[HN Gopher] Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk t...
___________________________________________________________________
Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk to Dunkin'
Donuts
Author : jseliger
Score : 734 points
Date : 2023-02-02 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>"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.
| eftychis wrote:
| It is easier to arrest the parents of course. The other classes
| might fight back and have lawyers.
|
| (End of sarcasm towards these "cops.")
| Zak wrote:
| '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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| If you arrest drug dealers today you end up with riots in the
| streets.
| standardUser wrote:
| Name one riot OR name the imaginary world you live in where
| these fantastical events occur.
| JackC wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Locking more people up only helps if you lock the _right_
| people up.
|
| Otherwise you might as well randomly pick them off the
| streets (but maybe that's already what is happening).
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It is kind of obvious that the guy who beat an Amazon
| employee in Beltown with a bat should be in jail right
| now, but they are considering releasing him [1]. You can
| walk out of a Target with a 65" TV and get bail with
| outstanding warrants [2]. I don't think Seattle is
| locking anyone up right now, to be honest, unless murder
| is involved.
|
| [1] https://mynorthwest.com/3777835/rantz-brutal-bat-
| attack-susp...
|
| [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10447987/Pro
| lific-s...
| ninjagoo wrote:
| Conservative Talk Radio and the Daily Mail? Really? Do
| you have any better sourcing (a.k.a more reliable
| sourcing) for these examples?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You could just read the Seattle times, no secrets here,
| but it is pay walled.
|
| Definitely conservatives pointing out these problems is
| the best way to get votes in ultra liberal Seattle, and
| they don't need to make anything up. It isn't going to
| change us into Trump voters, but it can sway local
| elections.
| overrun11 wrote:
| Have you ever been to a prison? It's not a randomly
| selected group. The majority of prisoners are in for
| serious violent offenses, easily confirmed by looking at
| the data or speaking to anyone who works in a prison.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Imagine if the streets were safe and we didn't need to keep
| funding so many insanely powerful police! Yikes!
|
| /s
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| We'd suddenly have a lot more gangs with firearm training
| roaming the streets after layoffs. That'll show us.
| notch898a wrote:
| Firearm training of police is laughable and probably
| worse than the casual shooter who goes to a range once a
| month.
|
| The average cop probably quals once a year with his glock
| 19 and spends the rest of the year stroking it thinking
| about how he's billy badass because he has a badge. You
| can watch the videos, any real resistance and they go
| back screaming asking for 10 of their buddies to do the
| spray and pray. When they were hunting Dorner they were
| even unloading full standard mags on random trucks just
| loosely fitting the description and still not managing to
| incapacitate the occupants. LAPD officers
| were guarding one of the officers on Dorner's manifesto
| hit list on Feb. 7, 2013 when a blue Toyota pickup truck
| allegedly matching the suspect's vehicle drove up to the
| scene. Police opened fire and aimed at least 100 rounds
| at the occupants of the truck who they mistakenly
| believed to be Dorner's. Two women were
| delivering newspapers on Feb. 7, 2013, when LAPD officers
| guarding the Torrance home of a target named in an online
| manifesto blasted at least 100 rounds. Margie Carranza
| and her mother, Emma Hernandez, were wounded and rushed
| to local hospitals. Carranza suffered a minor bullet
| wound, and Hernandez was shot twice in the back and
| reported in stable condition.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Sorry, I meant in comparison to teenagers with switches
| on their glocks.
|
| Cops are crap with their guns, but generally better than
| someone who has never trained at all and is waiting for a
| chance to shoot at something for the first time.
|
| I'm well aware of the American hero, Chris Dorner, who
| exposed LAPD and genuinely made them feel fear that they
| may see consequence for the first time. His methods are
| up for debate but he's done something only lies about
| fentanyl has been able to do.
| notch898a wrote:
| Ah lol point taken.
| projektfu wrote:
| 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.
| overrun11 wrote:
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Plus, if you just arrest innocent people, you're way less
| likely to get shot.
| jollyllama wrote:
| The only correct response to the quote is "It sounds like
| you're not doing your job."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "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.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| 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.
| eftychis wrote:
| 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...)
| schwarzrules wrote:
| Just going to state the obvious: this wouldn't have happened if
| they were walking to starbucks. blatant classism.
| tantalor wrote:
| Article is about events 4 years ago, with tiny update buried
| towards the end. Lazy journalism.
| Finnucane wrote:
| It's Reason, so that's basically assumed.
| locococo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If police really believe kids shouldn't walk alone outside, they
| should perhaps ask themselves who is doing a bad job: parents or
| themselves.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| 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.
| rashkov wrote:
| 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.
| locustous wrote:
| > Obviously these agencies are vital
|
| Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.
| blooalien wrote:
| Sometimes they do indeed do more harm than good. I know this
| for certain first-hand...
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.
|
| Do you have any evidence to back this statement?
| OJFord wrote:
| Evidence to back what 'seems'? GP was effectively asking
| for evidence; your response is to ask for evidence that
| it's not 'obvious' and that they need evidence?
| locustous wrote:
| Society tends to observe almost any mistake of parents as
| reasons to remove children.
|
| 24/7 surveillance of children is an unreasonable
| expectation. Yet if there is any lapse observed, no matter
| how minor, it's an investigative offense. There is little
| understanding for parents. Not many people are parents
| these days, and if they are frequently they only have
| experience with one or two children in a world where every
| child can be quite different.
|
| When CFS shows up, you are mostly at the mercy of the org.
| I've called attorneys and they kind of throw their hands up
| with a "not much they can do attitude". There isn't much
| due process except what exists internally to the org. When
| they make mistakes there is effectively no recourse except
| going public and shaming them in the media - which is not
| generally effective BTW.
|
| Which brings is to harm. Removing a child from a home can
| be life altering dramatic. Yet they can do it without
| judicial oversight. The places they put them aren't
| guaranteed to be superior. Even if a child experiences some
| abuse they may also experience love in a home. Foster homes
| are also actually more likely to be places of abuse -
| https://www.focusforhealth.org/sex-abuse-and-the-foster-
| care...
|
| So the metaphor that comes to mind is you are potentially
| removing a child from a pan, maybe not even a hot pan, and
| likely throwing them into a fire. To make that step you had
| better make 100% certain in triplicate that you are
| correct. And that bar is not met by the current system.
|
| I'm not really sure how to convey a lifetime of experience
| as a parent and personal dealings DCFS and what is and
| isn't good for children. Children are, nearly universally,
| better off with their actual parents if those parents want
| them. Even when those parents demonstrate pretty egregious
| failings. Unless there is really solid proof of physical
| danger to their life directly from the parents or sexual
| abuse, it should be hands off.
|
| The foster system just isn't good enough to justify
| anything else.
| notch898a wrote:
| Yeah 99% of people that complain about other peoples
| child. If you actually turn around and tell them you'll
| sign over the adoption to them and you just need the
| countersignature, they would shit bricks. They want all
| the veto rights with none of the personal responsibility
| -- the essence of entitlement.
| zosima wrote:
| Whether they create more harm than good, I don't know. I'm
| on the fence.
|
| But they definitely cause a lot of harm, and it shouldn't
| be a secret that foster homes are the most dangerous homes
| for kids.
|
| Here is some statistics and links to more:
|
| https://ritholzlaw.com/horrors-foster-care-abuse/
| bluGill wrote:
| > it shouldn't be a secret that foster homes are the most
| dangerous homes for kids.
|
| Most families are good to their children. Foster homes
| only get the worst: most kids never go to a foster home.
| That means kids that are harder than normal to care for
| and thus their parents are also also going to get
| frustrated (in fact they often have: many kids in foster
| homes the parents just need a break), and in turn means
| the foster parents will face the situations where they
| are more likely to lose their temper in a bad way - but
| the real parents have likely done the same. There are
| also kids who are abused by their parents, and that abuse
| is likely to make those kids worse than normal kids.
|
| As a parent I can assure you that taking care of normal
| kids is hard. I know other foster parents: enough to know
| that foster kids are even harder. Most foster parents are
| doing the best they can, but the job is a lot harder than
| normal kids.
| notch898a wrote:
| Most foster families are loving, but it's interesting to
| note in these situations where the parent/guardian is
| paid from outside the household for the children (foster
| or child support) we see increased rates of abuse.
| Correlation does not imply causation but there seems to
| be a heavy correlation between being paid for the child
| and abuse.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| OP asserted without evidence: "Obviously these agencies are
| vital."
|
| GP questioned, and made a contrary assertion without
| evidence: "Are they? Seems that they do more harm than
| good."
|
| Seems unfair to call out GP for not providing evidence, but
| not OP, especially since GP's claim was more moderate).
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I think I mentioned our kids were adopted.
| We adopted through the State, and underwent 6 months of
| training before being approved.
|
| The stories of abuse and neglect were hair raising, and
| our kids had their own fair share before they came to us.
|
| CPS exists as an alternative to cops doing this kind of
| work. When done right, they are compassionate and
| understand how to deal with kids in a variety of sm high
| stress situations. They do evaluations. They take kids
| out of homes safely. They do transport to foster care or
| elsewhere. They evaluate potential adoptive families.
|
| When all done right. We know some fabulous workers doing
| incredibly hard work here.
|
| We also know it's easy to abuse the system, and they
| could use a lot more checks and balances.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| These agencies were instituted on public demand to reduce
| abuse at a societal level, and their missions were
| constituted with those harms in mind - hence the
| obviousness of those agencies being vital, at least at
| the time when they were instituted, with plenty of
| evidence back then for their necessity [1]. If they are
| no longer meeting those mission parameters and causing
| more harm than good, then we should demand evidence for
| that as well, should we not?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_protective_servic
| es#Hist...
| bluGill wrote:
| They are not causing more harm than good on balance.
| However they are causing a lot of harm. they need to be
| reformed, but we need them.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| What value did CPS add there?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| They're extra bodies with more specific responsibilities
| and, ostensibly (read: ideally), with specialized
| training.
| genderwhy wrote:
| Have you _seen_ cops? Cops know one thing -- doing
| violence. They are already terrible at handling folks
| with mental health needs, folks who aren 't neurotypical,
| folks from other countries or cultures... I don't want
| them anywhere near kids.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'm guessing you're American?
|
| Cops over here receive specific psychological training
| and profiling to deal with all kinds of different people.
| [deleted]
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Cops are plumbers. They mostly fill out paperwork and
| look at things (and fill out more paperwork).
|
| Listen to the police scanner sometime. It is mostly
| boring.
|
| "Dispatch, my arrestee just swallowed a bag of cocaine.
| Moving to meet EMS" is about as exciting things get.
| xydinesh wrote:
| I think CPS doesn't add value to the road closing.
| However, they (CPS) are the one need to provide care for
| the kids after that.
| temporallobe wrote:
| 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_danger wrote:
| >otherwise
|
| but having no consequences means they CAN retaliate the same
| way
| temporallobe wrote:
| Right, but whom would you make the report about? All of the
| parents on the opposing team?
| Octokiddie wrote:
| This sounds like the parental version of swatting someone.
| Hideous.
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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
| williamcotton wrote:
| Are the downvotes for the SNL skit? Or?
| pc86 wrote:
| Probably for the insane suggestion that we shouldn't punish
| false reporting because it will somehow disincentive
| reporting actual abuse. Initiating a CPS investigation can
| be incredibly traumatizing for both the parents and the
| children, and due process can take months or years in the
| event the initial investigation ends in an incorrect
| decision to remove the children. This story is proof that
| even if the police aren't involved (or drop their
| involvement) CPS is its own entity and their investigations
| are not just having a chat for an hour. Multiple meetings,
| interviews, over the course of weeks or months.
|
| False reports, especially those used for retaliation,
| should be a felony and result in jail time.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Initiating a CPS investigation can be incredibly
| traumatizing for both the parents and the children, and
| due process can take months or years in the event the
| initial investigation ends in an incorrect decision to
| remove the children.
|
| The actual problem, with the responsibility being
| laundered by placing it on random busybodies. Maybe have
| a system where anonymous denunciation doesn't lead to
| trauma and misery.
| OJFord wrote:
| > insane suggestion that we shouldn't punish false
| reporting because it will somehow disincentive reporting
| [...] False reports, especially those used for
| retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
|
| Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that
| that would _absolutely_ disincentivise me from reporting
| anything - some process I 'm not privy to decides it was
| a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a _very_
| high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that
| 's what you want, only something that's too heinous to
| ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an
| insane suggestion that there's a link there.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the bar for proving a report was made in
| bad faith would be much higher than the bar for proving
| there is abuse happening.
|
| I'm not arguing that people who are wrong in good faith
| be punished, just that we punish people who we can prove
| lied in order to retaliate against people they don't
| like.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure the bar for proving a report was made
| in bad faith would be much higher than the bar for
| proving there is abuse happening.
|
| Why in the world would you be sure of that?
| notryan wrote:
| Not really. The bar (at least in the US) for convicting
| someone of false accusations is just the same as any
| other crime.
|
| The difference is the police won't go after false
| reporting often, probably because they are worried it
| will have a chilling effect on people talking to them.
|
| If 10% of murder convictions are mistaken it would stand
| to reason that the false accusation conviction error rate
| would be equally high or higher.
|
| It's fun to say, punish everyone that does crime X. But
| you have to accept a false positive rate.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It shouldn't stop you from from reporting the bare fax as
| you saw them. It should deter you from lies
| williamcotton wrote:
| Ok, so this is just a case of something that a primarily
| male demographic between 19-35 and a background in STEM
| agree with... which was also my initial, emotionally
| charged reaction!
|
| Meanwhile, the conversation amongst the staff at the
| public school my wife works at came to a different
| conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of
| society in general.
|
| So I guess it all works out!
