangerous as these police claim that it is, I can think of a hundred other responses that are orders of magnitude more useful than the route they chose, if their priority is indeed the safety of the children.

Follow the kids for a bit to make sure they're ok. "Hey kids, your parents know you're going to the store? ok!" "Hey parents, you gave your kids permission to walk to the store alone? ok!" "Hey just checking in, you know that there's this sex offender around the corner right? ok!" You can surveil the sex offenders. You can, you know, make your town safer (you are the police, right?).

I doubt this town is that unsafe, however. Ironically the polarization, paranoia, untrusting nature, and general hysteria in the US are a vicious cycle that leads to actual danger and more polarization, paranoia, etc.

RGamma• 3 years ago

In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society (*)

(*) when not matched by appropriate safe guards.

WaxProlix• 3 years ago

If it's matched with safeguards that are themselves empowered, then it's not centralization of power.

3pac• 3 years ago

I think that centralization of power is a spurious correlation. It may be part of the equation, but there is more to it.

Norway has a single national police organization which extends the local level. It is well-regarded by the citizens who are also big on free-range parenting. In Oslo you can find teenagers practicing skateboard on the steps of parliament during the day. On the other hand Americans might find certain means of protective services, for adults and for minors, overreaching.

Also, didn't absolutely everybody in the US rally around James Comey, during his unjust firing?

dheera• 3 years ago

It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips.

Yep. TFA: "that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them" -- Police should be arresting the shit out of those criminals, not innocent people.

Congratulations, police, by arresting innocent parents you just traumatized some kids, and if they become criminals because they grew up in foster care missing their actually good parents, you have blood on your hands. (I know they dropped charges, but in the shitty slow legal system we have, it's a real possibility this could have played out differently.)

Fix the town so innocent people can live sane lives in it.

friend_and_foe• 3 years ago

This is a very good point. Our society is more dangerous (giving them the premise, this might not be the case in actuality) because of their ineptitude and corruption.

They asked us to disarm ourselves, they asked us to trust them, to give them the power to police our behavior, then we do and our societies become less safe. Then they use this as a justification to tell us how to raise our kids.

If society is less safe it's their fault. So they either need to fix the problem or go get a job at McDonalds, either way leave me the fuck alone and don't tell me how to raise my kids.

luxuryballs2• 3 years ago

They should hang in the public square on the very next Sunday, it’s the only thing that will truly change anything at this point. You might think this is extreme but I welcome you to come back in 5-10 years and read it again and see what you think.

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

Christ, calm down a bit. Stupid shit happens, but the article not about that - they stimulus'd and you response'd exactly as intended. Get some insight into them and yourself or you're going to be easily manipulable forever.

sasattack• 3 years ago

This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism.

Nope it's just good old fashioned American police state activities. Once again people on this website love this subtle form of American Exceptionalism where they Pretend that America is not the most oppressive and destructive racist country in history.

If you were a A person of color fighting for your rights, a Communist, or any other ideological enemy of the United States you would realize that this activity from the police is nothing more than a generalization of the official policies of police towards "undesirables" in the 20th century.

mikotodomo2• 3 years ago

The police were just overreacting bro. They still had good intent and I applaud them for taking the initiative to combat rampant child sex trafficking that is almost never fought against these drays. From the judge's point of view, since a cop was feeding them info, of course the judge will side closer to the cop.

stirlo• 3 years ago

The insane part is that those police officers and neighbours likely grew up in a community where they were able to have the freedom to go outside unsupervised. They all survived to adulthood and are now trying to snatch away those freedoms from the young. Disgraceful.

aceazzameen• 3 years ago

"Because it's not like it used to be," is the excuse I hear. Meanwhile crime is lower than it was 30+ years ago, or whatever generation these cops grew up in.

jehb2• 3 years ago

Fear is the mind-killer.

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

The common perception of "stranger danger" is a load of nonsense thanks to 90s infotainment, as well as John Walsh (of America's Most Wanted) for making up bullshit about tens of thousands of children being abducted by strangers (hint: it's not even in the thousands); the vast majority of child abuse and abductions are committed by familial connections, by far.

qball• 3 years ago

"Because it's not like it used to be," is the excuse I hear.

Well, they're right.

We used to treat concern trolls like laughingstock, now they set national policy.

Karenism is an existential threat, and it should have been treated as such before it got this bad.

thechao• 3 years ago

Right!? I went out, by myself, walking through suburban and semiurban (Houston) as a young child in the 80s and 90s — easily far more dangerous in a practical sense: more crime, less ubiquitous cell phones, ...

This helicoptering is nuts. It's something my family does, which is especially weird from my parents: humans I wouldn't see for days due to their long work schedules and my boredom in the summer.

ElfinTrousers2• 3 years ago

"They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street, that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them, that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was 'a different world now,'"

It's even worse. There are paranoid conspiracy theorists roaming the streets of Killingly, armed to the teeth. You can recognize them by the blue uniforms.

ElfinTrousers2• 3 years ago

Also, sorry to reply to my own comment, but "drug dealers are going to give your kids drugs" is a trope dating back to the "Just Say No" days of the 1980s. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now. Kids have no money, and they have no idea that drugs are supposed to be kept discreet, so they're likely to tell the first authority figure they see.

confidantlake5• 3 years ago

Absolutely. The problem is the sane individuals don't become police. The ones convinced the quiet suburb is an evil dangerous place in need of constant vigilance do.

dsq2• 3 years ago

These kind of stories coming out of the US make me feel like I'm reading something insane and Kafkaesque. I therefore want to be skeptical at first.

Does anyone have direct, first hand experiences of this kind? Not from the media. First hand or someone you personally know.

ceejayoz12• 3 years ago

Does anyone have direct, first hand experiences of this kind? Not from the media. First hand or someone you personally know.

Yes; a family member's friend is currently dealing with potential prosecution for briefly leaving their kid in the car.

throwawaysleep3• 3 years ago

Kids can cook unsupervised in cars, so that makes sense.

philliphaydon• 3 years ago

Not related to kids but while living in Singapore. My friend and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment block, most apartments have a gate on them, and in 2 years we had over a dozen visits from neighbours and police because different families were ringing up our neighbours or the police to tell them our door was open (even tho the gate was closed and locked, we just wanted fresh air).

While living in Australia I used to have our front desk remind me to not leave the door open on the deck because “your annoying neighbour keeps calling us to say you left the door open while you were at work”.

I don’t know why people can be so… annoying like that. Like they just sit in their window looking for things to complain about.

dsq2• 3 years ago

So in a sense the problem is exacerbated by people looking to needlessly complain about their peers.

confidantlake5• 3 years ago

Not super interesting and not quite the same thing, but as a teen multiple different parents would not let us walk to local shops or events, insisting on driving us. The reason were the "cops would pick us up" if we were walking somewhere without an adult as teens.

jefftk3• 3 years ago

My kids are 7 and 9 and walk to the corner store together (Somerville MA). They also walk to and from school, the park, and to friends' houses. The more kids do this the more normal it will seem to others, and we can slowly get society's sense of how old you need to be to walk places back to somewhere reasonable.

0_____0• 3 years ago

Somerville is basically as perfect a city as I've seen in the US for walking, for anyone! And thus the perfect beachhead to take back childhood independence.

stephencanon• 3 years ago

Similar up here in Hanover NH. All the neighborhood kids just walk where they want to, and it’s totally fine.

lawkwok4• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, city design alters people's perceptions of where it is acceptable to walk. I moved from walkable Vancouver to car-centric Mississippi, and I already look at people with suspicion when they are walking on the road in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where their car is and why they are walking there.

This was in Killingly, Connecticut, a suburban town in the northeast part of the state. The Rivers' lived near an elementary school, library, state police barracks, sidewalks, crosswalks, many Victorian-style homes, and the aforementioned donut shop. The kids gathered $7, and off they went.

Street View shows that the town looks quite walkable especially for suburban America. It just boggles my mind that people would consider calling the police on a 7 and 9 year old for walking on those streets.

notRobot• 3 years ago

I already look at people with suspicion when they are walking on the road in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where their car is and why they are walking there.

... but why? How does it possibly matter?

scld• 3 years ago

Just wanted to pop in to say I love your blog!

jefftk3• 3 years ago

Thanks!

drunkenmagician• 3 years ago

The death of common sense, not 100% dead yet, but terminal with untreatable stage 4 cancer

ejb999• 3 years ago

>"They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street, that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them, that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was 'a different world now,'" says Rivers.

So, of course, you arrest the parents and leave the sex-offenders and drug dealers roaming the street. Makes perfect sense.

eftychis3• 3 years ago

It is easier to arrest the parents of course. The other classes might fight back and have lawyers.

(End of sarcasm towards these "cops.")

JackC• 3 years ago

There's one more layer, though: making you believe the streets aren't safe and we're not arresting enough people is the actual point of all this. America already locks up four times as many people as most countries, to little purpose besides control and profit.

seanmcdirmid3• 3 years ago

to little purpose besides control and profit.

It only takes a few times getting mugged, being subject to a car smash and grab, or being porch pirated to go from "we lock too many people up!" to "why aren't we locking these crazy people up?".