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > the conversation amongst the staff at the public school
| my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They
| seem to be a better representation of society in general.
|
| That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming
| it is accurate. For every great staff member at school,
| I've met at least one other than was barely able to
| function in adult society. I don't know which direction
| the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation
| between working all day with young children and being
| able to relate to other adults.
|
| My son's elementary school is more like a prison now,
| after a huge transformation in the last two years, and I
| can't wait for him to move up to the middle school. Which
| thankfully isn't quite so authoritarian. Yet. I'm right
| on the edge of pulling both kids out of school and going
| online with it, and probably would have except my
| daughter really didn't fare well during the pandemic
| version of online school. My son would be quite happy
| though. Make it self-paced and he'd have his high school
| diploma at 12.
| whythre wrote:
| Is it an option to put your son in online courses and
| keep your daughter going to 'regular' school?
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > That's the saddest thing I've read this morning,
| assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at
| school, I've met at least one other than was barely able
| to function in adult society. I don't know which
| direction the causal effect is going, but there's a
| correlation between working all day with young children
| and being able to relate to other adults.
|
| maybe i'm confused. are you saying it's sad that staff
| members at an elementary school aren't for punishing
| false reports to cps? i don't know what's sad about that.
| if reports are anonymous, how could you punish a false
| reporter? and how could you prove the report was
| intentionally false? seems like you'd catch a tiny
| portion of malicious reporters that for whatever reson
| left undeniable evidence of that intention to falsely
| report, and to do that the reporting would have to no
| longer be anonymous, which would stop a lot of people
| from reporting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Report not proven to be true" is _very_ different from
| "Report proven to be false".
| williamcotton wrote:
| You know what, re-reading what I wrote I can see why...
| honestly, I'm mainly parroting my wife's argument because
| she's the one who talked me off the ledge few weeks ago.
|
| Here's what she/I meant (she's also super annoyed that
| I'm bothering her with "nerds fighting about nonsense on
| the internet"):
|
| The gist of her argument and paraphrased: "The problem is
| that CPS is by necessity anonymous. It's not that people
| aren't being punished for reporting false claims, it's
| that if you really wanted to catch everyone who was
| reporting false claims then you would have to make them
| present some form of identification. What if this is
| about a legitimate case of abuse from a scary
| motherfucker? Someone might not report because they don't
| want to realistically be murdered by said scary
| motherfucker. Also, the communities that have the most
| problems with child abuse also have a higher number of
| people who do not want to interact with law enforcement
| for a number of reasons. There is a trade-off with any
| situation that requires anonymous reporting."
| snozolli wrote:
| _False reports, especially those used for retaliation,
| should be a felony and result in jail time._
|
| I _feel_ that what you are saying is true, but I _know_
| that this would result in a system where the wealthy and
| connected would then run amok while their honest accusers
| sat in prison.
|
| How about if we instead simply make the investigation
| process less threatening and terrifying, particularly at
| initial stages? For example, in the linked article, it's
| insane that the investigator required that the mother
| return to therapy because she'd been to therapy in the
| past for a bout of depression.
| pc86 wrote:
| I get what you're saying. And what I don't mean is the
| proverbial domestic violence situation where as soon as
| the police are involved, _somebody_ is getting arrested
| no matter what.
|
| But in instances where someone has incontrovertibly made
| a false report because they wanted to ruin someone's day
| (or life), that should follow them around. There is a
| large blurry area between reporting someone because their
| kid has a black eye every couple months and reporting
| someone because their kid is better at baseball than
| yours where you can't prove bad faith, and in that
| instance it doesn't make sense to ruin _anyone 's_ life.
| snozolli wrote:
| _But in instances where someone has incontrovertibly made
| a false report_
|
| That seems _extremely_ difficult to prove.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| It seems to me that you are being unfairly downvoted. At
| some point there has to be a balance between punishing
| provably false reports, punishing (or not) good-faith false
| reports, and not discouraging true reports. This kind of
| balance is something that folks in AI need to take into
| consideration when deciding model performance (ROC curves),
| but it gets a lot more complex in real life because now you
| need resources to distinguish between false-reports, good-
| faith-false-reports, true-reports etc which easily veer
| into territories of determining intent and downstream harm.
|
| If those resources do get allocated, there's a good chance
| these same folks downvoting you would complain about wasted
| government resources because the nuance in allocating those
| resources doesn't shine through in obvious ways.
|
| What's the solution to this? I don't know, unfortunately.
| AI scientists have to take every problem that involves this
| nuance on a per-case basis and work with their business
| partners (or whoever the "client" is) to decide what's a
| good point on the curve for the operational model.
| Similarly social scientists (and politicians) influencing
| government operations presumably have to determine where
| that balance lies. And likely the downvoters don't have
| those answers either. Maybe the real solution is to have a
| not-too-complex-or-lengthy redress mechanism for those
| caught unfairly in the "system", with the ease-of-redress
| driven by how far to one side or other the balance tips.
| eweise wrote:
| 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.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > 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.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| 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.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| Pretty sure you were a victim of a criminal nexus that
| formed to take advantage of the laws, the machinery of the
| state, and private providers. Just like the (juvie) court-
| to-prison-pipelines that we hear about every once in a
| while.
|
| What state was this in?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Western Europe, sorry didn't mean to make it sound like I
| was in the U.S.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Had a terrible problem in the UK with my grandmother, we
| never got a lasting power of attorney for health, and by
| the time she needed it it was of course too late. Figured
| next of kin would be reasonable.
|
| She's been incarcerated in a care home since the start of
| covid, although rather than one near to where family
| lived they refused to let us move her. Took 18 months of
| going through court to get her moved, she has degraded so
| far she barely remembers me now.
|
| (And of course despite legally being kept in the car home
| she has to pay for it. Had she broken the law and gone to
| prison she'd have more freedom and wouldn't have to pay!)
|
| We now have power of attorneys for our parents.
| c22 wrote:
| If she'd gone to prison in America she'd probably still
| have to pay :/ [0]
|
| [0]: https://apnews.com/article/crime-prisons-lawsuits-
| connecticu...
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| This kind of predatory guardianship is what "I Care a
| Lot" was based on
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Care_a_Lot). It's
| disturbingly frequent in a few states, I forget which,
| that have the right combination of laws and (lack of)
| oversight.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Friend of mine from Bari had the same problem with their
| old grandma. She (my friend, not the grandma) showed up
| with a bunch of male friends and told the fake caretaker
| "Leave by the door or you'll be leaving by the window,
| either way do not come back". The scammer left by the door
| and that was the end of it. The grandma died 18 months
| later in her bed surrounded by her family.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| In my province, rooms in long term care homes are
| (apparently) on some level, legally like a place of
| residence. Even though they exist in a public or private
| facility. Some families have caught on to this fact and
| installed cameras and audio recording equipment in their
| elderly parent's rooms. The staff don't like it but there
| isn't a whole lot they can do about it since it's the
| private property of the residents, in their residence.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > who received a percentage of his pension as payment
|
| You should watch the movie "I care a lot" with Rosamund
| Pike - it's terrifying how believable it is.
| gowld wrote:
| John Oliver covered this, "Guardianship" scam, theft
| enabled by the government:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG2pEffLEJo
|
| It is similar to the PACE scam, where government lets a
| company steal someone's house with a fake "energy credit"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8ZPFOxJEc
| https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-do-i-avoid-
| risk...
|
| Stuff like this turns me Anarchist in the "Government can't
| work" sense. The criminals are always 10 steps ahead of (or
| in cahoots with) the government, turning every attempt at
| "promoting the general welfare" into highway robbery, and
| no one in government is willing to prosecute and convict
| these criminals, because white collar crime gets the "it's
| too complicated to explain" Get Out of Jail Free card.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I would be lying if I said the situation didn't inspire
| urges of vigilantism in me at the time.
|
| The government is a very, very scary thing. Because I'm
| disabled, I've had many encounters with the faceless and
| all powerful hand of the government, sometimes it feels
| like they'd want a medical certificate just to allow
| people like me to keep breathing. But paradoxically, I
| believe in a fairly strong government, I think it's best
| to have an organization at the top which is explicitly
| defined to serve the need of the people, rather than
| whatever would rise to the top in its stead. As long as
| one remains aware of how terrifying the government can be
| and is willing to go out and throw a few bricks at
| government buildings. I think it's served us well,
| comparing my country to the rest of the word.
| dwallin wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. The mistake a lot of individuals make when
| they fall in the intellectual trap of Libertarianism is
| that power doesn't care about labels. Sure the state "has
| a monopoly on violence" but that is not an intrinsic
| thing. A weak state quickly finds violence being adopted
| by other centers of power within a society (just look at
| Haiti). We attempt to concentrate certain powers in
| government because it's the easiest way to keep those
| powers in check. In the end you don't want any center of
| power to get too powerful as it makes systems overall
| less stable. The best counter for a strong government is
| strong civic engagement and democratic norms as
| government is need to act as a counter to private
| centralized power (both legal and extralegal).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sometimes the easiest way to keep the powers and check
| are to simply not grant them to the state. Some problems
| are better solved by decentralized power, even if it is
| imperfect and has collateral damage.
| Retric wrote:
| Sometimes is a real weasel word here. The unfortunate
| truth is we can't trust government, but every other
| option tends to be vastly worse.
|
| Government contractors introduce horrible conflicts of
| interest at every level. The US used to get projects done
| early and under budget before contracting took over, but
| that doesn't make anyone wealthy.
|
| Private individuals run into the tragedy of the commons.
|
| etc etc
| freedude wrote:
| This is horrific and is caused by the pride of those who
| are too lazy to lift a finger. Just know that bitterness
| will only poison you from the inside out. Don't allow this
| to fester or it will make you like them. I have seen the
| effects of this in my own family and it ends in evil.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I'm sorry about the effect it's had on your family, these
| are hard things to bear. I've started praying again last
| year, and generally trying to live according to the
| kinder values of Catholicism but it's a work in progress.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| It makes you wonder what the appropriate level of cynicism
| is though. I assume you mean N=1 in an order of magnitude
| sense. But one person saw these kids and phoned it in. A
| cop returns the kids home with a warning. 3 more cops show
| up the next day and arrests the man only (but both parents
| should be negligent should they not???) and then some
| social workers appear.
|
| How many people heard about this and decided to waste time
| and resources either wilfully or unwittingly, and is that a
| reflection of the state law enforcement and social
| services?
| ribs wrote:
| I don't share this concern about over-estimating this bad
| behavior. Yes, normal people don't do this. But there are a
| lot of people who take advantage of other people, leverage
| authority (their own, or others), and even tell themselves
| that they're doing the right thing. That's not super
| uncommon. And true scammers aren't super rare.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| 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.
| wil421 wrote:
| I have a 3 year old. She hates going to bet and was having
| a tantrum for a while last night. She's smart and figured
| out we will take her out of the bedroom if she says she has
| to pee pee. After 4 times of playing around in the bathroom
| and only one time actually using it she finally went to bed
| after asking me to adjust the covers 30 times.
|
| All of this is normal kid stuff. What kind of parent is so
| spiteful they will call child services on an opposing teams
| parents?
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > All of this is normal kid stuff. What kind of parent is
| so spiteful they will call child services on an opposing
| teams parents?
|
| An ugly person.
| spoils19 wrote:
| [flagged]
| callalex wrote:
| You need a media break, identity politics is consuming
| you.
| xydinesh wrote:
| I totally agree. If someone making a generalization,
| chances are they may be wrong.
| masklinn wrote:
| > I have a 3 year old. She hates going to bet
|
| My brother in christ 3 years old is a bit young to hit
| the tables.
| wil421 wrote:
| Sigh. Not sure why it's so difficult to comment on my
| phone vs a computer.
| masklinn wrote:
| Small keyboard + autocorrect is just stupid. I have the
| same issue, and I still regularly miss typos even though
| I try to QC before posting. Either that or mini-strokes.
|
| At least this was funny and easy to understand, sometimes
| I'm careless and it's such complete gibberish if I come
| back to the comment an hour later I don't understand what
| I wanted to write.
| mjevans wrote:
| Autoincorrect can be bad enough, but speech to text can
| deliver some really concerning mistakes.
| masklinn wrote:
| I don't even try TTS, Siri is unable to grok even basic
| commands.
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| Sooner you start logging those 10,000 hours of practice,
| sooner you can start making real money
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > a bit young to hit the tables
|
| I suspect it was a typo. What he meant to type was "she
| hates betting when she loses".
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| It was a NJ/NY tournament with a lot of rivalry and
| prestige for the winners.
|
| Some parents get _very_ , ridiculously caught up in the
| excitement of their kids' sports, and a very small number
| go too far. I have seen parents fighting in the stands at
| 10U football games (10 and under). I have heard parents
| screaming at coaches threatening to sue them. I have seen
| parents mocking and degrading the opposing team's kids. I
| have seen parents encouraging taunts and chants from the
| crowd to throw off a pitcher or a quarter back. I've seen
| a nasty, abusive man ejected from a high school building
| entirely for cursing and screaming at opposing kids. And
| of course we had CPS called on us.
|
| It's only a very small percentage, but they really ruin
| the experience for everyone.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| A 60yr old died during some incident like this in
| Michigan during the last couple of days.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| And sometimes coaches are bad actors too, here a coach
| broke a 72 year old ref's jaw:
|
| https://www.nj.com/news/2022/06/nj-youth-baseball-umpire-
| vio...
| ballenf wrote:
| It's even less serious stuff than this that has me
| thinking kids' involvement in those leagues isn't net-
| positive. But I'm sure there are more positive
| experiences than negative. And I'd probably think
| differently if I was super competitive or more sports-
| oriented.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The issue is not the kids' involvement, it's the
| parents'.
|
| (former lacrosse and then crew parent)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| 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.
| lawkwok wrote:
| 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?
| rpmisms wrote:
| 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.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| In my experience growing up in a tiny town <3000 people, it's a
| lot worse.
| fencepost wrote:
| 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."
| raldi wrote:
| At the very least, there need to be clear laws about when you can
| legally let your kid walk outside.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| There does not need to be a law about this.
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| We don't want there to be a whitelist of things we are
| allowed to do, with anything not on that list assumed to be
| against the law. That's a bad direction to go down. The
| right response to this situation would be to apologize to
| the parents, and punish the police and social worker who
| overstepped their authority.
| raldi wrote:
| So make a list of things we're not allowed to do.
| karaterobot wrote:
| We have quite a few. Applying them correctly and
| equitably is a challenge, which is what leads to
| situations like this one. But, it's miles better than the
| alternative.
| raldi wrote:
| I think the overwhelming majority believes it's okay for
| 17yo children to roam free but not 17mo toddlers. Even if
| the gray area in between can't be made zero-width, I'd
| like it to be smaller.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "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.
| derelicta wrote:
| 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?
| vidarh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| [dead]
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| fsh wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| In Feb 2019. Why is this coming up now?
| gregwtmtno wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| A large, wealthy estate is sort of like a neighborhood. Brad
| Pitt built a skate park in his backyard for his children.
| anileated wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is how I grew up (well, not wealthy, but a dense,
| residential neighborhood in Manhattan): it was perfectly
| normal for me to walk around and take the subway alone by
| the time I was 8 or so. I don't remember ever being stopped
| by anyone, police or otherwise. This was in the early-mid
| 2000s, and my perception is that it hasn't changed much in
| the city.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Gated neighbourhoods and at some level suburbs that are
| simply unwalkable for everyone.
| localhost3000 wrote:
| 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.
| jeffwask wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >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.
| [deleted]
| yakubin wrote:
| Reading the headline, I naively thought it was about teaching
| them unhealthy eating habits. Yet the content is even more
| bizarre.
| COGlory wrote:
| 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
| u801e wrote:
| > 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.
| furyg3 wrote:
| > 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.
| hosh wrote:
| 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).
| dahfizz wrote:
| 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.
| hosh wrote:
| Letting an adult figure go with the kids to Dunkin Donuts
| for their safety misses the point. The deeper issue is that
| using "safety" as the only metric for enforcement is
| leading to a society where the next generation of adults is
| ill equipped to live as confident, responsible,
| independently-thinking adults.
|
| These parents are rewarding their kids to go to Dunkin
| Donut on their own. In their judgement, it was safe enough
| to do so. If they wanted to be sure, they could have snuck
| behind them (but they would have to make sure they are not
| caught doing so, otherwise it would shatter the emerging
| confidence of the kids).
| kenjackson wrote:
| No one said safety should be the only metric. The other
| commenters are questioning the fact that safety was
| raised as a metric at all, despite the fact that the
| behavior of the officers runs counter to the metric they
| cite.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
| btbuildem wrote:
| This is police statesque, authoritarian and bureaucratic
| nightmare overreach, a direct assault on your well-being and
| safety.
| hosh wrote:
| That, while is an important issue, is not the most
| important issue brought out by this article.
|
| Life is uncertain, and adults are called to choices weigh
| risk and opportunities. And there is an epidemic of
| teenagers and young adults _right now_ , cycling in and out
| of mental health facilities. There are otherwise healthy
| kids who are afraid of doing normal things by themselves.
| They go to learn to "adult" in college, but really, they
| never have the opportunity to make their own choices and
| learn from their own successes and failures. And that comes
| about from a society and legal framework that values
| "safety" to beyond a reasonable point that is healthy for
| people.
|
| These laws and the way they are interpreted has shifted
| dramatically over the past decade or so. And it has a lot
| to do with how our society views this. Seeing this as
| _only_ about parental rights misses the point, and in my
| view, short-sighted.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| hosh wrote:
| I don't think people can define legal standards for "well-
| being" distinct from "safety".
|
| And yet, this is where things are headed:
| https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-
| strugg...
|
| Beyond whether parents have a right to do this or not, is
| whether or not children can grow into resilient, confident,
| independently-thinking citizens. And what we have is a
| whole generation ill-adapted to the uncertainty of life,
| much less becoming the leaders, voters, and parents
| tomorrow when we're no longer there.
| standardUser wrote:
| "I don't think any U.S. police are legally allowed"
|
| Hahah, good one.
| hosh wrote:
| > Why do you think they might not have been doing this
| capriciously in this specific case?
|
| Neither of us were there. There are people who genuinely
| believe in this kind of safety of children.
|
| I've read other articles like this before, and I happen to
| agree with this author and what this author advocating for.
| This goes beyond whether parents have the right to let kids
| go and walk on their own. It has a lot more to do about
| raising kids that can gain gain the kind of resiliency,
| grit, self-confidence, independent-thinking from being able
| to do stuff on their own. My kids will need to be able to
| do that when they grow into adults, because I am not always
| going to be there to be their safety net. One day, I will
| die, and it is their turn to make choices, to vote, to
| navigate their own lives, and to help raise the next
| generation.
|
| So besides just advocating for changes in laws, there is a
| lot more to this kind of parenting than being protected by
| law to do so, including methods for parent this way when
| the laws in ones jurisdiction are not necessarily
| supporting this kind of parenting.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| 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.
| hosh wrote:
| Neither of us were there, and I can't speak for his
| motivations just from the article. He may well be power
| tripping, but I can also see someone saying that because
| they genuinely believe that kids should not roam around on
| the streets on their own. There are parents, cops, and
| state child safety folks who genuinely believe that.
|
| While police overreach is an issue, I think that misses the
| deeper problems that gave rise to this. I have linked a
| different article in other comments here and elsewhere
| about the current epidemic of mental health issues
| teenagers and young adults, and the possible link to not
| being able to have some kind of childhood independence.
| Such young adults are not well adapted to the uncertainties
| of life.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| feoren wrote:
| You don't have children, I can tell. He was threatening
| to _take away their children_ if they _spoke_ to him.
| Would it be OK if he threatened to murder them where they
| stand if they said another word? If you had kids, you
| wouldn 't think the two threats are so far apart. If
| someone was writing a movie about a totalitarian state
| and wanted you to hate a character, this is exactly a
| line they'd use. This is an authoritarian power-tripping
| asshole. He should absolutely, immediately, and
| irrevocably lose his job over this threat, just as he
| should if he threatened to murder them. I would even say
| jail time would be appropriate; you'd face jail time if
| you went into someone's home and threatened to kidnap
| their children. How can you possibly defend this?
| hosh wrote:
| I have a grown daughter, a two-year old, and one on the
| way.
|
| There are lots of things you can't tell just by text.
|
| Who said anything about defending this? I happen to agree
| with the author of that article, including things she did
| not elaborate on in the article as an advocate of free
| range parenting.
|
| It boggles my mind that people seem to read things that
| are not said.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I'm sorry but that's just excusing the police at this
| point. He said that he would arrest and take away their
| kids if the wife dared to _speak_ to him again.
|
| Whatever his intentions behind that statement, that's
| what someone on a power trip would say. Not in any way
| caring about the content, just the utterance of another
| word would have caused her arrest and the kids taken
| away.
|
| Forgetting the fact that someone was already arrested as
| is. For this.
|
| This is prime epitome of a power trip and it amazes me to
| see someone try to defend it as anything but.
| hosh wrote:
| If that is what you care about and get angry about, I
| won't gainsay it.
|
| In my view, that is the smaller issue of the bigger
| issues at play. The author of the article, and what he is
| advocating for, is broader than that, but hey, if people
| are motivated to act and speak out because of this, sure,
| why not?
| epolanski wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| DrThunder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Whether there is a law or not doesn't matter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heien_v._North_Carolina
| DrThunder wrote:
| Did you even read that case? Are you under the impression a
| traffic stop is equal to being arrested? The guy was
| convicted of COCAINE TRAFFICKING and arrested for that.
| Which means there's a law in place for COCAINE TRAFFICKING.
|
| I feel like you just googled that and pasted what the
| search result.
|
| Even if your assumption was true it's still the fault of
| legislators that have allowed the executive branch that
| much leeway to act outside of the written law. You ought to
| study the 3 branches of government.
| John23832 wrote:
| 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.
| notch898a wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The cops are the system. The people deciding in the moment
| what to do are cops, the people deciding who is going to be
| in those positions are cops, the people deciding the
| consequences for the decisions are cops, the people
| investigating abuses are cops. The people in oversight
| positions for the entire process are cops. The civilian
| government might be able to dismiss the top ranking
| leadership, the DA's office can choose to prosecute
| especially egregious behavior, but they have very little if
| any direct influence on the incentive structures for rank
| and file cops. Institutions like police unions typically
| have more control of the civilian government than the
| civilian government has on the police. This is a system
| that the cops both individually and collectively choose to
| participate in, and those who would seek to see it changed
| from the inside are forced out. Of course you can't place
| the blame on any one individual, and probably every person
| involved would like to see some change or another, but
| there is no shadowy cabal who designed the police to be
| what they are, they have done it themselves.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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.
| andrew_ wrote:
| _Some_ , agreed. _Most_? How are you quantifying that;
| feelings and anecdotes from your own experience or some hard
| data?
| John23832 wrote:
| I literally said "most". Where did you see "all"?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I can see both sides. Anyone with a basic understanding of
| History should know that police abuses of power are nothing
| new. Bad cops have always existed and are well documented.
| Just think of some cops beating up hippies and beats in the
| proposed golden age of neighborhood policing.
|
| On the flip side, there's been a definite trend in the
| militarization of the police forces and other public facing
| groups. The first big wave of this I personally saw came
| from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans joining the public
| service. Is not unreasonable to think that individuals with
| a background occupying a country with a hostile population
| transferred norms from that into their new job.
| andrew_ wrote:
| telling that no one has dropped any hard data in rebuttal
| to show that "most" officers are losers lusting after
| power.
| flandish wrote:
| If you're a "good cop" on a force with a single "bad cop"
| and do nothing about it, in this day and age, you are also
| a bad cop.
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| hpen wrote:
| This mentality is dangerous and only drives the thing you are
| getting at.
| Eupraxias wrote:
| I love the idea that things were different once...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| We're they? Perhaps if you are white. Cops used to just
| harass minorities. Now they have decided that all non
| police must be punished and made to understand their place.
| Not saying it was better when they just harassed
| minorities, saying cops have always been power mad
| narcissists. Now they just have armored cars and better
| weapons
|
| Edit: it's been pointed out to me that op was being
| sarcastic. My fault
| skc wrote:
| I believe he is being sarcastic.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| They are different even today in first world countries.
| Where I live, becoming a police officer is a three year
| education (equivalent to a bachelor's degree) and it's not
| easy to get accepted to the programme. Training on what the
| law actually says, de-escalation, handling mentally ill
| people etc. is an important part of this.
|
| As a consequence, most cops are good human beings who care
| about their community.
| Eupraxias wrote:
| This is also my personal experience, including a good
| friend of mine who opted for policing for these reasons
| after completing a degree in philosophy. He has been a
| beloved small town cop for many years.
| Retric wrote:
| Being a cop in the US has become vastly less dangerous
| which changed the dynamics around who becomes cops.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This would suggest that trend is reversing:
| https://nleomf.org/memorial/facts-figures/officer-
| fatality-d...
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Only if you ignore the size of the US police force, and
| more recently COVID. By far the #1 risk is the amount of
| driving police do, but policing in the US is nowhere
| close to as dangerous as being a truck driver.
| sct202 wrote:
| This website breaks down by cause and almost all of the
| difference is explicitly covid.
| https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2021
| autoexec wrote:
| Covid is the #1 cause of death three years running.
| powertrips123 wrote:
| 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.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash
| and arrogant.
|
| This is how most humans are. My tribe:friends, Everybody
| else: enemies, let kill them.
|
| It's Jekyll/Hyde.
| [deleted]
| 3pac wrote:
| 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?
| indymike wrote:
| > 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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).
| indymike wrote:
| A) The arrest should have never, ever happened. There needs
| to be a line where police know they are not allowed to
| cross. This I'm immune from everything because I'm an agent
| of the government needs to go now.
|
| B) The arrest record needs to go away forever
|
| C) Arrest records should never be used by government to
| deny rights or services, only conviction records.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Can't they atleast push for expunging of the records? No
| charges were pressed; if the state wants to dispute that,
| they are opening the gate for a lawsuit.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Pistol license applications explicitly state that you
| have to include expunged records. Also, what expunged
| actually means (or if it's available at all) depends on
| the state. If you wanted to work for the government, get
| certain clearances, etc it would also come up on
| background checks. So it's totally unfair that innocent
| people like this have it attached to their name.
| sitkack wrote:
| > 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/
| btilly wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
|
| QI doesn't stop you from suing "the police" (as in, the
| public agency responsible), it stops (absent clear
| precedent eatablishing the right on which you are suing)
| individual public officers.
| btilly wrote:
| Yes. But as soon as the charges got to the department,
| they dropped it. The police department did nothing
| egregiously wrong.
|
| It is the individual police officers that I would like to
| see be liable here. And if they were, then it would do a
| whole lot more to dissuade other police officers than any
| official department policies.
|
| And that is exactly what qualified immunity keeps from
| happening.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But as soon as the charges got to the department, they
| dropped it.
|
| So?
|
| > The police department did nothing egregiously wrong.
|
| Insofar as the officers, as agents of the department,
| were trained and supervised in such a way that they did
| something egregiously wrong in the conduct of their
| duties, the police department did, in fact, due something
| equally wrong.
|
| > It is the individual police officers that I would like
| to see be liable here.
|
| Then you should favor suing the responsible department
| because, given QI, you need a clearly established right
| for their to be personal liability, and the only way to
| get there is to sue someone to clearly establish the
| right. Which can't be the individuals, because QI.
|
| (Even without QI, you should favor suing the deoartment,
| because individual officers can be disposable and
| replaced with people selected and trained for the same
| tendencies, but department leadership and policies that
| keeping turning into a liability hole for the local
| government are more likely to trigger more significant
| changes.)
| btilly wrote:
| Your reasoning is a little dubious there.
|
| I should not favor suing the department when I can find
| no legal theory under which they should be liable. And in
| this case it was an individual officer mistake that
| directly did no harm, and was corrected as soon as it
| came to the department's attention. I'm not going to find
| anything in police training or general behavior that fits
| with this mistake being a general pattern that is endemic
| to the department. I see no damages or legal relief that
| makes sense here.