We are obviously messing up somewhere else before we throw people in jail.

laweijfmvo• 3 years ago

Imagine if the streets were safe and we didn't need to keep funding so many insanely powerful police! Yikes!

projektfu• 3 years ago

The subtext is that the police don't do anything to prevent crime. You alone are responsible for what happens to you. And if you would choose willingly to do something the police officers think you shouldn't do, you deserve arrest.

overrun113• 3 years ago

I think you’d see substantially more crime if the US incarcerated less people. The evidence is clear, released prisoners have a much higher rate of violent crime than the average person. I’m sort of confused where this meme that prisons don’t keep us safe comes from.

Removing people who commit violent crimes from the public should obviously decrease crime and I’ve never really heard a convincing counter argument. Usually when people make this claim they’re just badly misinformed and believe most prisoners are in jail for marijuana possession.

dfxm123• 3 years ago

Convincing people the streets aren't safe also helps ensure police budgets keep going up year after year.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/defunding-claims-police-funding-in...

ceejayoz12• 3 years ago

"Registered sex offenders" have already been arrested, convicted, and sentenced. That's how they get on the registration list.

I'm under the impression cops tend to arrest drug dealers regularly.

"More arrests, just for other things" isn't the fix here.

ubermonkey• 3 years ago

Plus, if you just arrest innocent people, you're way less likely to get shot.

SapporoChris• 3 years ago

An ambivalent counter point. When I was growing up, I walked to school. Elementary school was just ten minutes away walking. There was a park also within ten minutes from our house and I was allowed to go alone even at the age of six.

I am totally for this. I don't like the idea of restricting children, I think it inhibits growth.

Still, I had my near miss, and I know others of my age that had near misses too. I walked to park alone after school. I got tired of swinging on the swing set and went to sit on the park bench. Soon a man came and sat right next to me. I was uncomfortable, I slid down the park bench away from him. He soon slid right next to me again, his leg and torso against mine. I remember him being warm and sweaty and I thought him weird. I got up and went back to the swings and from the swing set stared at him. He eventually got up and left.

As an adult, I'm fairly freaked out by what could have been a bad experience. I don't condone arresting parents that give their children free reign. I do understand the perspective just a little bit.

CogitoCogito3• 3 years ago

I don't think anyone here is making the argument that kids being in public is without risk. Besides, kids die when driven to school as well.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

If you arrest drug dealers today you end up with riots in the streets.

standardUser3• 3 years ago

Name one riot OR name the imaginary world you live in where these fantastical events occur.

Zak• 3 years ago

'a different world now', implying a more dangerous one than when these parents and police officers were kids. That's objectively false in the US; despite a modest increase in crime over the past five or so years, crime is much lower than 30-40 years ago. I am frustrated that a great many people seem to believe otherwise.

jollyllama• 3 years ago

The only correct response to the quote is "It sounds like you're not doing your job."

eftychis3• 3 years ago

a) don't talk without a lawyer (including to the child services...) b) the road to hell is the high speed interstate of "I am just doing my job."

A lot of us have bad experiences and the history books are also filled. Let's stop these recurring mistakes.

(Edit.) P.S. Here is one of those lawyer articles about why not to talk to... CPS https://mayerlegal.com/f/dont-talk-to-cps

(Who knows, the way things go in a few years one will need a lawyer to pay their water bill...)

tantalor• 3 years ago

Article is about events 4 years ago, with tiny update buried towards the end. Lazy journalism.

Finnucane• 3 years ago

It's Reason, so that's basically assumed.

locococo• 3 years ago

It is interesting that parents are not granted the autonomy to make these decisions by the law. If the police have such a great concern about the safety in the neighborhood to the degree that children can't be outside someone has failed at their job. Arresting people for letting their kids walk outside just to spread fear is shameful.

alkonaut• 3 years ago

If police really believe kids shouldn't walk alone outside, they should perhaps ask themselves who is doing a bad job: parents or themselves.

Scubabear686• 3 years ago

A few years ago at a baseball tournament my son’s team did phenomenally well, and ended up beating a really great team from out of state.

A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.

Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).

Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.

williamcotton4• 3 years ago

The problem with trying to punish people for false complaints is that disincentives to reporting child abuse is probably not worth the annoyances. By the time it transitions from a mere annoyance (having to talk to someone from the CPS for an hour and that's it) to something much more impactful (someone producing enough fraudulent evidence that you are arrested and put on trial) they've moved away from merely abusing a reporting system and into full-blown felonious behavior that will not be ignored!

Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.

Cue Will Ferrell yelling at kids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=junIx1T8A5I

williamcotton4• 3 years ago

Are the downvotes for the SNL skit? Or?

RicoElectrico• 3 years ago

they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom.

Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)

In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.

We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.

Scubabear686• 3 years ago

My daughter was having a very bad day, very pouty and whiny. Around age 8 or so. My wife had put her in a timeout, and then our daughter kept “needing” to go to the bathroom over and over again (usually to play in the sink). Fed up with this, my exasperated wife force marched her to the bathroom with her hand on her back to ensure she went to the bathroom and wasn’t loitering about playing.

A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.

ad404b8a372f2b94• 3 years ago

We had a complaint like this for my dad when he was near the end.

We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).

Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account. That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.

We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.

bpodgursky• 3 years ago

The OP in this case has an idea what happened, but in general CPS has no legal obligation to tell you what you are accused of.

You're defending yourself without knowing the charge, with the investigator/judge/jury CPS agent presuming you are at least somewhat guilty.

bluGill3• 3 years ago

This is an N=1 story. There are 7-8 billion people on earth, 300 some million in the US, I forget how many in Europe (you can measure Europe, EU, NATO, and get different results and different cultures). With that many people there will always be someone doing something unbelievable stupid, and hackernews is large enough that you are likely to hear about it.

Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.

lawkwok4• 3 years ago

Sorry you had to go through that. I am having a hard time thinking of a way how someone could walk their child to the bathroom wrong. Could you share some more details if you are comfortable?

rashkov• 3 years ago

I'm glad it worked out for you. If anyone finds themselves in this situation, please do not talk to protective services without a lawyer. Treat it like you're talking to the cops who are investigating you.

They can make your life hell and take your children away. They do it for things as minor as possessing marijuana in your home, and they do it every day to people who are poor. You just don't hear about it because those stories don't make it into the news.

locustous3• 3 years ago

Obviously these agencies are vital

Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.

ninjagoo10• 3 years ago

Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.

Do you have any evidence to back this statement?

vorpalhex2• 3 years ago

I listen to the police scanner frequently.

A few days ago, CPS had to get involved because somehow an eight year old ended up in the middle of a highway. Cops showed up first and shut down the highway to safely extract the kid. CPS got to bring the kid back to the parents.

People abuse kids all the time.

blooalien• 3 years ago

Sometimes they do indeed do more harm than good. I know this for certain first-hand…

temporallobe2• 3 years ago

The insidious aspect of doing something like this is that there’s no way of knowing who made the report, and there seems to be no repercussion for making frivolous or false claims, otherwise you could retaliate against them in the same way.

ranger_danger2• 3 years ago

otherwise

but having no consequences means they CAN retaliate the same way

eweise2• 3 years ago

Not as bad as your story, but my wife drove to our local community center parking lot, with our infant in the back. She got out of the car and started talking to a friend about 20 feet from the car (windows down, not hot). Another woman called the police complaining that the kid was in the car unattended. They came and threatened to get CPS involved. In the end nothing happened, but it was scary how the situation escalated so quickly.

LenoreSkenazy4• 3 years ago

I am so sorry that this happened. People love to feel like THEY care more about your own kid than you do. And the problem is: with cell phones it is almost effortless to get the authorities involved. LS (I wrote Free-Range Kids and run the nonprofit Let Grow)

Octokiddie• 3 years ago

This sounds like the parental version of swatting someone. Hideous.

aidenn05• 3 years ago

Happens enough that CPS basically ignores reports from ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends around here.

devwastaken• 3 years ago

Don't talk to state workers. Same as don't talk to the police. Anything you say cannot be used to help you in court, it is heresay. It can only be used against you. The interviews are to determine if the DA has enough evidence to prosecute you and if human services meets the vague requirements to steal your kids.

LenoreSkenazy4• 3 years ago

Hi. I'm Lenore Skenazy. I wrote that article and run Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence, which grew out of the Free-Range Kids movement. (I wrote Free-Range Kids.) At Let Grow we are working to change state neglect laws so they clarify that neglect is ONLY when you put your kid in serious, obvious and likely danger -- not ANY TIME you take your eyes off them, or anytime someone doesn't like your parenting style. Four states have passed these "Reasonable Childhood Independence" laws and five states are considering them this year. Find out more (and, if you'd like, help out) at LetGrow.org . Click on "Advocacy."

mcv4• 3 years ago

What's bizarre to me is how common both these sort of stories are, but also stories of American parents beating their kids as if that's a normal thing. Where are these child protection services in cases of actual child abuse?

raldi4• 3 years ago

At the very least, there need to be clear laws about when you can legally let your kid walk outside.

tohnjitor• 3 years ago

There does not need to be a law about this.

raldi4• 3 years ago

If the police are empowered to arrest you and child services is empowered to take action against your family, there needs to be a clear declaration of safe harbor.

pavlov• 3 years ago

“She tried to dispute what the police were saying, and one of them asked if she watched the news.”