|
| Arguing about what good might come from the department
| losing said lawsuit is like debating how convenient it
| might be if pigs could fly. The whole conversation is
| based on something that isn't going to happen, and
| therefore isn't a real possibility. And any attempt to go
| from discussion to reality by actually filing said
| lawsuit is a waste of effort.
| COGlory wrote:
| >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.
| sasawpg wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Nobody is making the literal comparison. Eastern bloc was a
| totally different form of repression, the top poster in the
| thread was just making a clumsy comparison between
| different forms of oppressive state action. Connecticut has
| plenty of citizens with license plates, stickers, and flags
| on vehicles that mock or call for violence against the
| current US president. They do so without any fear of
| imprisonment. Try that with a Solidarity sticker in Poland
| in the 80s. I have no doubt they had a healthier view
| towards independence in childhood in Poland in the 1980s,
| though.
|
| As smart people, let's get a grip and realize that outlier
| incidents happen all the time, and just question the why
| and when they get coverage.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I bet the parents didn't watch the news there, either.
|
| Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do sex
| offenders?
| pjc50 wrote:
| They probably did watch the news, but it would be very
| different news on the state-run Jugoslavenska
| Radiotelevizija.
|
| (If this incident _had_ happened in Yugoslavia, or
| something similar with unjust police harassment, would
| anyone have heard about it on the news? Of course not.)
| sasawpg wrote:
| Probably not as different as one would hope compared to
| North American news of unjust harassment/abuse by police,
| religious/sport organization some 10-20+ years ago. I
| didn't see major Canadian news sources overflowing with
| content about abuse suffered in residential schools until
| fairly recent for example. That's not to paint any sort
| of a rosy Jugo picture, far from it.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do
| sex offenders?
|
| Unless the EB was radically different from the rest of
| 1970s Earth, nothing.
|
| In the US, pre-1980s kids knew not to take any kind of
| abuse to the police. At best they'd be gaslit or outed to
| their abuser (who was commonly family). For most of LEO
| history cops (who reflected society in general) were not
| there to protect kids. Perps certainly knew this.
|
| Source: We kids talked to each other and figured out
| reality pretty fast.
| sasawpg wrote:
| Ah yes - familiar and agree with this as well. It does
| however depend significantly on whether the perp was
| known to you or not. You'd be far more likely to report a
| stranger abusing you randomly on the street than say your
| family member, teacher, coach, etc. (see Hockey Canada
| for a sad example of this continuing to date).
| sasawpg wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're getting at. In ex-Yu, they'd go
| through criminal proceedings.
| notch898a wrote:
| Would they survive to make it to the proceedings?
| timeon wrote:
| This is maybe more about time then about the place. Before,
| growing up in Slovakia, I walked streets of a city as kid
| alone. Now when I mentioned it to some parents (even in
| village) they think that I was so brave (even if they did
| the same).
|
| Only children that you can see in parks or on the streets
| of Bratislava alone are refugees from Ukraine.
| m348e912 wrote:
| You and the parent are touching on the key difference. The
| neighborhood was a community who knew each other and looked
| out for each other. In the US this dichotomy is
| exceptionally rare, so a young child walking alone is truly
| among strangers. I am not saying that kids shouldn't have
| freedom to roam but it's different.
|
| America lacks community in many places. I don't know if
| it's uniquely American, but it's very common. Neighbors
| don't know neighbors, the shop owner doesn't know who kid's
| parents are. This is in my opinion is the primary reason
| why kids aren't allowed out alone.
| friendzis wrote:
| > This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids
| aren't allowed out alone.
|
| I guess this is polar opposite: the situation is like
| this _because_ kids are not allowed outside. Since kids
| are not allowed outside, you build "suburban sprawls":
| rows of houses with literally nowhere for those kids to
| go even if they wanted. And then you transport them
| directly to school and sports with a personal car. So the
| kids do not have interaction with other kids, because
| they are neither allowed to nor there is a field to play
| in. Naturally the other parents don't know the kids
| further than immediate neighbors.
|
| The twist is that now the infrastructure is suddenly
| lone-kid-hostile.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > the situation is like this because kids are not allowed
| outside.
|
| Imagine if the street-scene was crowded with kids. They
| would witness vandalism and bad behaviour, and wrongdoers
| would be much more cautious. I wish kids would play
| outside on the estate where I live.
| whitemary wrote:
| >America lacks community in many places.
|
| Arguably the most painful aspect of survival in our late-
| stage capitalist society.
| locofocos wrote:
| How do we find places that still value and foster this
| kind of community?
|
| And how do we contribute to it ourselves? Lately I've
| been wanting to be intentional about getting involved,
| getting to know people, etc. I came across this blog post
| on the topic from HN a few months ago:
| https://www.seanblanda.com/its-time-for-localism-in-
| america/
| m348e912 wrote:
| It's just my own theory but perhaps there is some
| relationship between loss community and a few things:
|
| * A two parent working household meant that there were
| less stay-at-home moms around to network in the community
| and build familiarity with other moms and neighboring
| families.
|
| * The use of cars meant that there was less opportunity
| for interaction while walking in the neighborhood.
|
| * Local church where people built a community through
| faith.
| bundze wrote:
| I grew up in the former Eastern bloc (Poland) in a small
| town and we had this sort of free-range parenting there.
| When I was around 9 or 10 I would spend my whole days
| playing outside with the other kids from the
| neighborhood, especially in the summer. Sort of like the
| "Bullerbyn children" in Astrid Lindgren's book. Sometimes
| one of us was sent on an errand (like to a local shop)
| and others went along to keep company. There were 5 of us
| hanging out regularly and most of us lived in two working
| parent households except one who had a SAH mother and
| another who was raised by a working single mother. So I
| don't think the lack of SAH moms is a factor here. Also,
| my parents are not religious and there definitely was no
| faith-based community. My parents actually didn't know
| that well the parents of other kids, we kids just met
| each other somehow in the area or were introduced by
| other kids that we knew. I think it was rather a
| combination of living in a safe neighborhood - suburb
| with low traffic (even now Poland has less cars per
| capita than US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co
| untries_by_vehicle...) and people being just less
| paranoid back then. Also, the societal expectations
| towards children have shifted in the recent years, now
| people often try to micromanage their children's time and
| provide them with too many after-school activities so
| kids don't have time to just hang around.
| SamBam wrote:
| Regardless of Eastern bloc vs West, or anywhere else, I
| think the biggest issue might simply be era.
|
| Parents in the States were much more permissive in the 80s,
| and to a certain extent the 90s. That started to change in
| the 2000s, with far greater "helicopter parenting."
|
| So are these descriptions of idyllic life in ex-Yugoslavia
| five years ago, or twenty?
|
| I grew up in central Europe in the 80s and was given plenty
| of freedom, but I don't know whether kids there have the
| same amount as before, or if it has been changed like in
| the US.
| mcv wrote:
| There are plenty of countries where kids can still live
| in freedom. I can let my 8 year old son play outside with
| his 7 year old friend, and trust they'll be alright. I
| see lots of kids around their age go to their judo
| lessons on their own. This should be completely normal.
|
| For police to come and arrest parents for trusting their
| children with some basic freedom is unbelievably
| oppressive. It's bizarre to hear this coming from a
| country that once claimed to be the "land of the free".
| And this is hardly the first story like this.
| mgarfias wrote:
| I was just thinking about my childhood and how much
| freedom I had at that age. Car rides from parents for
| when the weather sucked
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I feel like the fear around "stranger danger" played a
| huge role in normalizing the idea that children shouldn't
| be unsupervised and that the police needed to enforce
| truancy laws with more urgency.
| marton78 wrote:
| My 7yo daughter goes to school alone, by subway. Not
| every day, and it's only two stations, but still. Nobody
| bats an eye. This is in Berlin, though not in a dangerous
| area.
| sasawpg wrote:
| My experience ends in mid-90s, but from what I understand
| it is still far more permissive than US/Canada. In
| Finland for example, kids go to school alone starting in
| grade 1 (walk or public transport). That is definitely
| not something you will see often in Canada. I do
| absolutely agree though - anecdotally speaking of course,
| parents today are far less permissive than "back in the
| day".
|
| I have no issue with my kids (8 and 9) playing outside
| alone provided they don't venture out onto the
| thoroughfare street. My concern is with irresponsible and
| inattentive drivers, including residential construction
| traffic.
| greedo wrote:
| I walked to school for Kindergarten and 1st grade.
| Roughly a mile each way. This was in the early 70s, and
| though I see some kids walk to the nearby elementary
| school, the majority are dropped off by their parents in
| their huge SUVs...
| petre wrote:
| > 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.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Come now, everybody likes a pickled cucumber.
| bundze wrote:
| Funnily enough, I'm from the Eastern bloc (Poland) and
| apparently my grandma used to run a grocery store for some
| time in the 1980's. It could have been technically
| government owned, I never inquired. Whatever was the legal
| status, it was called "Grandma's store" in my family.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| Pasting 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.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I think the legal penalties for being _negligent_ towards
| children stem from rich people making up laws as a response
| to narratives about rare occurences that take places in
| environments lawmakers have 0 experience with (low-income
| neighbourhoods). They feel as though less children would be
| harmed if they always had an adult present with them, which
| is feels like a solid assertion if you have the means to
| provide adult supervision at all times, ignoring the
| alternative costs of letting children experience
| independence and completely misunderstanding the every day
| reality of low-income parents.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _as a response to narratives about rare occurences_
|
| I think this is the root of it. Before the advent of mass
| media, you would hear about crimes if those crimes
| happened to people you personally know, but probably not
| otherwise. Rare crimes were rarely heard about and
| therefore people had an intuitive understanding that
| those crimes were rare. Mass media changed all of this.
| The most rare sort of crime is the most newsworthy
| because novelty sells newspapers. So the media has people
| fixated, worrying, about very rare sorts of crimes and
| this has made the general population much more irrational
| about rare crimes than it ever was before. Journalists
| may sometimes say that their job is to inform the public,
| but very often they induce a perception of reality that
| is less accurate than what people would have formed on
| their own with no journalist around to make a huge deal
| out of freak rare occurrences.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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)
| Nitramp wrote:
| Without commenting on the other issues, but something that
| struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in
| California appeared fully disenfranchised during
| presidential elections.
|
| Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near
| guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of
| the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your
| opinion, advertise for your vote.
|
| It struck me as really bizarre.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The solid red and blue states influence what kinds of
| candidates can make it to the general election at all.
| California and the other large, blue states also have
| significant influence in Washington between elections.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| They aren't disenfranchised. Everyone knows which way
| California will go so they don't spend a lot of time
| campaigning there. Candidates have a limited amount of
| time and money. So they focus on the swing states. My
| state also votes pretty consistently and therefore
| doesn't get much campaigning. I don't feel like I am
| disenfranchised for it.
|
| And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote,
| there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was
| recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular
| vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always
| call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of
| the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it
| doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds.
| This was a compromise between populous areas and rural
| areas in order to get the union formed.
|
| If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation
| would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA
| etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents
| that while still allowing for populous areas to matter.
| Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of
| the main compromises our federal system is built on and
| in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to
| secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of
| the Bill of Rights.
| neura wrote:
| Yeah, I guess it's as black and white as you state.
| There's no in-between like keeping the per state
| allotments while still having that allotment be chosen by
| the people instead of adding another layer in between
| that is "voting for the people", which I provide in
| quotes because who actually believes that is happening?
| "voting on behalf of their supporters", at best.
| hexane360 wrote:
| The electoral college wasn't created to restrict the
| power of large states like Virginia.
|
| The electoral college was created because it was expected
| that state governments would elect the president, _not
| citizens_. In the presence of direct election of the
| president, it 's an anachronism at best. It was never
| about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party
| system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is
| just a tyranny of the minority.
|
| If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states
| count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll
| still be a much more fair and equitable system than the
| electoral college, which effectively means that anyone
| outside a swing state has _no_ representation.
|
| Of course, doing it that way would make it much more
| obvious that there's no credible reason we should give
| 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000
| farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus
| more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Even though that gets brought up as a reason very often
| it is not true. Firstly the US (like many other
| democracies) has a two house system. The senate is
| designed to counter balance the power of high population
| states. Even if the US went to a popular vote system now
| it would not be governed by california and NY, because
| the senate gives disproportionate power to smaller
| states.
|
| If you read historians opinions there are several
| reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically
| not cited [1], however one important reason which does
| get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to
| count slaves as population without actually letting them
| vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]
|
| [1] https://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/e
| lectcol...
|
| [2] https://historyofyesterday.com/the-racist-origins-of-
| america... [3]
| https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929609038/how-electoral-
| colle... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/20
| 19/11/electoral-...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I've heard this take before and it makes no sense to me.
| _Areas_ don't dictate anything. It's people. Why should
| it matter where the people live? As it stands, people who
| live in smaller states have more say in national politics
| than people who live in bigger states.
| masklinn wrote:
| > As it stands, people who live in smaller states have
| more say in national politics than people who live in
| bigger states.
|
| Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about
| Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states
| matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.
|
| Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind,
| but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population
| Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of
| the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the
| national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of
| the Senate.
|
| States which have a say (or are heard really) during
| presidential elections are states with large enough
| populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time
| and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough
| that there's a chance to swing them.
| cduzz wrote:
| As things stand, where every state votes as a block, the
| ones where the whole population lands within the 50/50
| range is heavily contested. If North Dakota were 50/50
| the Bismark media market would be flooded by advertising.
| Every electoral college vote matters.
|
| The actual number of potentially contested states is
| quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.
|
| There are many "within the constitution" ways of
| adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as
| chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state
| election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual
| state would do this by itself because an inconsistent
| implementation would (IE if california or texas stop
| sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the
| balance to one or the other party for forever.
|
| There's some indications that the republicans won the
| house in this current election cycle because new york
| didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several
| republicans to be elected when the absolute math would
| have made it trivial to exclude them.
|
| Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though,
| which is the typical alternative.
| moate wrote:
| >> Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder,
| though, which is the typical alternative.
|
| Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it's
| not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have
| hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully
| negligent deaths annually in <country name of your
| choice>.
|
| Modern politics isn't about stopping the deaths, it's
| just better at hiding how the sausage is made.
| masklinn wrote:
| > As things stand, where every state votes as a block
|
| Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have
| district voting, so they allocate one elector per
| congressional district (based on that district's vote),
| plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9
| electors combined. And it's still far from proportional
| representation.
| moate wrote:
| >>I've heard this take before and it makes no sense to
| me.
|
| I'm assuming that's because you're not trying to vote in
| candidates who consistently support a small group of
| loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast
| majority of the country.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote,
| there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was
| recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular
| vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always
| call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of
| the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it
| doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds.
| This was a compromise between populous areas and rural
| areas in order to get the union formed.
|
| The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The
| idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise,
| and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the
| candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting
| everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any
| meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many
| of the relevant issues in order to make an informed
| choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast
| (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped
| with the core problem of most folks--justifiably!--
| knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state
| deals with).
|
| This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-
| declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which,
| while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented)
| idea originally, is now simply very bad--we get all the
| noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't
| get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.
| thewebcount wrote:
| This is the exact opposite of my experience. It's the
| only place where my elected officials were actually
| engaged. I received regular updates from my
| representatives without even asking for them. They just
| mailed all of their constituents flyers explaining the
| current issues and how it affects the community. I've
| lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like
| this in any of them except California. Go figure.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I 've lived in 5 different states and never saw
| anything like this in any of them except California._
|
| I live in Texas, around Houston. Here we certainly _do_
| have representatives (but not members of the Senate) who
| send mail to constituents with information. Our Senators
| send emails once in a while, if you sign up for them.
|
| But good luck ever figuring out the real information from
| the spam and ~~malicious dis~~incorrect information and
| opinions.
| hollerith wrote:
| You missed the word "presidential".
| dantheman wrote:
| The federal government does far too many things, and
| that's really the problem. The constitution spelled out
| what the government was allowed to do and that limitation
| died in the progressive era.
| themitigating wrote:
| Can you provide an example of something the federal
| government is doing that should be up to the states?
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Yes well the progressive era was truly terrible. Food
| safety, environmental protection, monopolies etc. are
| really not something the Federal government should have
| any right to intervene in. After all the states had no
| issues handling all the before.. obviously...
| cpurdy wrote:
| California has already passed the National Popular Vote
| bill. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-
| explanation
|
| Republican controlled states don't want people's votes to
| count, so none of them have passed the bill.
| starkd wrote:
| Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to
| do with how responsive or attentive a government is to
| voter's interests. You vote for a candidate as a whole,
| but there are likely still issues you disagree with.
| Voters' interests are largely unaddressed or ignored
| altogether.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing
| to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to
| voter's interests
|
| Actually, it does: more specifically, degree of
| _proportionality_ does, and antimajoritarianism (systems
| in which an absolute majority-preferred option can lose
| to a minority option) are an extreme case of
| nonproportionality. Having a powerful central executive
| elected by nonmajoritarian election itself weights the
| government to nonresponsiveness (though the US has _many_
| other factors reinforcing that.)
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It is completely the point of 'voters in specific states
| are largely disenfranchised during presidential
| elections'.
| yellowapple wrote:
| In other words: California has promised to disenfranchise
| its own voters even more than is already the case. I can
| already see this backfiring _spectacularly_ with a
| solidly-blue state like California being on the hook to
| put its electors toward a Republican popular vote winner.
| cpurdy wrote:
| That's a weird way to look at it.
|
| The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the
| bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people
| is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who
| have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.
|
| Right now, effectively, the land votes, and the people's
| vote is often ignored. Wisconsin is a good example, where
| the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less
| than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority
| in the legislature.
| scythe wrote:
| That's true recently. But only recently have political
| alignments been so rigid and predictable in the United
| States. California went for the Republicans from 1968-92,
| and before that was somewhat swingy.
|
| More generally, any single-winner election system is
| prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works
| out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%.
| This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and
| then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy"
| Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly
| my whole life.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Without commenting on the other issues, but something
| that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how
| people in California appeared fully disenfranchised
| during presidential elections.
|
| That's the case of every state which is away enough from
| swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential
| elections.
|
| Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few
| months every 4 years.
|
| [0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but
| at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter
| terr-dav wrote:
| This is true for the vast majority of states, and the
| vast majority of people's interests. The political
| systems in this country have been shaped by -- and
| frankly, designed by -- by wealthy interests to make the
| US an oligarchy with various performances of democratic
| representation.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| I'm not sure that's the reason why it's only worth
| campaigning in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and some other
| states during presidential elections.
|
| Also it is the system that was designed over 100-200
| years ago. The problem is the lack of meaningful reform
| because the people in power are there only because of the
| current system.
|
| That's the reason why is it so hard to change electoral
| system without some external/internal shock. And
| "unfortunately" US has been way too stable politically
| during the 20th century compared to most other countries.
| gruez wrote:
| >Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is
| near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result,
| neither of the sides cares to address your interests,
| solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.
|
| Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to
| vote for one party regardless of what they or the other
| party does, of course neither party is going to bother
| catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you
| will always buy apple products, then complaining that
| apple doesn't address your grievances.
| bigfudge wrote:
| That doesn't follow. A similar proportion of electors in
| swing and non swing states could have fixed voting
| patterns. The only difference in California is that the
| proportion of fixed electors for each party is further
| from 50%. That is, it might be the case that only 10% of
| electors in any state are ever prepared to change their
| mind, but the ones in Ohio get more say than the ones in
| Cali.
| 1024core wrote:
| We have elections... but offering water to a voter standing
| in line to vote on a hot sunny day may get you arrested in
| some states (like Georgia).
| ranger_danger wrote:
| That law is prefaced with "No person shall solicit votes
| in any manner"... clearly making it more about stopping
| political influence at the polls by giving things away.
| Also it only applies within 150 feet of the building
| anyway.
| timeon wrote:
| > We have elections... but
|
| two parties. (Still better then one.)
| notch898a wrote:
| As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd
| world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the
| police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone
| isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot
| can be overlooked.
|
| >(I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it
| is to get guns
|
| Yeah I often imagine myself in the scenario of what to do
| if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms. I
| calculated it would take me about 2 weeks to print an FGC-9
| and source the various ammo components (by doing things
| like using primers from nail gun ammo etc this can be done
| all from unregulated sources).
| pjc50 wrote:
| > what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and
| without arms
|
| I don't mean to be rude, but this phrasing makes you
| sound like an addict trying to work out if you can smoke
| banana peel to get high. You can just .. not have a gun
| for a bit on holiday? Rather than engaging in illegal
| activities? Heck, several countries have tourist hunting
| industries! (The tourists do the hunting, not hunting the
| tourists)
| scrose wrote:
| > As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic
| 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario
| the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as
| someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real
| violence) a lot can be overlooked.
|
| In the US, flashing a PBA card[0] or the fire
| department/ambulance alternative will get you out of most
| of what police consider 'low-level' infractions(ie.
| Covering a license plate, speeding, etc...).
|
| Or in less corrupt cases(like the ones I unfortunately
| have used mine for), it gets the cops to leave you alone
| or listen to you when you get profiled for no good
| reason.
|
| I guess it's technically not a bribe since no money is
| exchanging hands, but last I checked, each PBA card
| raises ~$150/year for the police union.
|
| [0] https://www.the-sun.com/news/4212777/what-is-a-pba-
| card/
| giggles_01 wrote:
| You should try to live there as an average local person
| with average income and without "connections". "Crisp
| $20" in some countries might be quite a lot.
|
| Also: I've seen this many times, foreigners from rich
| countries get completely different treatment.
| notch898a wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| I'm aware of my privilege, but since I have it does it
| not make sense to use it for my maximum liberty? At the
| end of the day I have to act with the resources I have,
| not the resources someone else has.
| giggles_01 wrote:
| What are we talking about here? You can power trip
| (literally and figuratively) as much as you are able.
| Some countries are good for that. That doesn't make those
| countries "freer" as parent comment suggests.
| notch898a wrote:
| I'm not interested in power-tripping, I'm interested in
| the people power tripping having the least interest in
| putting me in jail. Maybe that's because the judicial
| system allows freedom, maybe it's because the police are
| lazy or understaffed, maybe it's because they want my
| money. I'm a pragmatic man.
|
| As for freedom, it's going to be relative. Each person
| has unique resources and abilities that dictate where
| they will find the most freedom. You don't have to
| victimize others to improve your own freedom.
| zirgs wrote:
| And what would you do with that gun? Commit crimes? Even
| simple possession of it would be a crime. You would not
| be able to use it to defend yourself without getting
| prosecuted yourself.
|
| It's not that it's impossible for me to manufacture an
| illegal gun for myself. What's the point of doing that?
| I'm not a criminal. I don't plan to overthrow the
| government or anything like that. Why risk getting a
| criminal record for no gain?
| notch898a wrote:
| I'm not pulling out a gun anywhere populated unless the
| choice is that or I end up dead. In which case prison is
| an upgrade. I would consider european jail a great chance
| to read up on the classics while I enjoy not being dead.
|
| Even where I live now (constitutional carry state,
| extremely lax on guns) pulling from the holster without a
| threat is gonna get you tossed in prison. Nobody knows
| you have it until you do that.
| zirgs wrote:
| Why not go the legal route and get a gun permit? Seems to
| be a much better option if you believe that you need a
| gun for self defence.
| notch898a wrote:
| Totally, if that's an option that would be a rational
| choice. For instance, if I ended up in Poland I would buy
| a black powder revolver and carry that (legal) and if I
| ended up in Czech Republic or Austria I think the permit
| is very easy. The pure hypothetical is ending up
| someplace where it isn't practical to get the permit.
|
| In practice I just live in a place that does not even
| require a permit.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| so basically you get treated like rich person in the US.
| kragen wrote:
| Did your old account get banned, man? I forget the name
| but you posted a lot of great comments.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Folks in the US are aware of this, it's all they ever talk
| about.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > We have elections... but
|
| Maybe the real enemy of the American people is ... the
| American electorate?
| giggles_01 wrote:
| I think a lot of folks in US over-romanticize those "feel
| freer" authoritarian countries. In some cases like this it
| might be better but I don't think systematic cases of:
| "inconvenient" people disappearing, being at complete mercy
| of local oligarch/overlord, inability to leave your country
| are such rampant in US as in those countries. Usually
| people who write something like this never lived in an
| authoritarian country as a local but were there on a 2
| weeks trip or heard it from someone who was on a trip or
| someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great
| place to live?).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm not claiming authoritarian states are sunshine and
| roses, just that freedom is a lot more complex and
| fuzzier than is sometimes appreciated, and that in some
| regards we're noticeably _less free_ than some (some!) of
| those states, despite their being authoritarian. I 'm not
| saying we should switch to being authoritarian in the
| name of freedom--most other liberal democracies also
| manage to be freer on several of these issues than we
| are, though, sure, some are less-free by other measures
| (but, on balance, I think we're pretty far on the less-
| free-as-felt-day-to-day-by-most-people side, as liberal
| democracies go).
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'll bite. I lived in an authoritarian country.
|
| People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).
|
| A lot of things were worse, but a lot were better. You're
| definitely not going to be arrested or harassed for
| letting your kids walk alone. Not sure how good their
| record is for actual child abuse (bad cases would make
| the news, so there was _some_ enforcement).
|
| While they could prevent you from leaving the country,
| they didn't have no fly lists, and I believe many more
| were impacted from the latter than prevented from leaving
| that country.
|
| No one is disputing things can get really bad in those
| countries. It's more about _probabilities_. One thing
| that becomes very clear in the US if you poke around: It
| 's _ridiculously_ easy to end up with felony charges, and
| I know plenty who faced them (some convicted). The number
| of people I knew in the authoritarian country who had a
| criminal record? Miniscule. Raising my kid here, the
| chances of him getting a criminal record is significantly
| higher here than there and is a source of worry.
|
| And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an
| apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.
|
| And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's
| orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often
| more about ineffective governments).
|
| > someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a
| great place to live?).
|
| Classic false dichotomy.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The difference, of course, is that in the US you could
| start a campaign to change all those things.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| This man literally is doing the exact same thing the
| comment above is describing. Incredible.
| ahtihn wrote:
| How did that work out for communists in the US in the
| 20th century?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| They scared business owners enough that some of them
| started planning a fascist coup :-/
|
| OTOH they also scared them enough that we got The New
| Deal. So. Mixed bag?
| hd95489 wrote:
| Could you though? I mean in theory it's possible but the
| barriers are basically insurmountable for creating a
| viable 3rd party. It's like trying to remove Putin by
| voting him out.
| zirgs wrote:
| The UK has the same bullshit FPTP system as the USA, but
| they have more successful 3rd parties. The SNP dominates
| in Scotland. LibDems were even able to participate in a
| govt coalition. And both Conservatives and Labour are
| completely irrelevant in Northern Ireland - which has
| completely different parties than the rest of the UK.
|
| So what prevents parties similar to the SNP and LibDems
| to get elected in the USA?
| Clubber wrote:
| >Could you though?
|
| Highly unlikely in one election cycle. The parties
| control both houses, the presidency, the states and the
| locals almost completely.
|
| Step one is stop voting for incumbents and seriously
| consider voting out incumbents unless they are _really,
| really_ good; exceptional. The longer someone stays in
| power, the more power they get, the more deals they make,
| the less accountable they feel. It 's good to get fresh
| blood and a fresh outlook every term too. Really the
| bottom line is we expect change, but we keep voting the
| same people in and those people serve for _decades_. It
| 's almost an insanity.