American local TV is mostly mind poison. A lot of stations are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, a corporation with an extreme right-wing agenda.

Europeans with their tame national broadcasters have no idea how insane a large part of American TV is with its obsession on local crime.

vidarh4• 3 years ago

I used to fly over to the US for work a lot, and even though I was usually in California, and got what I presume is a rather mild version of what you might run into elsewhere, seeing US TV was always a bizarre experience. It was like entering another dimension where every minor little thing was amplified ten times over.

Makes it seem even more bizarre that Americans aren't out in the streets rioting on a much more regular basis.

lizzardbraind• 3 years ago

When everything is presented as a crisis, you get inured to it and nothing, no matter how dire, feels like a really emergency.

derelicta2• 3 years ago

Let's be honest its a terribly lucrative business model that is spreading. Look at BFM TV, or worse, CNews, in France and tell me whats the difference between those and FoxNews?

gregwtmtno• 3 years ago

Any reasonable person can see that there's much greater danger in allowing a child to ride in a car on a highway--which no doubt would be considered perfectly acceptable by these police. Look at this visualization of cause of death by age: https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home. For those kids, the number one cause of death is "unintentional injury," the biggest component of which is motor vehicle crashes. Unfortunately, these police wield incredible power in our legal system, and, as a lawyer, I don't see any easy fix. It makes me sad that I'll be raising my child in this kind of environment.

pxue• 3 years ago

What does the richest do in this situation? Surely some must feel the need for their kids to venture out on their own, or do they live in a neighborhood where these types of policing doesn't happen?

Overtonwindow2• 3 years ago

A large, wealthy estate is sort of like a neighborhood. Brad Pitt built a skate park in his backyard for his children.

anileated• 3 years ago

Yeah, it’s not even a question regarding the richest, but change it to upper middle class families with busy and reasonably wealthy parents living somewhere in dense urban NYC downtown and it’s interesting how they go about it.

dsfyu404ed4• 3 years ago

You know where this problem is? In the mirror.

The kind of people who think it's reasonable to call the cops over a nothing-burger like this are simply a part the extremist long tail that is a product of middle/upper middle class culture that condones and encourages bucking everything to some external party whenever possible. When you exist in a bubble where everyone is patting each other on the back for calling the city over disputes that should at least be initially handled between neighbors, reporting petty business disputes to the state AG, calling a plumber to replace a toilet flapper, getting engineered drawings for a garden shed, etc, etc, it should come as no surprise that some people take this sort of responsibility to think for yourself outsourcing too far and call the cops on some kids walking down the street.

Of course dispatch and the police were behaving like idiots here too but they are clearly serving a community where responding to frivolous calls like this is the norm because if this one case was so outside of their normal purview it wouldn't have been handled the way it was.

And the DCF part, well that fact pattern just looks like a boring old case of bureaucratic incentives and ass covering. They were fishing for something to make the rest of the fact pattern look less unreasonable. And then when they found it they jumped right to some sort of remediable action so they could say "there, we did something, case closed".

nashashmi• 3 years ago

The DCF caseworker visited the family twice and interviewed everyone about their complete history.
"She was looking for problems," says Rivers.

Overtonwindow2• 3 years ago

When I was six years old, my best friend and I rode our bicycle 2 miles to RadioShack. On the way back, his grandmother found us and said go home! So we did. No one got arrested.

Your parents should start suing. The people who are reporting this kind of crap. Custodial interference, I don't know I'm not a lawyer, but maybe a lawsuit will teach people to mind their own business.

preinheimer• 3 years ago

In Canada we had something of a long running case against a father who let his kids ride the bus on their own: https://globalnews.ca/video/7151336/court-rules-against-b-c-...

People used to talk about "The Popsicle Index"[1] which is the percentage of families in an area comfortable with letting an elementary school aged child walk to the nearest store and buy a popsicle on their own. These days parents don't get to make that decision, the entire community makes it for them. Any dissenting opinion can result in losing your kids.

[1] https://home.solari.com/the-popsicle-index/

exabrial2• 3 years ago

This just sounds like taxes are way too high in that area. Cut them by 75% and we’ll see if the government has anything stupid to do after that.

pjc507• 3 years ago

"Defund the police"?

exabrial2• 3 years ago

Defund the everything.

manojlds2• 3 years ago

So the police were sure there were culprits around and their focus is on harassing the parents rather than make the place safe?

colpabar3• 3 years ago

Rivers tried to explain to the caseworker that the police had overreacted, but the caseworker maintained that the parents had somehow jeopardized their kids safety. When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information—and insisted she return to therapy.

Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?

tboyd47• 3 years ago

It's because they aren't accountable to anyone.

giantg25• 3 years ago

Also, most of what they do is under threat of authority, not actual authority. For the most part, they need a court order to enter your home, question your children without your permission, etc. Hopefully if more people realize they have the right to say no, then the worker will be a little more reasonable. Right now they know that everyone they meet bends to their threats and nobody challenges them, so they are emboldened.

MonkeyMalarky2• 3 years ago

And people wonder why there is a stigma and general reluctance to get help like therapy. Even if it were completely free, it can still have a cost and be used against you.

glenstein• 3 years ago

Exactly. I think that for some folks out there who are struggling, they're not necessarily hesitating to get help they need out of shame or wounded sense of pride. But because they've correctly assessed the risks of it being weaponized against them.

I can imagine a world where culture gets better in 20, 30 years and we look back at the 2020s and say "yikes, good thing it's not like that anymore."

nullc8• 3 years ago

I felt like I learned something when I saw a list of average GRE scores by fields of study and social workers were at the absolute bottom, well below others.

While I'm sure that many have genuine compassion for others, this doesn't change the fact that many are literal morons who have been given incredible authority to interfere with the lives of others. What could possibly go wrong?

burkaman4• 3 years ago

Can you please at least find and link to this list before you call hundreds of thousands of low-paid highly educated essential workers "literal morons"?

I'm asking because I don't believe you. Here's a list I found, see page 28 for Social and Behavioral Sciences' above average scores: https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-data-2016.p...

roboscides2• 3 years ago

Fuck the police

Haha nice one dude, very edgy.

hgsgm3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the social workers are just police without guns. They have the same law enforcement problem: the people who apply for the jobs are the ones who want to abuse people. They aren't servants of the law, they want to use the law as a weapon. The good social workers are in private clinics and schools.

Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.

krolden• 3 years ago

Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.

Why stop there? Do that for all law enforcement jobs.

codexb• 3 years ago

The problem is that making the government responsible (and liable) creates an incentive for government employees and departments to overreact and treat every situation as harshly as possible, because if they were ever to be reasonable and lenient, and a child were to be abused later, they would then be blamed.

The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges.

The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.

maerF0x04• 3 years ago

Funny enough part of the Defund the police push essentially was implying social workers were the answer (granted more about mental health than child protection services). Still, the point is it seems every agency has their knee to the neck of americans so to speak.

Kinda reminds me of the song Dystopia Now by Mental Minority[1] which quotes George Orwell's 1984 "If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever"

[1] https://open.spotify.com/track/5stJEL2X1WkqAFz4kTq8hV

MarvinYork• 3 years ago

As a European "The Land of the Free" is the funniest contradiction I've ever seen. As a teenager and young adult I loved to visit the US (NYC & LA) and everything seemed amazing. These days, I avoid the USA like I avoid North Korea and Russia. Of course, we have also huge problems here, but we seem to be more aware of them. And that helps immensely to bring about improvements.

foobarian2• 3 years ago

That label was invented hundreds of years ago when the unincorporated land here was larger than continental Europe. But it's a different story now, the gas has expanded to fill all available space and there is no more freedom.

rsaarsoo• 3 years ago

At the same time in Japan: parents are not pleased when the toddler they sent to do shopping forgets to buy some of the requested items.

https://slate.com/business/2022/04/old-enough-netflix-do-jap...

spywaregorilla4• 3 years ago

Toddlers do not do this in Japan. People deeply misunderstand this show.

It's carefully monitored and setup. The kids don't know it. They are genuinely doing the things on their own. But it's not like the parents then rely on the kids to go do those things independently after the show.

They are more independent at a young age. But you don't see toddlers walking around Japan unattended to shops.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

To be fair, when I send my 4 year old to the closest shop, my concerns have absolutely nothing to do with the safety of the environment (e.g. actions of others), and everything with how much I trust him not to be an idiot.

If we had a shop only two streets over it would be doable at that age.

ensignavenger• 3 years ago

The article says this much too. While I never saw any actual toddlers running errands on their own in Japan, I did see children 5-6 years old doing it.

vidarh4• 3 years ago

It's well worth a watch to see how small kids act when they think they're not being observed. And also for the hilarious footage of how oblivious they (mostly) are of the swarms of camera people running in front of and after them...

hgsgm3• 3 years ago

In the US we have Avengers protecting us and/or endangering us.

You shouldn't get your "news" from entertainment TV shows.

VyseofArcadia• 3 years ago

My mom has a funny story about how my grandfather surprisingly didn't get arrested.

Back in West Germany, they had lived across from a bar, and every night my grandfather would send my mom and her older sister across the street to get some beer for him.

Then they moved to Ohio and rented an apartment down the block from the bar. And my grandfather sent two little girls who didn't speak any English to the bar for some beer.

Well, they came back with cops, who then had to fetch a neighbor who spoke more English than my grandparents to translate and explain the whole situation. The cops then left with a, "don't do that again" and that was the end of it.

The mind boggles at how quickly Opa would have been behind bars in 2023.

TrueGeek• 3 years ago

In Southern California in the late 80s / early 90s I had a few friends that were regularly sent to the corner store for cigarettes. They had to bring a note, but otherwise the store seemed to think this was normal.

confidantlake5• 3 years ago

Nice story! My father did the same thing as a kid, going to the bar to get beer for his father.

Symbiote• 3 years ago

I was in a small village pub in England one Boxing Day.

A man at the table next to ours handed a £10 note to his sons, who were about 8-10 years old. They went to the bar and asked for two Fantas or something like that. The bartender said "I can't serve you, you need to be 16".

Silence fell. It was a small room, and we'd all heard the boys ask.

The old man at the end of the bar said, "You'll serve the boys, John, or else you won't be seeing me in here again."

The boys got their Fantas.

(Checking the law now, the boys were clearly accompanied, and I see no reason the bartender shouldn't have served them. I think it may have been forbidden before 2003, when the rules distinguished between children "at the bar" or not, rather than the current rules which distinguish between accompanied and unaccompanied children. But even then, the bartender would have been applying a 'rough city bar' approach to a posh village pub.)

wtcactus• 3 years ago

The all story is a scary tale about the state's intromission on people's lives.

But this part is a constant reminder of how misandric present society is:

"...the officers proceeded to charge Rivers' husband with risk of injury to a minor. They charged Rivers separately for the same thing. Then they arrested her husband and took him away."

neilv• 3 years ago

First, I don't take anything in Reason magazine at face value, because the pieces I've seen have always seemed published for appeal and to convey a "we are the people of 'reason'" image, rather than the issue itself.

That said, assuming at least partial truth to this article, I hope the kids didn't see their parent arrested, and weren't interrogated by anyone. I'd find a really gentle Mr. Rogers-type counselor to help talk with them about it.

jefftk3• 3 years ago

Reason, like most outlets, is mostly untrustworthy in what they choose to cover: they're not going to put time into writing a piece about something that happened unless they can tie it back to their preferred policies. But, like most outlets, what they write about each particular instance is technically true and usually not misleading.

francisofascii• 3 years ago

If you ever had to volunteer at a school, and have to go through all the trainings, you can see how this nonsense can happen. The message is when you see something even remotely suspicious, report it. And all reports have to be followed up on. Because God forbid something bad happens to a kid, you will be blamed for not reporting or following up on something.

lumb63• 3 years ago

I grew up in Connecticut. Killingly is not an unsafe area by any stretch of the imagination. It’s quaint by all my measures.

This is absurd. I’d have been very quick to retort to the officers, upon being informed that there were sex offenders all throughout the neighborhood, that it was their job to fix that and they failed.

throwawaysleep3• 3 years ago

Police have no power to put convicted sex offenders back in jail.

Indeed, they pressed the Rivers to search the sex offender registry to learn which of their neighbors were on it.

baidifnaoxi• 3 years ago

Cases like this are all too common across the country.

bdw5204• 3 years ago

There are 2 possibilities here:

1) The police have no real criminals to arrest but need to do something to justify their existence. So they're harassing people over things that not only aren't crimes but are examples of good parenting that teaches kids to be independent. In this case, "defund the police" would genuinely be justified as they're clearly overfunded.

2) The police are refusing to do their job and arrest real criminals. Instead, they are harassing people over things that aren't crimes because those things are "unsafe" due to the refusal of police to do their job. In this case, the police need to be reformed so that they do what they're supposed to do.

Either way, the police should stick to arresting murderers, rapists and thieves to protect the fundamental freedom of decent people who respect the rights of others to use a public street whenever they want without fear of becoming a victim of violent criminals or of the police. Since this is literally why the government exists according to social contract theory (which the US was founded upon), the refusal of the government's police to do their job or the choice of the government's police to oppress others out of boredom is a breach of the social contract that makes said government illegitimate and no better morally than a street gang or mafia.

Even if the laws are vague, enforcing a vague law in a way that is clearly evil and oppressive is unacceptable because the core principle of the American legal system is that our fundamental rights are the supreme law and supersede any laws that infringe upon them. The right to walk on a public street is clearly protected by the 9th Amendment as it is so obviously a basic right that there was no need for the 1st Congress to enumerate it. Thus infringing on such a right in the name of "safety" is flagrantly unconstitutional.

taylodl2• 3 years ago

Some of those who work forces, are the same that burn crosses

Every American should understand that the police are not your friends. They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about. A seven and nine year-old walking together to Dunkin' Donuts resulting the in the arrest of their father is a symptom of our police state. The fact that neighbors can "sic the law" on one another and the fact that "swatting" has become a verb is a symptom of our police state.

Getting back to this story and adding my own "get off my lawn" anecdote, when I was a kid every kid in the neighborhood walked to school. Even the five year-old kindergartners, like I was at one time. Oh sure my mom walked me the first couple of times to ensure I knew the route and that was it. Some kids had to walk two miles! We didn't even get a break for inclement weather! We had to walk in rain, snow and ice. We also had to cross a four-lane arterial thoroughfare! The horrors! And all this was in a big city! In all those years not a single kid was grabbed.

rootusrootus4• 3 years ago

Every American should understand that the police are not your friends.

But they should also understand that policy are rarely the enemy, either, and treating them as such will result in a worse outcome on average. Don't let the evening news distort reality so much.

Also, in the interest of sharing anecdotal get off my lawn moments, all the kids in my neighborhood walk to school too, in 2023. All weather, all the time, safely, nobody calls the cops, nobody gets grabbed, it's fine. The world is in fact objectively safer than it was when I was growing up in the 80s. There's a good reason I don't routinely watch the news or read partisan political media.

MSFT_Edging5• 3 years ago

The point of "police are not your friends", is you can't know which cop has a chip on their shoulder until its too late and you're three teeth short of a smile. The nature of policing and the logic behind "ACAB" is that because police don't keep their peers in line, you cannot trust any cop.

"One bad apple" has been corrupted just like "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps". The former cuts off "spoils the bunch", the latter being a satire for something obviously impossible.

LarryMullins7• 3 years ago

My general approach is to be as polite as can be while saying virtually nothing. If the first words out of your mouth after getting pulled over are "AM I BEING DETAINED?!?" then the police are going to make you have a very bad day. My brother had to learn this the hard way, he learned that 'tactic' from reddit I think, and it got him face down on the pavement for what should have been a speeding ticket. Just stay calm and never say anything more than the most vague pleasantries. If they ask where I'm going then it's either "to home", "to work" or "to the store"; they aren't owed answers to these questions and reddit will tell you to sperg out and start ranting about your rights, but if you stay calm and pleasant albeit distant, then the police will be more inclined to treat you the same. But if you antagonize them within the bounds of the law, they'll step outside the law to get you back. You're just setting yourself up for failure in the common case when you follow popular internet advice about cops.

jjk1663• 3 years ago

But they should also understand that policy are rarely the enemy, either, and treating them as such will result in a worse outcome on average.

If you are afraid of what will happen to you if you don't comply with everything someone says, they are your enemy.

dfxm123• 3 years ago

Kids in cities tend to be safer in general than suburbs. Not only from strangers, but especially from cars.

hpen6• 3 years ago

Need Data to back this

p1esk• 3 years ago

Link to the source of your data?

wan23• 3 years ago

The safety models of cities is just different from that of suburbs. If you live in a walkable urban area, there's safety in numbers. It's not uncommon to see children walking down the block to their corner store or going to school or whatever. If a random adult approaches a child, there are plenty of people around to see it, and if they call out for help it's very likely that someone will intervene. In the suburbs, it's a bit different. The safety model depends more on things being "normal" - people are suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. In a community where everyone drives their kids to wherever they need to go, seeing children walking down the street might be unusual enough to get someone to call the police. because they'd want other parents to do the same if their own children somehow escaped and started wandering the neighborhood. It all depends on the norms of the particular community.

willcipriano3• 3 years ago

The trouble with "The police aren't your friends" crowd is they always seem to think the the police's boss is their friend when in reality, the government isn't your friend in general and the police are merely the enforcement arm of said government. Elect the same people for 50 years and let them get away with blaming their underlings if you want, but you are just being a useful idiot. The much lauded "social services" also played a role in making this happen, so "defunding the police" probably results in exactly the same outcome.

kritiko3• 3 years ago

"The government" isn't a monolith, and I'd argue it largely isn't "the police's boss."

For instance, the NYPD leaked Mayor Bill de Blasio's daughter's arrest information, in a move that was widely criticized as an attempt at intimidation.

There's a great documentary about war from the 80s or 90s, and I remember a quote from it about how in an all volunteer military, soldiers are afforded special privileges in society. I think police in the US basically function in the same way.

quacked2• 3 years ago

They exist to "protect and serve" those in power

While this is technically correct, this phrase sets up a simplistic model of society where there's the Powerful on top, the Police right under them serving them, and the Oppressed under that. I don't think this is the best way to understand what the Police are and what they do.