|
| Once the existing political parties are weakened by
| turnover, you can start placing third party people in
| there. Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's
| credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over
| elections than traditionally.
| xtian wrote:
| If you go beyond the level of shouting on a street corner
| and start building real power, you will be dragged
| through the mud by the combined force of corporate media
| smears and social media discourse swarm influence
| operations. If you go further you will be murdered by the
| state. Ask Fred Hampton and others.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| People do, and they fail. Often, bad policies and laws
| stick around _even when most people don 't like them_. I
| will live my whole life seeing few or none of those
| issues solved, no matter what I personally do--that's
| just a fact. I could, today, devote the rest of my life
| to this, and if I moved the needle at all on even one of
| them it'd be a miracle.
|
| We have a uniquely-bad electoral system, which is why so
| much of this day-to-day stuff ends up so insanely
| dysfunctional compared to most other developed
| democracies, and we've had mass-media special interest
| propaganda running rampant in a way it doesn't elsewhere,
| since the 80s (loss of the fairness doctrine--which,
| admitted ickiness aside, did seem to keep things _on the
| rails_ a bit--and deregulation of media outlet ownership
| leading to unprecedented, extreme levels of
| consolidation; hard to tell which of those is most
| responsible, since they both happened around the same
| time) and that propaganda 's able to be unusually
| effective in part because of our bad electoral system.
|
| The result is that as long as factions in favor of these
| shitty things can stay under one of the two big tents,
| they get the tacit support of all the rest of the
| factions under those tents, even if most of them don't
| like that first group of factions. "Of course civil
| forfeiture's bullshit, obviously it is... but I can't
| vote for a pro-choicer/communist/whatever!" et c. (and,
| yes, the effect is on "both sides"--it's why we hear a
| ton of noise from "no abortion ever!" and "zero
| restrictions until the baby takes its first breath!"
| while the majority of voters, who just want more-or-less
| what Roe guaranteed, get little attention)
|
| So, our freedom to vote is even, arguably, quite a bit
| less-free than for a fair proportion of our peers, since
| our ability, in practice, to express our actual desires
| through the electoral process is much more curtailed than
| in most of them--though, obviously, that part doesn't
| apply to authoritarians states.
| nhchris wrote:
| You have elections.. but which party can you vote for if
| you want a stop to Middle East wars?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| LOL, literally an example I thought of after my post. How
| much of the population dislikes foreign adventurism?
| That's a semi-common position _across the aisle_ , among
| actual voters! Hell, _Trump_ ran on it and it worked for
| him (once, anyway)! But typically this position has
| almost zero representation in our legislature, because
| our electoral system is _really, really bad_.
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| The Iraq war was _overwhelmingly_ popular with the US
| electorate when it started. It had far more approval than
| almost any other policy at the time.
| yterdy wrote:
| The US was overwhelmingly propagandized toward, but all
| you had to do to find resistance was to open the funny
| pages:
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/15
| https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/09
|
| (I HIGHLY suggest reading at least a few weeks forward,
| starting from the second link.)
|
| I'm sure Doonesbury got in on it, too. Eventually. After
| the Napster arc.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The US did end one foreign war quite recently. It was
| pretty messy, since it was definitely not a victory, and
| cratered the president's approval ratings. It turns out
| there is almost no political constituency for visibly
| losing a war.
|
| Additionally, the US' kinetic operations in the Middle
| East have shrunk substantially as the drone strikes have
| been substantially curtailed, again under the same
| president that recently extracted the US from a long-
| running foreign war. He got no credit for that either; it
| turns out nobody in the US really cares very much, and
| even the people who generally disapprove of US foreign
| military involvements don't seem excited to give credit
| to the current guy.
|
| The US has always ping-ponged between loving foreign wars
| and hating foreign wars. Not having a reliably anti-war
| party is not great, but that's at least as much the fault
| of the voters.
| xtian wrote:
| They ended the occupation of Afghanistan abruptly in
| order to redirect resources to a certain other conflict,
| more critical to US elite interests.
| AnnikaL wrote:
| Which conflict would that be? I'm not aware of any wars
| that started in 2020/early 2021, when the US was
| preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's _possible_ US intelligence agencies were aware
| Russia was preparing to escalate their invasion of
| Ukraine in early 2021, so I assume that 's what's being
| alluded to. Preparations and plans _were_ most likely
| starting in Russia by then, that 's true (even limited
| mobilization is a pretty big undertaking--it's hard to
| hide supply-dump preparation and heavy equipment movement
| and shifting soldier concentrations). Though IIRC the US
| government didn't start saying that publicly until late
| 2021/early 2022.
|
| If they knew about it in late 2020, that info must not
| have made it to the upper levels of the military, given
| how much crying and foot-dragging they engaged in when
| Trump tried for his (IIRC) 90-day withdrawal. One wonders
| how ready our military actually is if they act like
| moving low-thousands troops and some equipment _out_ of--
| not into!--a theater in which we control the airspace,
| within in a couple months, is a crazy thing to ask of
| them. It may have been a _bad idea_ to withdraw that
| fast, sure, but some of their spokespeople they had on
| the circuits whining about how hard it was weren 't
| saying it was a bad idea, but that it literally couldn't
| be done. Sure, Jan. Certainly, if The Shadowy Figures
| That Control Everything (riffing on the vibe of GP's
| post) had already decided we needed to shift to Ukraine,
| that was still a closely-kept secret in late 2020.
|
| And I'm not as sure as GP that Biden's following through
| on the withdrawal was because of Ukraine, but I'd also
| not rule it out as extremely-unlikely--the timeline is
| such that it's possible.
| yterdy wrote:
| Oh, this one's easy. Trump's withdrawal is as much of a
| clusterf*ck as Biden's, it sours American appetites for
| more military adventure, scuttling a Ukraine campaign.
|
| Another fun exercise is to ponder how much - if any -
| influence Trump's supposed ties with Russia have on these
| hypotheticals. There was some other issue, recently,
| whose details have since slipped my mind, that made me
| think, "Oh, this 100% makes sense if you assume that
| Trump is being told to do Thing by a party who is trying
| to weaken America's position ahead of a
| resumption/escalation of 2014's hostilities." I believe
| it was something that Democrats uncharacteristically
| reversed course on, which, again, would lend credence to
| the notion that this was something of a clandestine
| pitched battle from the start. I wouldn't rule it out.
| Not from a Secret Society Ruling The World standpoint,
| more like Leaders In A Desperate Position Pulling Out All
| The Stops.
| xtian wrote:
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
| yamtaddle wrote:
| God I love policy-wonk shit. I got to get back into
| reading this stuff semi-regularly, it's a blast. Thanks
| for the link.
| xtian wrote:
| Yeah it's fun to watch it fail as the empire collapses.
| starkd wrote:
| Remember Code Pink that was so active protesting the Iraq
| and Afghanistan wars? They are protesting the war in
| Ukraine, but notice how the media is not giving them
| hardly any attention now. These grassroots activist
| movements are just as much provoked into activity as they
| are genuine organicly driven.
| themitigating wrote:
| You don't like some park regulation vote for someone who
| will change it. If no one running is willing to do that
| then you can run for office. If no one votes for you that
| sucks.
|
| Democracy isn't about getting what you want. This reminds
| me of people who say "not my president " or "I didn't vote
| for that"
| ryanackley wrote:
| Valid points but a lot of frustrations and injustices you
| hear about in the USA are told by our own press because
| freedom of press. We are a very transparent people. This is
| not the case for other places.
|
| My brother lived and worked in China for many years as a
| professional photographer and basically made the same
| points as you when we would ask him about what life is like
| over there. That was until he fell under suspicion at some
| point because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time
| taking pictures. He was under house arrest for over a year.
| They confiscated his passport but eventually let him leave
| because of Covid. He had zero due process. It was decided
| by the local police that he should be under house arrest.
| My family hired a lawyer but he had to present the lawyer
| to the police as a "concerned family friend who lives in
| China".
|
| That anecdote is relatively tame compared to what some
| people go through in authoritarian countries. If the
| government targets you in one of those countries, your life
| is over with near zero chance of getting out of trouble.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's no element of this story that couldn't have
| happened in the US, and no reason presented to believe
| that your brother wasn't involved in something shady
| under Chinese law, other than the fact that _the
| situation was resolved in his favor._
|
| > He had zero due process.
|
| Are you saying that Chinese law wasn't followed?
| foobarian wrote:
| That might sound worse than US but is it? If the
| government here targets you, you end up with a felony
| record and at that point your life is effectively over as
| well even if you don't go to prison.
| Laaas wrote:
| What did your embassy in China say? Did they not try to
| help?
| ryanackley wrote:
| Yes, they helped us find the "lawyer" and told us based
| on their experience that it was very likely he would
| spend time in a Chinese prison regardless of guilt or
| innocence. He got lucky in one sense because this was
| right before Covid hit. When everything started going a
| little crazy over there because Covid was spreading, they
| decided to let him leave for whatever reason.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Sure, I wasn't trying to be all "rah, rah,
| authoritarianism!" in my post (though several posters
| seem to have taken it that way, so maybe I wasn't clear
| enough). My point was more that our notions of freedom
| can sometimes be rather myopic, and miss the forest for
| the trees, such that we can become so _un-free_ that even
| (some!) authoritarian states can feel much freer (until,
| as you note, you piss off the wrong people, which is
| obviously a huge problem--or you happen to be of the
| wrong ethnicity, or wrong religion, et c.--I _am not_
| trying to defend authoritarianism).
| themitigating wrote:
| How do authoritarian states feel more free?
|
| They have rules as well. Your list of grievances has some
| small issuss. Why do you think an authoritarian state
| would better. For example in Sir Lanka chewing gum is
| banned. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_sales
| _ban_in_Sin...
|
| That's a easy one because it's mentioned often but I
| guess my question is how do you know the US is less free
| than other countries? What if you are being manipulated
| to feel anger at the government?
| Laaas wrote:
| You probably meant to say Singapore.
| vkou wrote:
| The 2nd will also happily get you killed during a no-knock
| raid (that, for bonus points, was for the wrong house), or
| a traffic stop, or a cop hallucinating that he saw you
| reaching for a nonexistent gun on your waistband.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I've, further, got some _strong_ suspicions that a look
| at history and whatever limited and noisy data are
| available, is more likely to support the notion that our
| kind of gun laws are at least as much a _risk_ to the
| maintenance of liberal democracy, as a protector of it.
| Yet, that 's a common justification for why we _mustn 't_
| question the 2nd. AFAIK they've contributed at least as
| often to imposing oppression as to resisting oppression,
| on the local scale in the US. Then there's revolutions in
| other countries, where they seem at least as often to aid
| overthrowing a democracy as to play a pivotal role in
| defending it (though, from what I can tell, they hardly
| matter in either case--foreign aid and gaining the
| support of elements of the military are usually far, far
| more effective in actually forcing an outcome).
|
| That's in addition to the hard-to-quantify harm to
| freedom from having to worry about terrified, trigger-
| happy cops.
|
| Got half a mind to research it and write a book about
| whatever I find....
| umvi wrote:
| America has a lot of quirks and problems, but in not many
| other countries can you flagrantly criticize/insult the
| government/leaders/policy without repercussion. USA has
| arguably the greatest freedom of speech protections on
| earth which is one liberty that is not worth trading for
| the freedom to drink wine more easily when picnicking in
| certain places - hence why people are not flocking to
| authoritarian states that "feel freer" than USA.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| You are so right. In America you can lead protests and
| bring to light uncomfortable truths about the government
| and they can't do anything about it. They do tend to find
| you dead in your car a few months later... but I'm sure
| that's just a coincidence though. The important thing is
| that there are laws that are there to protect you, unlike
| other countries which aren't as free as the USA.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Go look at the extent of anti-BDS legislation and how
| appeals courts have upheld it in spite of 40 year old
| precedents to the contrary then talk about "free speech".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > America has a lot of quirks and problems, but in not
| many other countries can you flagrantly criticize/insult
| the government/leaders without repercussion.
|
| This is possible in most of the developed world. You
| don't have to have the peculiarities of the American
| concept of "freedom" to have this one. Someone in Norway
| gets to enjoy _both_ healthcare and being able to make
| mean comments about the Prime Minister.
| umvi wrote:
| Not so. UK, Germany, and indeed most of the EU have
| significant speech restrictions accompanied by censorship
| or jail time if you violate them.
|
| I'm not super familiar with Norway's speech protections,
| but it has a smaller population than the US state of
| Maryland, so it seems to be the exception more than the
| rule or at least not an easily scalable solution to
| America's problems. Saying "[Insert Scandinavian country
| proves it's possible]" is like saying "Look at how well
| Hacker News is moderated! Facebook and Twitter should
| take notes on how to do it right and fix the moderation
| issues with their services."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They have very _specific_ speech restrictions around
| things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly
| criticizing the government". I'll happily give up freedom
| to publicly be a neo-Nazi if it gives me freedom from
| "out of network" healthcare bills.
|
| Neither society is 100% free; that's the point, really.
| The trade-offs like this that the American system has
| selected seem insane.
| umvi wrote:
| America is like a union of 50 countries, yet the things
| you chose to criticize were for the most part not federal
| level restrictions, but rather cherry-picked quirks of
| individual states.
|
| > They have very specific speech restrictions around
| things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly criticizing
| the government".
|
| Germany, maybe. In UK a scottish man was arrested for
| tweeting "The only good brit soldier is a deed one, burn
| auld fella, buuuurrn." about the late Tom Moore.
| Apparently being arrested for offensive tweets is not
| uncommon in the UK. Lots of arrested around the time of
| the queen's death for making fun of the monarchy/dead
| queen.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That happens in the US, too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novak_v._City_of_Parma
|
| > Novak v. City of Parma, No. 21-3290, is a 2022 decision
| of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth
| Circuit granting qualified immunity to the city of Parma,
| Ohio, and its officials for prosecuting Anthony Novak
| over a Facebook page parodying the Parma Police
| Department's page. As of December 2022, the case is
| pending certiorari before the Supreme Court of the United
| States.
|
| > cherry-picked quirks of individual states
|
| Civil forfeiture? Healthcare? Incarceration? Paid leave?
| These are each widespread _national_ problems in the US.
| polski-g wrote:
| Germany criminalizes opposition to war:
| https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/01/qqln-f01.html
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Any reporting on this from a _reputable_ source?
|
| Googling Heinrich Bucker doesn't turn up much other than
| "World Socialist Web Site", and it appears Germany
| permits opposition to war just fine;
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa0PevmD6EI
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Isn't a woman in Norway facing jail time for saying that
| trans men can't be lesbians? Doesn't sound very much like
| free speech.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, not that statement on its own, and no one's seen jail
| time in Norway for hate speech alone. The post
| specifically targeted an individual for harassment.
|
| And, again, these tend to be matter of perspective;
| balancing the right of free speech against the right to
| be free of discrimination. Each country is picking in
| these scenarios where rights conflict; I tend to prefer
| Norway's selections.
| teolandon wrote:
| Not what she said and not the core reason she's being
| investigated.
| cpurdy wrote:
| But I heard Alex Jones say something different ...