I've heard many left-leaning people claim something along the lines of "the Police do whatever the Powerful want by taking it out on the Oppressed". This doesn't accurately reflect the behavior or mindset of the individuals who collectively make up the Police. There are thousands of stories of rich and "powerful" individuals being harassed by police officers when their actions or beliefs clashed with the beliefs of the responding officers.

In fact, in America the definition of "power" is almost tautological when it comes to police. You are a "powerful" person when the police will either look the other way or help you when you break the law. I would go as far as to say that in America it is impossible to be "powerful" unless you have the police on your side. (A possible exception is for gang leaders with their own outlaw police forces.) Without the police you do not have meaningful power, and so saying "the police exist to serve the powerful" incorrectly separates the relationship between the "Powerful" and the "Police".

The Police are the power. I like to call them the "Martial Caste", in order to draw connections between them, medieval knights, samurai, cartel sicarios, the KGB, etc. It's all the same thing: they are the muscle behind the societal ownership claims of the local warlords. Without them the warlords are nothing, and without the warlords they are nothing.

A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".

ninjagoo10• 3 years ago

A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".

Reminds me of this joke from the other day about the "system":

A CEO, a Politician, a Supreme Court justice, a Cop, a Laborer and an Immigrant are at a table. The table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies, and passes one cookie to the Politician's PAC. The Politician says to the Laborer "look out, the Immigrant is trying to take your cookie!" and allocates a few crumbs from the table cookie to the Cop. The Cop beats the Laborer and shoots the Immigrant. The Supreme Court justice rules that the PAC is legal, the shooting is justified, and the Cop has qualified immunity for beating the Laborer.

s1artibartfast8• 3 years ago

Yep, the police serve the themselves. The same can be said about basically every other group of humans. Police have significant power and leeway because the service has provides a lot of value to others.

I like your martial metaphor.

Poor and marginalized communities usually want more police, not less. Not because the police come at no cost, but because the alternative is worse.

It is like hiring one knight errant to keep other knights/bandits at bay.

This is basically the origin of all governments and power structure.

secondcoming• 3 years ago

Until now I thought the lyric was

Some of those that law enforce us, are the same that burn crosses

dsfyu404ed4• 3 years ago

They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about

So who are the police serving in this case? It's not like Big Karen(TM) has a trade group that hires lobbyists. It's not like The System(TM) really cares if your kids walk to wherever.

The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.

HN is angry because the morals enforced in this case are excessive and the amount of enforcement is disproportionate but the fact of the matter is that the person/people who's morals the cops are backing up with state violence is probably not that different from them.

TheFattestNinja• 3 years ago

The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.

I don't think the problem is so much about them checking on the kids' family after being called by some neighbour (which is prob. legitimate to avoid any risk of neglect etc.).

As you said t he problem is that they arrested a parent who, for all intents and purposes, was complying with their questioning. In front of their children. And threatened the second parent with arrest. And taking away the children.

I don't see how you can make the jump from "response was disproportionate" to "commentators are not that different from the person who reported the incident" though.

jcfrei2• 3 years ago

All these terrible experiences people vent about the American police force largely have to do with the fact that it's completely underfunded and poorly trained. In the US the average time to become a police officer is around 600 hours, in Germany 3500 and Finland 5500 hours [0]. If you pay police officers a shitty wage and let them do long, strenuous shifts - the only people who sign up for that kind of job are those with some external motivator other than money. In the best case they wanna help their community out but in many cases it's power hungry people who feel empowered carrying a gun and stopping traffic at will. The solution to fight that is simple: Pay higher salaries, have more competition among the applicants and only select those that pass a thorough barrage of physical and psychological tests.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

It's a bit strange to point to 4 officers spending hours "investigating" a nothingburger as being evidence they're underfunded and overworked.

I guarantee that if that family had their house broken into and a bunch of stuff stolen...one cop would have shown up hours later, told them it wasn't worth filing a report as "nothing ever comes of it anyway", and then ignored phone calls from them when they discovered they did, in fact, need a report for insurance.

40% of the town general fund in Uvalde went to the police department. A tiny town with nearly zero crime had a large police department geared up to the gills and a separate school police department...and it got them...a police department that stood around (with county police and a federal border patrol tactical team) while their children and teachers were slaughtered.

Police aren't underfunded. They're lazy, entitled bullies.

They're also not undertrained - most police get huge training budgets for all sorts of stuff. It's just stuff that is fucking useless. There's lots of time and money for SWAT, anti-terror, and drug operations training, and it's way sexier than training on how to handle a domestic violence case or sexual assault or home invasion.

nerdponx• 3 years ago

Police officers in cities like Boston and New York can make well into 6 figures after overtime pay. They also can retire relatively young, with generous pensions. Their departments are also well-stocked with capable vehicles and equipment. Funding is not the issue in those cases.

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

I have a couple cop friends and they make about as much as me. And that's ignoring benefits. How much do we need to pay them? $300k? $500k?

lovehashbrowns• 3 years ago

Underfunded lmao. This is some grade-school level of bullying. “We will stop the beatings and murders if you give us more money.”

LAPD got 1.9 billion in 2022 by the way: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/police-commission-votes-to-...

Various cities can spend over 30% of their budget on police btw.

Maybe it should be even closer to 100% huh. Why live with iPhones, flat screen TVs, computers, when all of our spare cash can just go to the police.

wonderwonder7• 3 years ago

They did not endanger their kids, the illegally dared to argue with the police. That level of arrogance is not tolerated by our betters in the elevated class of police officers. If they had simply apologized, thanked the officers and perhaps knelt before them there would have been no problem. /S

This is what happens when you create an insane concept like qualified immunity and give it to people that have absolute power. Society treats cops like they are a special privileged class so they act like it and treat everyone else like serfs.

I let my 11 year old ride his bike to 7-11 the other day for the first time. I can't imagine how I would react if the gestapo showed up telling me I was a bad parent and endangering my child. I would absolutely sue if they arrested me for it, especially after threatening my wife as in the article and then dropping charges.

rootusrootus4• 3 years ago

This particular incident has been recycled often enough that it actually makes me feel a little better about policing when I read it again. I keep wondering 'oh shit, is this becoming a thing now?' and then I see 'no, it's the same one as last time.'

acegopher2• 3 years ago

Not claiming it's not true, but according to the article, the author is "president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement".

So could the story have been embellished or made up to push a narrative and stir upset and outrage to get exposure? There doesn't seem to be any authoritative third-party evidence (public records) supporting this story.

trgn4• 3 years ago

If you want to make the connection, the less accusative, more simple interpretation is that because of their activism with Let Grow, they have the energy and commitment to actually push this story. Most people would just eat the humiliation and harassment to avoid more trouble.

acegopher2• 3 years ago

The burden of proof isn't on the reader, it's on the writer.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

I was sceptical reading it but I found the smoking gun to be the following: "she waited three years to let her go for another walk unsupervised". So not only is it anonymised with no information from police/social, but it's supposedly also a several years old case which makes it nearly impossible to verify. But I guess it will get people going.

woodruffw7• 3 years ago

I’ll note this every time this kind of story comes up: it’s good and correct to direct ire at the police here, but it’s also not the end of the story. The story also continues through America’s isolationist and atavistic car culture: you simply don’t see this kind of bloodthirst for “protecting children” in countries (or even areas within the US) with sensible urban design and correspondingly shifted expectations about the public.

This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.

dfxm123• 3 years ago

"Think of the children" is an excuse used to pass too much poor legislation, not just relating to cars, but also infosec. It's one of the Four horsemen of the infocalypse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

trgn4• 3 years ago

This is really it.

I'd go a step further, which technologists will fail to accept, since it's essentially an animistic argument. Cars, very specifically, the actual physical _thing_ are evil technology. In absolute terms, in absence of their application.

Americans don't recognize it as such. We see it just as a tool. It is not. Cars have their own force field and it has changed our minds, our bodies, our relationships to other, our dispositions.

Once americans recognize it as such, we can see change. It's not impossible. From my visits to Europe, the difference is already night and day in so many places compared to just 10-15 years ago. If they can, we can. But it will be such a hard slog.

woodruffw7• 3 years ago

Excellently put!

I've been reading a collection of Tom Wolfe's journalism from the 1960s[1], and it's fascinating to see how the car has warped from a liberating force (in the sense of propelling countercultures and shrinking the rural divide) to a domineering one (in terms of suburban fear culture and dependence).

These phenomena could be seen as incompatible on face value, but they're really just two phases in the same arc: the children of these articles' subjects grew up in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself, and built systems to enshrine it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kandy-Kolored_Tangerine-Fl...

fnimick2• 3 years ago

It's called "motornormativity", and it's measurable. https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/42160/20230201/breakin...

ironmagma• 3 years ago

While we’re on the topic, I would add TVs to the list of evil objects. With a book, if you don’t like the content, you can stop reading at any time. But with a TV, anyone in the vicinity is coerced into keep listening and turning the TV off, even when the content is extremely disturbing, while others are watching is considered faux pas.

balfirevic• 3 years ago

We see it just as a tool

I'm European and basically everyone I know sees them like that, and great tools as well.

I won't even comment on the woo stuff.

maerF0x04• 3 years ago

kind of agree, but there are ways to improve it. Public transit can be an example where it (in some places and countries) mixes socio economic classes, maybe save for the highest wealth...

Additionally things like Cruise's driverless car can make driving more social again. Imagine being able to play a game or have a casual cup of coffee with a friend over a commute.

wyager4• 3 years ago

America has had a robust car culture for over 80 years. The obsession over safety is more recent. Stop trying to make everything about cars.

woodruffw7• 3 years ago

I think you missed the point: the claim was that the obsession over safety (partially the kind that manifests in cases like this) is the culmination of a robust car culture. Things like this obviously don't happen overnight; they require decades of normalization (and, for car culture in particular, alienation).

H4ZB72• 3 years ago

uhh no the blatant problem here is american mentality where everything is illegal by default including breathing and walking. breathing is only legal because it's necessary to survive. walking is legal but only on certain areas of land. you HNers display this mentality every single day with your latest "oh cookies should be illegal" and "oh AI should be illegal" nonsense. your narrative about car culture (the first time i heard this one) is insane and probably some left wing talking point or something, i don't read the news. normies have that pathetic mentality you describe regardless of cars. call it american mentality, not car mentality, although it's actually the same in all countries (including whatever "well designed" city like oslo or whatever you have in mind), but america invented it. tl;dr the disease is statism, not car culture.

jaccarmac2• 3 years ago

Leaving aside the parts of this argument not worth dealing with (that is, most of them), you make the fundamental carbrain error. How do you think interstates, suburban development, and countless square miles of public roads and public parking came to be? The answer (and it's an extremely easy one to find because it's less than a hundred years old) is massive amounts of public investment. There's no universe in which virtuously libertarian (TM) private money would have done the same thing. So while the midwit impulse is to bifurcate "statism" and "car culture" and call one a "left wing talking point", they are at the very least not exclusive. There's mutual causation, of course, but I have no desire to open that chapter under this comment.

insane_dreamer4• 3 years ago

It's not just a matter of car-dependent living. Suburbs have been around since the 50s and yet, 20-30 years ago, we didn't live in this constant fear of danger lurking on every suburb sidewalk. Media (regular media and social media) amplification of every single tragedy that ever happens to anyone anywhere has created this culture of fear. When I was a kid, we walked or rode our bike to school, or to the ice cream shop, without everyone being up in arms about it. It's no more dangerous now than it was then -- in fact, it's probably safer -- but our perception of society as a dangerous place has grown tremendously. It's a horrible way to live. I want my kids to be smart street and not naive, but I don't want them to live in fear.

berniedurfee• 3 years ago

Agreed. I probably put 100k miles on my sneakers as a kid and I don’t imagine this was ever a problem for anyone.

Our hyper-focus on fear these days is pretty apparent. I do think the media and the scale of information that abounds is a likely culprit.

I cynically think that the media advertising complex which is fueled by attention is to blame. Danger grabs eyeballs for advertisers.

brailsafe• 3 years ago

This was my first thought. Didn't even think about the cops, they do what they do, but they're operating in a culture, not that they're not wrong, but it's stupid all the way down. If I lived in Berlin and my kid wanted to ride their bike to the Dunkin Doughnuts in fucking Amsterdam, I'd tell them to update me every so often over the next couple days, and let me know if you quit and need to get the train home, but I'd wish them well and send them on their way.

That's also not to say that there's no car dependency there, but it's not as ruthless and overbearing.

fomine3• 3 years ago

I live in rural/small town area in Japan that is not designed well and most adults have a car, but children go elementary school by walking. This is standard here. Sensible urban design isn't minimum requirement.

hosh11• 3 years ago

This is why we have this: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-strugg...

Instead of this: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...

For whatever reason, our society has confused well-being with safety. Those are not one and the same.

There will be a time when an adult has to assess risks and opportunity, and make choices. There are things in one’s life where they have to face the unknown and decide actions without having safety nets. A life cowering from the possibilities is small, with the illusion of safety.

And that’s for navigating one’s own life. What happens when these risk-adverse kids are raising their own kids?

What happen when these kids are the adults who have to vote and make decisions on things that affect the whole society?

mjw_byrne• 3 years ago

"If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids"

That part, at least, sounds like a power trip to me.

shanebellone• 3 years ago

Finally, Connecticut made it on HN. Go Nutmeggers.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 3 years ago

"Arrested for child endangerment", and the mug shot will stay in his record forever. Also fingerprints and possibly DNA record in the database forever.

1over137• 3 years ago

As a non-USian, this headline made me think "What?! They are literally policing unhealthy food choices?!" The fact that it's about just letting kids walk to a nearby store is so much more mind boggling, it did not occur to me at all.

sircastor• 3 years ago

This sort of thing is on every American parent’s radar. There’s a mild concern that some overeager police officer, or concerned citizen is going to decide that you’re not parenting correctly. At the top of the list of things to avoid is being noticed by the state.

I understand why child protection services exist, but it freaks me out that someone can arbitrarily decide that my wife and I aren’t good enough parents and take my kids.

bleepblipbloop• 3 years ago

It's a good thing they were white, otherwise, the cops would probably have shot the parents for resisting

kloch• 3 years ago

When I was a kid in the 70's/80's we weren't just allowed to play outside unsupervised until dark - we were required to!

There was an arrangement where the older neighborhood kids would look after the younger ones.

throwawaysleep3• 3 years ago

I am really curious if we had an up or down vote whether people would pass a law saying that everyone 12 and under must be supervised. I think it would pass.

I certainly wasn't permitted to walk anywhere by myself at that age, nor were any of the non-immigrant friends that I know. My sister wasn't permitted to do that until around 15.

gregw2• 3 years ago

As a boy in the early 80s age 10 in an American suburb, I rode my bike to school one mile and back. It was fairly safe.

I also walked half a mile to a school bus stop when I was 12 and waited there (on a pretty busy street - not sure if that makes it safer or more dangerous but I would guess actually safer.)

I don't think the risks were high then, nor are they now. But the culture of what is considered acceptable for your kids to do by themselves outside the home is definitely way different.

If I had to pick one factor that is different and driving the difference, I think it's that the society now keeps (public) databases of where sexual offenders live so the awareness of the threat is much more concrete, even if it is not particularly elevated. We are over-managing/weighting what we can measure.

But also feeding the changing dynamic is bureaucracy and funding and legislation reflecting both the wealth and fears of our society -- today I learned) Child Protective Services wasn't really created until certain 1974 federal funding was given to the states, and other legislation around this didn't come till the 1988 Child Abuse Prevention, Adoption, and Family Services Act.

gnicholas• 3 years ago

I saw this article the other day and thought it was odd that it doesn't mention how far away the Dunkin is. It does say the cops picked up the kids two blocks from their house, but it doesn't say how far the destination was. Seems kind of relevant, and it's usually mentioned in Reason pieces like this. Does anyone know the details of the distance or route?

phkahler• 3 years ago

"They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street, that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them, that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was 'a different world now,'"

Isn't it your job to protect people from all that?

epolanski2• 3 years ago

Every time I read something about the United States, I am so happy to have been born on the other side of the Atlantic ocean.

fsh• 3 years ago

Fun fact: The German foreign office warns about these kind of laws on its travel information page for the USA. Most European parents would not expect this to be a problem.

jeffwask• 3 years ago

Interesting way for the local PD to say they are incompetent. Sorry, but the streets aren't safe for your children but here are two cruisers full of cops to explain parenting to you.

srj• 3 years ago

I used to walk or ride my bike to Dunkin Donuts at that age and it's likely farther than the one in this story. I imagine the officers are DCF workers will bear no accountability for this.

freedude2• 3 years ago

It reminded me of when I was about 9 my younger brother and I were allowed to ride our bikes from our house 3.5 miles to the corner store, crossing under the freeway. We went many times during the summer. For several years. We read comic books, bought candy and soda pop and had a great time.

My folks were are conservative and taught us the value of hard work. I did plenty of it growing up. It is how we had the money for the comic books and junk food. During that time period I also remember hearing of someone who was murdered and the body was dumped in a ditch on a road about a mile away as the crow flies. There were rapists nearby and children stolen only a few miles away in the next town. I am sure my mom was worried and perhaps my dad too. I remember my dad looking at my little brother once and asking him what do you do if someone tries to take you? He said, "I fight and scream as loud as I can!" He would do it too. He was a scrapper. There is a reason my dad asked him and not me. He knew the response he would get. My parents are conservative Christians. They knew they couldn't protect us everywhere, all the time. I am sure they were praying about it often as we spread our wings and gradually flew out of the nest.

roboscides2• 3 years ago

This comment thread is what happens when politics is allowed on HN, just utter trash. I wish dang was a competent moderator.

MarkusWandel• 3 years ago

These aren't real numbers. But as someone over a certain age, I always say that during my childhood, you had about a 99.99 chance of surviving it to adulthood (discounting unpreventable causes such as inherited defects). And I know of at least one child who did perish in an incident which back then was a mere tragedy, but might today be considered criminal negligence (lack of supervision) by adults.