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Ten thousand or so Canadians who lost access to their
| bank accounts for criticizing their government would like
| to have a chat with you.
| bregma wrote:
| It was dozens of Canadians, it was a transaction freeze
| by certain banks for a few days, and it was because there
| was a suspicion of contributing to terrorist
| organizations. It was not an action by the government and
| the freeze was lifted quite quickly once the facts were
| established.
| katmannthree wrote:
| > for criticizing their government
|
| No. Here's a protip which applies to every country across
| the globe: if you're donating money to people doing
| things your government decided is illegal with the
| express purpose of enabling continued illegal acts,
| you're gonna have a bad time.
| ashwagary wrote:
| >We have elections... but, this article.
|
| >We have elections... but civil forfeiture.
|
| We have elections... but once in a while a shadowy
| organization within the government assassinates the
| President if he becomes too much of a threat to the
| establishment, allegedly.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "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)"
|
| We have elections... but everyone is so terrified of the
| LOLWTF numbers of guns in society that we never leave the
| house
| curun1r wrote:
| The other part of authoritarianism that's less popular to
| talk about is that, in many ways, it works very well. In
| many parts of the "free" US, you can't leave a visible bag
| in your vehicle for more than a few minutes because you'll
| return to a smashed window. In places where that kind of
| petty crime is dealt with harshly, it's almost non-
| existent. As trite as it sounds, Mussolini made the trains
| run on time.
|
| So authoritarianism often gets a lot of the small stuff
| right at the cost of the big stuff while freedom often
| means sacrificing a lot of those small things to get the
| big stuff right. Having a society where you've got the best
| of both worlds is a really hard balance to strike.
|
| And while it's really easy to say that the big stuff is
| more important, the subjective feeling of freedom can be
| more affected by the small stuff because it's much more a
| part of daily life. I don't need to criticize my government
| on a daily basis, I only need to do that at critical
| moments. But I have to park my car multiple times a day,
| and needing to keep it safe becomes a front-of-mind concern
| that makes me feel less free.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > The other part of authoritarianism that's less popular
| to talk about is that, in many ways, it works very well.
| In many parts of the "free" US, you can't leave a visible
| bag in your vehicle for more than a few minutes because
| you'll return to a smashed window. In places where that
| kind of petty crime is dealt with harshly, it's almost
| non-existent. As trite as it sounds, Mussolini made the
| trains run on time.
|
| Actually that semi quote is typically used in relation to
| the Spanish civil war and it's an old lady saying "the
| anarchists were certainly a weird bunch, but they did
| make the trains run on time).
|
| Also the correlation between harsh punishment and lower
| crime rates is dubious at best. The US has harsher
| penalties than most other Western democracies, but higher
| crime rates. This applies in particular to murder, where
| the rates are higher despite the death penalty. To add
| some anecdotal evidence, the only place I was ever
| pickpocketed was in Shanghai (where punishment is
| extremely harsh) and I have visited places like Nigeria
| which has a much less functioning law enforcement system.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| >> 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).
| Clubber wrote:
| >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).
|
| That happens here, it's just not coordinated before the
| fact. If you piss a policeman off by taking too long to
| pull over, they will beat you and get away with it. There
| are many examples of this on YouTube, here is a relatively
| minor one. This poor woman will be forever traumatized by
| this event. Those police won't get fired and it's pretty
| obvious they have some serious anger issues.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vFupklNSs0
|
| I feel policing and the overall justice system is the
| single largest threat to our country right now and if it
| isn't rectified will lead to massive civil unrest. This
| channel covers a lot of it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCSd9ZNL0nshOhXwtfIJBA
|
| This is a more recent channel that covers quite a bit as
| well.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMcW0MFzOAgfQ-7et47zw
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I think the main issue in this story is that most Americans
| wouldn't feel comfortable leaving their kids outside by
| themselves, even though it's really safe outside. It's a
| real issue.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I think the main issue in this story is that most
| Americans wouldn't feel comfortable leaving their kids
| outside by themselves
|
| Father of 5 here and you are fully correct. Our kids are
| not meaningfully safer with constant supervision - and by
| mandating it, we're knee-capping their ability to develop
| problem solving skills.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| It's silly to pretend that there are no people who might
| want to do harm to children, but as a father, I'm not
| really worried about them. I am, however, worried about
| the police hassling my kids and my family for the reasons
| presented in the article.
|
| My kids are very very little now, but it's something my
| partner and I discuss how to handle in the future. We
| live in a typical suburb now, but we're planning a move
| to the city for several reasons. Counterintuitively, we
| think this will provide our children more freedom to
| grow. Our impression is that police authority goes
| unchecked in the suburbs, while the city resists police
| overreach (sometimes).
| matwood wrote:
| Conversely, some neighbors just moved in from Seattle
| (I'm in an east coast suburb). They are ecstatic they can
| just let their kids play outside now. Something they said
| they couldn't do when living back in the city.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Hope it works out better for them than the family in the
| article
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Qualified immunity does not protect officers, it protects
| municipalities.
|
| Indemnification protects officers, but no one ever talks
| about it.
| burkaman wrote:
| Why do you say this? Qualified immunity explicitly only
| applies to individuals, not if you're suing the
| government as a whole.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Police officers in the United States are universally
| indemnified by their employers. There's no constitutional
| or case law which requires this it's just the rule
| everywhere.
|
| Indemnification means that their employer (i.e.
| municipalities) must pay for their legal defense in a
| civil suit and any judgment that arises under it.
|
| 1983 cases are technically against individuals but not at
| all in a practical sense.
|
| For some reason activists have zero interest in tackling
| this issue even though it could be done on a divide and
| conquer basis and even though it would provide much more
| deterrence than eliminating QI. I almost suspect the
| influence of the plaintiffs' bar is at play.
| burkaman wrote:
| Ok I see what you mean. I think you underestimate how
| hard this would be though. You'd probably have to
| basically eliminate police unions somehow.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I'm still confused on what your saying. If a public
| official wins a SS 1983 suit under a qualified immunity
| defense, there are no monetary damages to be indemnified
| against. Their employers only have to indemnify them if
| it is found they did _not_ have qualified immunity and
| then had a judgement against them.
|
| Are you saying that, for practical purposes, qualified
| immunity doesn't matter to the individual as they will
| almost always be indemnified anyway? I suppose this is
| true in a pragmatic way, but not in theory. As you say,
| there's no law that says the government agency has to
| indemnify. While I'd be surprised to find a case where
| the official ended up paying anything out of their own
| pocket, there are plenty of cases where the official has
| lost their job over a judgement against them and none
| that I could find where they won the case due to being
| covered under qualified immunity but still lost their job
| over it.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _I 'm still confused on what your saying.
|
| ...
|
| Are you saying that, for practical purposes, qualified
| immunity doesn't matter to the individual as they will
| almost always be indemnified anyway?_
|
| Yep, except the almost part.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Sure I'm glossing over that, but for practical purposes
| you have no redress because the officers were acting in
| their official capacity.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| They key difference here is whether you care more about
| bad officers facing consequences or the victims getting
| compensation.
|
| Eliminating qualified immunity only helps with the second
| part and does zero with respect to the first, but
| advocates of reform never make that clear.
|
| Even with qualified immunity sometimes victims win
| judgments. On the other hand indemnification is 100%
| universal and effective at protecting cops. No cop ever
| pays anything out of his own pocket, period.
| landemva wrote:
| Same with judges and court clerks. 'Because government'.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| They have absolute immunity. That's a separate issue.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I have a feeling that if municipalities start having to
| pay out lots of settlements for civil rights abuses by
| police, they'll start reconsidering the limits of
| indemnification.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| It hasn't happened in practice. NYC's is way up this
| year, Adams is doubling down on supporting the police.
|
| Instead of hoping for trickle down to work why not attack
| the problem directly?
| landemva wrote:
| Practically speaking there is no effective recourse. For
| things to change, need USSC to remove the qualified
| immunity doctrine which USSC basically created on their
| own in 1970s. State law could put in a few fixes, but
| generally few people are really interested.
|
| A couple years ago BLM had energy yet was distracted and
| diverted from the enabling problem - USSC qualified
| immunity.
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| 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
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| 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.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _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.
| COGlory wrote:
| 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).
| bundze wrote:
| This analogy is a huge hyperbole and the sole number of
| people addressing that suggests that many people might
| consider it to be misinformation that should be corrected
| before it spreads.
|
| Even if you meant authoritarian approach towards citizen in
| general (not regarding parenting), this is also incorrect.
| People who stayed out of politics weren't really persecuted
| here in Poland. Activists, independent journalists and
| priests were persecuted by the police but ordinary people
| just went on with their lives (although it is true that the
| regime used to be very oppresive in the 1940s-50s before
| Stalin died in 1956).
| vxNsr wrote:
| 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.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| 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.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> If you had tried to get over the wall you 'd been shot
| and your family questioned._
|
| Although I agree with aspects o your general point, this is
| a bad take.
|
| Pretty sure this is also true of the US-Mexico border wall.
| It's just much longer so it's easier to get away with, but
| if you tried to cross illegally in front of a law
| enforcement official and ignored their orders to stop, odds
| are very good you'd be shot. And your family would
| definitely be questions during the ensuing investigation.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Maybe the Mexican border guards would shoot you for
| trying to illegally enter their country. But East German
| border guards were shooting East Germans who were
| welcomed by West German guards. Pretending that this is a
| typical state of border affairs is gross revisionism.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> Maybe the Mexican border guards_
|
| I think there's a good chance that you'd be shot at by US
| law enforcement if you tried to make an end-run through a
| border checkpoint, regardless of which direction you're
| going. In fact, they might even be more aggressive in the
| US -> Mexico direction (because follow-and-detain is less
| of an option and the presumption that anyone heading that
| direction illegally is either smuggling or evading
| arrest).
|
| _> But East German border guards were shooting East
| Germans who were welcomed by West German guards.
| Pretending that this is a typical state of border affairs
| is gross revisionism._
|
| Of course. I think the point still stands.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > if you tried to cross illegally in front of a law
| enforcement official and ignored their orders to stop,
| odds are very good you'd be shot.
|
| How is shooting at someone crossing a border illegally
| reasonable use of force? It's a nonviolent offense that
| doesn't harm anyone directly.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> How_
|
| By force of law, which is my point :)
| dogleash wrote:
| > I don't think OP referred to authoritarianism about
| children, but authoritarianism in general.
|
| Thank you. I can't believe I had to scroll as far as I did
| to see your comment.
|
| I'm not saying the comparison is or isn't apt, but what a
| side-track to bother arguing that the policy wasn't 1:1
| identical.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Who is arguing other than you? What is there to side-
| track? People are providing their anecdotes about the
| Eastern bloc and growing up in it, and how it differs
| from the western stereotype.
|
| A curious mind would encourage learning more about
| something you likely have had no real world experience
| with.
| nosianu wrote:
| OP wrote in response to a very specific incident, and he
| wrote exactly about that specific incident before he wrote
|
| > This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level
| authoritarianism. Police are out of control.
|
| So I would say my assumption that he was talking about
| exactly that incident are quite justified, and this was
| specifically about children walking around on their own.
|
| I have no idea how in that very specific text and context
| of OPs comment some general statement about Eastern Bloc
| authoritarianism can be deduced, or if it can, how it would
| make any sense to suddenly bring that up in that very
| specific context, which OPs comment maintains. As far as I
| can tell it's always within this frame of the story.
|
| I see no reason why my response would not fit perfectly.
| The Eastern Bloc did _not_ have that problem, it makes no
| sense to try to reframe it. How does it matter that they
| (we) had lots of _other_ problems? ones not the subject of
| the current discussion?
| sasattack wrote:
| > 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.
| confidantlake wrote:
| My parents are from an eastern block country. This never
| happened.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| 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.
| confidantlake wrote:
| For sure I understand, I was not trying to say you were
| wrong. My point was in some ways our system is worse than
| what we consider dystopian authoritarian systems.
| mikrl wrote:
| >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.
| COGlory wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| RGamma wrote:
| > In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society
| (*)
|
| (*) when not matched by appropriate safe guards.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| If it's matched with safeguards that are themselves
| empowered, then it's not centralization of power.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| > 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?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| colpabar wrote:
| 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.
| DrThunder wrote:
| It's not an either or bud, it's both. IF you are allowing
| laws in place that these police officers are able to use as
| justification then your government is just as at fault as
| the officers. It's pure idiocy not to blame both. Where do
| you think the officers get their power from? It's like
| you're failing to reach the logical conclusion and blunting
| your own thought process because you hate cops.
|
| Cops AND the government giving them the power to do stuff
| like this are both to blame.
| colpabar wrote:
| I'm not your bud, guy.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Oh ok, that upset you but yelling bullshit in your
| comments with no objective data to back your statements
| up is fine? You need to chill. Maybe use your anger vote
| in someone who doesn't allow your police officers to act
| this way?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The laws don't actually have to exist. Cops can arrest
| you if they just say they thought it was the law and that
| the believed they had the right to enforce it. They can
| totally make it up. So while you may not be convicted of
| violating a made up law you still have to deal with all
| the consequences of the arrest. No ramifications for the
| cops at all. They have virtually unlimited power.
| DrThunder wrote:
| They don't hold up in court if that's the case and they
| get sued out of existence or imprisoned in many cases.
| This is just a flat out false assumption especially in
| today's climate.
|
| The city government can remove powers from these officers
| as well. The legislative branch is responsible for
| writing laws in a way that don't allow the executive
| branch (leo's) that much leeway. They are just as at
| fault for letting this exist. YOU are electing the wrong
| people to your local government office if officer's are
| able to function that far outside of the law with no
| repercussions.
|
| I think you'd have a pretty hard case arguing that police
| officer's are just getting away with acting outside the
| law over the past couple years.
| [deleted]
| kelipso wrote:
| Saying vote better is the I will pray that things get better
| of our times.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Saying vote better is the I will pray that things get
| better of our times.
|
| Please see my other comments about there being _two_
| necessary conditions for this arrest to have occurred.