I believe that today's society, at least in North America, has added at least one nine to this statistic. Wonderful! For every 100,000 kids born, nine deaths prevented. That's a measurable success. But the reduction in "childhood experience" - the free roaming - for example, when as kids we received - and this dates me - our first 3-channel CB walkie talkies, with all their glorious 100mW of transmit power, 3 channel switch but only one set of crystals installed (channel 14) - it was completely natural that we'd fan out all over the countryside, testing the range - including a relay on a hilltop when we found that schoolmates had compatible walkie-talkies too.

But more seriously. Kids that can socialize unsupervised learn by experience how social structures are established, how to act responsibly and the consequences of not doing so and so forth, and also that the majority of people are good, nice folks who'll let you use your phone or have a glass of water or whatever. Now, instead, it's drilled into them that the world is a bad place and safety is at home with your gadgets.

asah• 3 years ago

Setting aside the outrage-inducing headline, in fact there's numerous registered sex offenders in that town: https://www.city-data.com/so/so-Killingly-Connecticut.html https://www.city-data.com/so/so-Danielson-Connecticut.html

and there does seem to be a substantial amount of violent crime: https://crimegrade.org/violent-crime-east-killingly-ct/

https://www.google.com/search?q=crime+map+killingly+ct

I have no comment about whether the arrest or social worker were appropriate in this situation - we're only hearing one side.

thwayunion4• 3 years ago

I've been to Killingly several times and find it completely non-credible that it's unsafe for kids to walk there.

The raw number of sex offenders / violent crime rates don't tell us much about the safety of a kid walking in a particular neighborhood at a particular point in time.

Additionally, I'm not sure how arresting a kid's parents is supposed to make anyone safer...

aidenn05• 3 years ago

Indeed. I had a friend in college from Gary, Indiana which at the time was perennially near the top of the homicides per-capita lists. He said that he learned at a young age which neighborhoods to avoid and felt generally safe in the "good parts" of town.

standardUser3• 3 years ago

We're hearing the side of the parents. They live there. It's their kids. What other side do you need to hear?

mdp20213• 3 years ago

So the inhabitants lose the right to go for a walk?

Enforced by the same who did not manage to prevent the circumstances?

educaysean• 3 years ago

Both the police and the DFC dropped their charges. What information could there be that we still need to hear from the other side?

anoonmoose• 3 years ago

Not sure how you can look at that second link and conclude it has a "substantial" amount of violent crime. The overall crime rate, and the violent crime rate, are both rated at "A-" levels, which is on the good end of the scale, not the bad end.

I mean, ffs, this is from the link:

"By a simple count ignoring population, more crimes occur in the northwest parts of East Killingly, CT: about 0 per year. The north part of East Killingly has fewer cases of violent crime with only 0 in a typical year."

evgeniysharapov• 3 years ago

Haha, what did America become! Country built by pioneers venturing into unknown danger, the whole ethos of the country is "exploration and endeavor". Now, one would be questioned for having kids outside.

fencepost• 3 years ago

Time for some local press coverage on the topic of "why is Killingly so dangerous for children?" with plenty of "the department denied this when asked, but multiple officers spoke to us off the record about the dangers of the town and advised never leaving children unsupervised."

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

America needs a party representing the public interest of ensuring small government.

Stop centralizing parental authority.

CalRobert• 3 years ago

Yet again this video on how there is something deeply, horrifyingly wrong with raising kids in American suburbs is apt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

Visited Utrecht in December and visiting Freiburg in April to decide where to live.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

I grew up in Africa.

We had some of the deadliest snakes in the world, slithering through our backyard (mambas, gaboon vipers, cobras, etc. -Nigeria, in the 60s), and we had brown scorpions, scuttling around the schoolyard, in Morocco.

I have had the … pleasure … of a rabies vaccination series, because of rabid rodents.

I used to pass a police fort, with a .50 caliber machine gun pointed at me (Uganda, in the early 70s -fun times), on my way to the candy store.

Coming to the US was a bit of a culture shock.

schwarzrules• 3 years ago

Just going to state the obvious: this wouldn't have happened if they were walking to starbucks. blatant classism.

tootie• 3 years ago

This kinda reeks of /r/thathappened. Why is this posted 4 years after the fact with no sources? It's just a personal story being relayed by an advocacy group. I see kids roaming the streets of NYC and even riding the subway unsupervised and nobody says anything. This is either an isolated case or being reported by biased party who is omitting a lot of salient details to avoid looking bad.

agotterer• 3 years ago

There’s a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind. It talks about play grounds safety, cancel culture, and many of the topics covered in this article and thread. It tried to use data to back up its claims and identify the causes for America’s shifting mindset. One interesting takeaway from the book was how the creation of the Americas Most Wanted tv show may be responsible for some of todays parental fears. However, statistically this is the safest time to be an American child. I recommend the book to everyone, but especially parents.

hpen6• 3 years ago

To all those who believe that "one bad apples spoils the bunch", I do question what your proposed solution to that is.

air72• 3 years ago

Whenever I hear a story about a police encounter that went sour (which is often) I have to remind myself that this is probably pure sensationalism.

In the US about 30 million adults have a police initialed encounter per year[1]. It seems obvious to me that the vast, vast majority of these encounters end in the way common-sense would dictate, and that only very few have the shocking, blood-boiling finale that can make you angry enough to demand reform. But equally obvious is that these are the exact stories that are attention grabbing and therefor news worthy (at least in the click-through sense). I remind myself of this prevalence perception skewing effect that the news has whenever I read it and I try to actively resist it.

This reminds me of an 20yo comedy skit (that probably wouldn't be made today) by Chris Rock called "How not to get your ass kicked by the police!" which seems to say the same thing. [2]

Of course I might be mistaken. I wonder if people here have data to prove otherwise?

---

[1] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cbpp18st.pdf [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8

orf• 3 years ago

15% of the population having a police initiated encounter per year is ridiculously high.

indigodaddy• 3 years ago

Absolute insanity

libpcap• 3 years ago

Meanwhile in Japan...

wkat4242• 3 years ago

If the cops come over and tell me "it's a different world now" and the streets are not safe for kids I'll ask them what they're doing about it because they're obviously neglecting their duties :P

Yes I'm sure I'd find myself in the back of a squad car like this dad. But it's worth it

paxys• 3 years ago

In Feb 2019. Why is this coming up now?

mdp20213• 3 years ago

"Your job is to keep streets safe, you claim to be unable to, and your idea is to lock people out of danger".

truesy• 3 years ago

These comments are mainly condemning the police. While they are definitely at fault here, so is society in the US as a whole. It's become pretty common in the states to not allow children to go outside without supervision. You just don't see kids biking down the road alone anymore. These cops have taken it too far, and made up reasons to arrest the parents, but in general the idea of children having any sort of freedom or responsibility is pretty much dead in this country.

mikotodomo2• 3 years ago

What the hell?? I bike to school every day. Our bike rack has like 100 bikes each morning, I can't even count.

It's become pretty common in the states to not allow children to go outside without supervision.

You can, just don't send them through the forest and city for hours alone, when they're literally 8.

kunalgupta• 3 years ago

In my hometown of Easton, CT, the cops were the sex offenders on my block. I never reported it. The first half of this story makes me wonder how common that is in CT.

terminatornet• 3 years ago

cops are terrified babies and credulous morons who will believe anything

bastardoperator2• 3 years ago

What a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. If we want to fix policing in the US we need to do three things immediately:

1. Revoke qualified immunity

2. Educational requirements beyond a HS diploma

3. Internal Affairs should not be managed by the people they're investigating, it should be a citizen led committee that has no involvement with the department but can fire officers at will pending an actual investigation.

aidenn05• 3 years ago

Revoking qualified immunity just seems like the wrong solution. It seems impossible for a police officer to do their job for 20 years without once having a situation where the preponderance of the evidence could suggest that there are grounds for damages.

bastardoperator2• 3 years ago

Sorry, it's not. We need to hold police to higher standards, not the lowest. If these people can't do the job make way for people that can. Look at airline pilots. We hold them to the highest of standards and because of that air travel is safe. Police are seemingly drunk with power, which enables the situations we're seeing now. The Tyre Nichols murder highlights just how above the law these people see themselves as being.

luxuryballs2• 3 years ago

Those cops are lucky they didn’t pick the wrong family to mess with.

mdp20213• 3 years ago

Real time coincidences:

an article just came out on the FT:

"US police receive less training than plumbers"

https://www.ft.com/content/0ec78d2e-9a3b-403b-9d5a-fc68c2804...

Edit: that was the RSS title; the webpage title is "US police: is a lack of training behind the violence? // Officers require fewer hours to qualify than plumbers and cosmetologists". Which again elicits a reaction in the lines of: "suspicion of that correlation being causal is the farthest from novel".

vxNsr2• 3 years ago

The most worrisome part of about this is the amount of power we give young clueless social workers who usually have never actually parented a child. Many of whom have never been in real relationships. All their knowledge comes from college classes dealing in theory. Same exact thing can be said about teachers.

There should be very serious pushback against allowing people like that near any levers of power.

bg4• 3 years ago

My sister had the police called when her school age kids were playing/riding scooters in her front yard and driveway. In that case though, the police were just as confused as she was.

jsz0• 3 years ago

I live near this area and am very familiar with the exact DD location in question. Obviously arresting the parents was a huge overreaction but the one thing I will say in defense of the police is the roads in this area are not pedestrian friendly at all. Portions of the road in question are 4 lanes including highway on/off ramps and dozens of businesses driveways and parking lots. Sections of the road have sidewalks that abruptly end and turn into guardrails forcing people to walk on the shoulder 1ft away from traffic moving at 45-60mph. I rarely see people walking these roads and as a result drivers are certainly less likely to be watching out for pedestrians. If I had kid I would not let them walk these roads. I would be on very high alert walking them myself as an adult.

COGlory10• 3 years ago

I lived in Killingly for some years. You probably are thinking of the wrong Dunkin. The article states they live near the Troop D barracks, so it's not the Dunkins in Killingly Commons, and the Dunkin closest to the troop D barracks is not on a difficult road at all. It's quite possible the children did not have to cross any main roads to get there.

If it's the Dunkins in Killingly Commons, I'd agree, that's tough to get to on foot and that intersection is awful.

spoils19• 3 years ago

Is it an Eastern bloc level intersection?

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

She tried to dispute what the police were saying, and one of them asked if she watched the news.

In 2023, you shut-up and close the door when the cops are done talking. That's the response they deserve. Anything else is used against you.

yakubin• 3 years ago

Reading the headline, I naively thought it was about teaching them unhealthy eating habits. Yet the content is even more bizarre.

mcguire• 3 years ago

"Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement."

insane_dreamer4• 3 years ago

As a parent, the overreach by child protective services and the like is terrifying.

zebnyc• 3 years ago

As a parent, I feel for them and this is definitely a situation where cops overstepped their bounds.

To play devil's advocate: I am wondering if we have created a system where the cost of being wrong is too high. Imagine what would happen if the police didn't investigate and something had gone wrong? Or look at Gabby Petito's parents who are trying to sue the Moab police.

tflinton2• 3 years ago

Yeah, I do think we’ve overstepped on what we expect police to do for us. It might also correlate with the seemingly endless stories of police overstep and abuse.

tflinton2• 3 years ago

The amount of power CPS has in our state is somewhat unbelievable. A friend documented on instagram how during an X-ray of their daughters arm (as she had complained about a dull pain) that they found that she had at one point fractured it. She was 4 when she finally verbalized the discomfort but the injury was probably when she was 2. Her parents explained they didn’t know how it happened and like most parents of 2 years old know it’s sometimes impossible to know why your child is upset unless you see them injured.

CPS came later that evening and took both of their kids. The parents being Mormon had no drug or substance abuse issues, but her mom mentioned she was on antidepressants and the state decided to put them into a 1-year foster care for both of their kids until she an complete a mandated psych review.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Lmao at the risk of the road collapsing to middle earth, you won’t be allowed out, that’s self endangerment

mordae• 3 years ago

Have you watched Old Enough yet?

https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279

93po• 3 years ago

Another great example of why you should never talk to the police. They would have been fine if they just didn't talk to them.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information—and insisted she return to therapy.

Why are we "normalizing therapy" if nothing has changed about it being used against you?

snozolli3• 3 years ago

I found out later from my husband that after I went inside, the arresting officer said to him, 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'"

Any cop who threatens retaliatory arrest because his feelings are hurt should be severely reprimanded, then fired and barred from police work if the behavior continues.

Same goes for airport security who casually threaten to add passengers to the no-fly list if they push back. Retaliatory abuse of power isn't acceptable.

user39393823• 3 years ago

It’s a crime to threaten to hurt someone with a weapon, I don’t see how this is any different. The culture of zero accountability for law enforcement is a symptom of a government that is systemically corrupt and has thrown out even the pretense of consent of the governed.

ape4• 3 years ago

I guess the cops have never seen Old Enough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough!

ianmcgowan• 3 years ago

There's a lot of criticism in this post of CPS (not just in the US), with comments like "they do more harm than good", etc.

As someone who was fostered and ultimately adopted, I want to reject the characterization that CPS is a useless organization - they are typically made up of underpaid people who genuinely care about the welfare of children.

Before dismissing them think about what kind of organization would you create to handle the distressingly common scenario of a drunk/drugged parent doing terrible things to themselves and their children in the middle of the night. CPS shows up in this case and takes care of the children. That is a routine event that doesn't make the news, it probably happened in your city last night. An insane response like TFA describes cannot be defended, but that is not the typical case at all.

rpmisms• 3 years ago

Surprise surprise, the cops are on a power trip again. You want to avoid this? Good luck. Your best bet is to move to the middle of nowhere where there are 4 police officers and they mainly care about joyriders.

My young (5-10 y/o) in-laws can walk around town with no worries, since the cops know who they are, and it's a tiny town. One of the few artifacts of normal life left in this country.

Oh yeah, and "Posted" signs carry force of law here, unbreakable by police or even federal agents without a warrant. They also know better than to try.

GaryNumanVevo2• 3 years ago

In my experience growing up in a tiny town <3000 people, it's a lot worse.

GaryNumanVevo2• 3 years ago

Literal police state. My elderly parents recently had police in their upper middle class neighborhood start POUNDING on their door at 3am. What was the cause? Had they caught someone breaking into their house? Was their house on fire? No.

They had left their garage door open over night, and the "kind" police officers decided to nearly give my father a heart attack to let him know that leaving open your garage door could draw in a "criminal element"

I don't want to live anywhere where police can feel "empowered" to terrorize regular people because of "crime" that may or may not be happening.

vogt• 3 years ago

Heh. I grew up in a town nearly identical to the one mentioned in the article (not far, either - probably only a 45 minute drive).

My bus stop was like a half mile/three quarters of a mile away so in the mornings my dad would drop me off on his way into work. One morning I realized we made it too late, and I had missed the bus.

On the walk home I got approached by a police officer who pulled up next to me. Thankfully, we had some history as he was my DARE officer in fifth grade.

He told me 3 different people called the police about a 15 year old walking by himself with a bag and large jacket on. People can never resist being busybodies.

maerF0x04• 3 years ago

Then mom, dad, and the kids faced a barrage of questions

In America, you should essentially never speak to the police w/o a lawyer[1]

They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street

Isn't that stark admittance that the police themselves are the ones failing in this scenario?

PS: highly recommend reaons's reporting, I find them quite interesting not just covering the same run of the mill topics.

PPS: I'm sure they should arrest all of Japan for being complicit in the making of this show (jk) https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO7z4cHrcuY

Willish42• 3 years ago

This is really bad and I'm generally a pretty politically minded person, but is there a policy for what is and isn't discussed on hacker news? This one seems completely unrelated to technology.

I don't mind talking about politics in circles such as this but it seems a bit arbitrary that this particular news story blew up on HN. Does anybody know / could speculate why?

timerol• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

No comment on the applicability to the current article

chung8123• 3 years ago

Somewhat similar to this story: https://www.iheart.com/content/2022-11-18-texas-mom-wrongful...

localhost3000• 3 years ago

Grew up in a small town in Connecticut and roamed around all the time as a ~9 year old. Used to go fishing with my friends at the various rivers and streams around town. No cell phones, be home before dark. Doors were never locked. It was a great way to grow up.

miguelazo• 3 years ago

Sounds like these cops have been spending way too much time on social media-- sex offenders lurking around every corner.

Glad to see that "free range" parenting movement has taken root the last few years.

babyshake• 3 years ago

On an actuarial basis, how likely are children of this age group walking to a store in the suburbs likely to be a) approached by sex offenders trying to abuse them and b) either kidnapped or abused by strangers after being approached? My hunch is that being exposed to a small amount of anecdata warps our perception of these types of problems, and police are not immune from this type of bias. Although I could also be wrong on this hunch.

therealdrag0• 3 years ago

Isn’t the vast vast vast amount of abuse from people who know the victim, including when it’s kids? Aka I agree with your hunch. Most of this is boogie man panics.

animitronix• 3 years ago

Burn all the police stations to the ground

trogdor• 3 years ago

This author has a history of bending the truth.

Last time around, we were told the story of Heather Wallace, a Waco, Texas woman who was arrested after her child walked home. That Reason.com article stated that Wallace’s child, Aiden, had “agreed to walk home,” after which Wallace was arrested for child engagement.

I am a reporter and I cover crime. I was skeptical of that story, so I contacted the McClennan County Clerk of Court, and I paid for a copy of Ms. Wallace’s indictment.

It stated that Wallace had forced her crying child to walk home — on the shoulder of a busy highway.

I have no doubt that Heather Wallace told the article’s author (who runs an advocacy organization…) that her son Aiden wanted to walk home, but that is not what Aiden had told the police.

Wallace pleaded guilty.

Government overreach can be a serious problem, but I would be very hesitant to draw that conclusion from any story by this author. Particularly this one, since you can’t independently verify the facts. If you are going to credibly report stories about crime, you can’t anonymize the names of people who were allegedly arrested. That is not journalism. It’s storytelling.

reportgunner• 3 years ago

Why is this even on hacker news.

e40• 3 years ago

I found out later from my husband that after I went inside, the arresting officer said to him, 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'"

Wow. That person definitely deserves to never be in a position of power again. Abuse like this is insane.

feeela• 3 years ago

The land of thee free - where you get arrested if your kids buy some sweets on their own.

Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk to Dunkin' Donuts

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