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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.
| epistemer wrote:
| There is no going back though. No politician is going to
| risk repealing this type of law and then have their career
| destroyed when a single crime happens against a kid that
| this law would have "prevented".
|
| People bashing the cops for this is bullshit too. The cops
| are the bad guys either way. They enforce the law and they
| are the bad guys. Something happens to a kid with this law
| in place and then they are also the bad guy for not doing
| their job.
|
| The solution to all this is simply to not have children. It
| is just another of the near daily reminders of how great it
| is to be child free.
| avisser wrote:
| Bad laws notwithstanding, I think GP getting downvoted for
| giving police the benefit of the doubt. In today's America,
| I think it's fair to be a skeptic first when it comes to
| the cops.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Skeptic yes, but OP passed hard judgement. If OP would
| have speculated or suggested a possible cause, that would
| be healthy skepticism. OP is dripping with bias and
| preconceived notion.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > I think GP getting downvoted for giving police the
| benefit of the doubt.
|
| FWIW, I'm not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm
| simply withholding judgment, which (hopefully) is more
| neutral.
| ShrimpHawk wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I have two counterpoints.
|
| 1) We haven't heard the police officer's side of things.
| All we're going on is _one_ news story, which didn 't even
| interview them. So we simply have no idea what additional
| factors they may have considered. I think it's
| irresponsible to pass judgment on them until getting more
| info.
|
| 2) I agree that laws need to be written with some
| discretion left to the judiciary. However, there's been
| enough media coverage on this general topic over the years,
| that Connecticut voters _have_ had a chance to refine the
| laws. E.g., to modify the laws to clarify that kids are
| permitted to roam free in public places. But they didn 't.
| landemva wrote:
| > they [police] dropped the charges.
|
| Are you sure the police dropped the charges? Usually
| criminal charges are brought by a prosecuting attorney, not
| police.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the
| door of legislators and voters.
|
| I'm not. In this situation, there were (at least) _two_
| necessary conditions for the arrest to happen:
|
| (1) The law was written in a way that led the police to
| believe a crime had occurred.
|
| (2) The police _chose_ to perform the arrest.
|
| If _either_ of those conditions weren 't true, then I don't
| think this incident would have happened.
|
| It's entirely possible that the police exercised lousy
| judgment in this case. I'm simply reserving judgment until
| I hear their side of the story.
|
| I brought up (2) for several reasons. First, I think it's
| BS to create politically sticky situations for police, and
| then skapegoat them things turn out badly. (Imagine the
| news coverage if they _didn 't_ arrest the parents in a
| situation like this, and then the kids were abducted.)
| Second, I don't see how, in a democratic form of
| government, citizens can avoid responsibility for the state
| of their laws. If the laws are outside their control, it's
| not a democracy.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > (1) The law was written in a way that led the police to
| believe a crime had occurred.
|
| The fact that charges were never brought means that the
| law very likely wasn't written in a way that a reasonable
| person would believe a crime had occurred. Certainly the
| DA's office did not believe a crime worth indicting had
| occurred.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Again. No. Police officers have their own brains and make
| their own decisions on a case-by-case basis, not every
| weird interpretation of a law needs to lead to an arrest.
|
| 'Imagine' is a nice pre-amble to a strawman: that didn't
| happen.
|
| What did happen is ridiculous, and regardless of the
| citizens having a very indirect say in the laws that get
| made to make them first cause rather than the police
| officers (and their immediate superiors) is - frankly -
| ridiculous.
|
| I really wonder why you would bend over backwards to find
| excuses for something like this, it doesn't pass the
| beginnings of a common sense test. Having your parents
| arrested because you're walking on the streets as a child
| makes zero sense, no matter what the law says and no
| police officer with half a brain should make that arrest.
| Arrests are for criminals, worst case if they really
| wanted to test the law they could have simply cited the
| parents and then they'd have their day in court, this is
| simply a power play of the very worst kind.
|
| Oh, and it is 'scapegoat'.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Police still have very broad discretion in what laws they
| enforce.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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
| overrun11 wrote:
| Qualified immunity pertains to civil liability and
| therefore wouldn't be relevant to the parent comment's
| suggestion.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Qualified immunity prevents civil recourse when police,
| their unions, and friendly/reliant prosecutors
| successfully prevent criminal liability from being an
| option (https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-
| law/2020/05/29/charging...).
| mindslight wrote:
| I agree that qualified immunity is a harmful and bogus
| precedent that needs to be eliminated. But my point is that
| if they are acting outside written department policy, then
| they're no longer acting as an agent of the state in the
| first place. Like when a cop beats their spouse, they can't
| claim qualified immunity as if it were part of their
| policing duties. The same standard should apply during
| daylight hours when they depart from the mandate of their
| employment.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > But my point is that if they are acting outside written
| department policy, then they're no longer acting as an
| agent of the state in the first place.
|
| That's not how the courts have treated it.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1047085626/supreme-court-
| poli...
|
| > In practice, the doctrine has shielded officers from
| liability in hundreds of civil cases, even when accused
| of destroying property, killing innocent people they
| mistook for suspects or stealing thousands of dollars.
|
| (I would presume stealing thousands of dollars is
| forbidden by most department policies.)
| mindslight wrote:
| I responded in the qualified immunity context, but
| qualified immunity is actually somewhat of a red herring.
| It certainly does need to be eliminated, but it is not
| the main problem. In fact the focus on it smells a bit
| like the common pattern of hoping that occasional extreme
| penalties on individuals will reform a situation that has
| poor diffuse incentives.
|
| The main problem is extending blanket _sovereign
| immunity_ to these actions /positions in the first place.
| Let's say someone is arrested, even on a good faith
| suspicion of a bona fide crime, and is then later
| acquitted or the charges are dropped. From the victim's
| perspective, what has actually taken place is a
| kidnapping and false imprisonment. But the current
| framework just writes off what happened to them as
| collateral damage, leaving the unlucky individual to bear
| it themselves. But really they've suffered an
| _externality_ of policing which they should be reimbursed
| for. The damages should be rolled into the overall police
| budget so that it reflects the true cost of the police
| department.
|
| Right now these externalities are being covered by a
| perverse reverse lottery of unlucky citizens, which is
| not right. Reform this perverse incentive and correctly
| attribute blame (economic blame, at least), and many
| resulting incentives will fall out from that.
| briffle wrote:
| > 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
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > 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.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Connecticut has approximately the same number of Dunkins by
| land area as Massachussetts.
| cpurdy wrote:
| Yes, but less of an obnoxious accent
|
| (I live in Boston. The accent is crazy.)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It is a strange accent! (Brit here). Bawston?
| COGlory wrote:
| 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.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| 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.
| ajross wrote:
| > 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| Mostly good points, but would you point me to a major
| publication that links to arrest records when an arrest is
| mentioned?
| juve1996 wrote:
| Plenty would if it supports the narrative.
| ajross wrote:
| Virtually all of them? Here's the Times covering SBF's
| arrest: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/ftx-
| sam-bankman-...
|
| Note all the quotes from law enforcement and details about
| the event.
| tomcam wrote:
| I was probably taking you too literally. I thought you
| were talking about links to arrest records, which I
| pretty much never see. I may be not looking closely
| enough for those links.
| ajross wrote:
| Right, just verification is all that's needed. "Killingly
| police records confirm Rivers was arrested on January
| 77th" or whatever. Or maybe "Killingly police confirm
| Rivers was detained briefly, but note that he was never
| arrested". Anything like that would be great. Even
| "Reached for comment, Killingly police were unable to
| confirm Rivers' arrest, but would not deny the arrest
| occurred" would at least be something.
|
| But failing to even get that far tells me that either the
| author doesn't care about whether this is true (not
| unlikely given her day job), or that they're deliberately
| hiding something (maybe "Killingly police deny the arrest
| and have no record of the interaction with Rivers").
| kritiko wrote:
| Most major publications would at least pursue statements
| from the police & child protective services about their
| side of the story.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| ajross wrote:
| That may all be true, but it remains the case that _every
| time_ I see a Reason link being thrown around it 's one of
| these kinda suspect things. You know this is a junk piece.
| They ran it anyway. Again: how much work does it take to
| assign a journalist and call the police department to
| verify the arrest records?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I didn't believe you (because my blood boiled too) but
| then I decided to search for this story in Google
| (without using names but just the incident and location)
| and didn't find any reputed news organization reporting
| it, which admittedly surprised me. I found a similar case
| where parents got in trouble for letting kids walk around
| alone[0], but not this case (and considering the
| specifics here are bound to touch the nerves of parents
| and practically guarantee viewership, I would think that
| it would be pretty attractive piece to print for them
| assuming it was found to be genuine).
|
| Not trying to agree/disagree but just sharing what I
| noticed.
|
| [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/free-
| range-pa...
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| The fact that you couldn't find it reported in another
| "reputed news organization" doesn't mean it didn't
| happen. News organizations only have limited bandwidth
| and the extreme power that police and CPS has in these
| kinds of situations isn't exactly a secret nationally.
| Maybe the reputed news organizations simply don't
| consider it news? Or maybe the organizations aren't as
| reputed as you believe? There are many explanations for
| the lack of corroborating reporting here that don't imply
| the original story isn't true.
| ajross wrote:
| > The fact that you couldn't find it reported in another
| "reputed news organization" doesn't mean it didn't
| happen.
|
| But that's not the standard for good journalism! You
| appear to be saying we should _believe_ this story in
| Reason despite the long delay from the events,
| uncorroborated evidence, and clear bias of the author...
| because we can 't prove it's false?
|
| No, that's wrong. The correct way to interpret the data
| is that this is a suspect piece of writing that someone
| should try to verify before trusting.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > But that's not the standard for good journalism! You
| appear to be saying we should believe this story in
| Reason despite the long delay from the events,
| uncorroborated evidence, and clear bias of the author...
| because we can't prove it's false?
|
| I never said that.
| [deleted]
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Maybe - however, we are expected to do our own due
| diligence for trustworthiness of news and considering
| that we have limited time and resources at our disposal,
| one has to set some sort of an approach to do so - in my
| case, reputed news organisation it is (and people are
| free to disagree with that approach).
|
| Using this approach doesn't mean that whatever doesn't
| get printed in NYT or WaPo or doesn't get covered on CNN
| didn't happen but considering police overreach is a hot
| topic in recent times with prevalent extensive coverage,
| it is possible but not probable that something like this
| (involving kids, which makes it a more "newsworthy"
| story) hasn't been reported, in any of the major news
| outlets, just because of undue influence of Police/CPS.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I can't really speak to this article, and as they've
| changed the family's name(s) for privacy reasons it's
| hard to fact check, but other stuff published by Lenore
| Skenazy about similar cases seems more readily
| verifiable. That said I don't really pay much attention
| to this type of story so I'm not well versed on the issue
| or who is credible in reporting on it. But for issues I
| do follow, I usually find their reporting to be
| excellent.
| jghn wrote:
| > for decades
|
| At some point they went deep Tea Party/MAGA type, but seem
| to have come back to their roots over the last few years.
| However the commenters are consistently still MAGA types.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| When were they ever publishing MAGA content? Yeah, the
| comments have always been trash and they openly joke
| about it.
| shrikant wrote:
| 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| These are all good points, but I spent many years living in
| the town in question, so I am perhaps already biased.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| >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?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| America needs a party representing the public interest of
| ensuring small government.
|
| Stop centralizing parental authority.
| srj wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| "Your job is to keep streets safe, you claim to be unable to, and
| your idea is to lock people out of danger".
| francisofascii wrote:
| 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.
| mjw_byrne wrote:
| "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.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| 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.
| tflinton wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > The DCF caseworker visited the family twice and interviewed
| everyone about their complete history.
|
| > "She was looking for problems," says Rivers.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| exabrial wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Defund the police"?
| exabrial wrote:
| Defund the everything.
| lumb63 wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| 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.
| libpcap wrote:
| Meanwhile in Japan...
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| 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.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| air7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 15% of the population having a police initiated encounter per
| year is ridiculously high.
| zebnyc wrote:
| 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.
| tflinton wrote:
| 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.
| 93po wrote:
| 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.
| freedude wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting
| childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-
| Range Kids movement._ "
| manojlds wrote:
| So the police were sure there were culprits around and their
| focus is on harassing the parents rather than make the place
| safe?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| kloch wrote:
| 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.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Those cops are lucky they didn't pick the wrong family to mess
| with.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Absolute insanity
| shanebellone wrote:
| Finally, Connecticut made it on HN. Go Nutmeggers.
| miguelazo wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bg4 wrote:
| 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.
| baidifnaoxi wrote:
| Cases like this are all too common across the country.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Lmao at the risk of the road collapsing to middle earth, you
| won't be allowed out, that's self endangerment
| asah wrote:
| 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.
| educaysean wrote:
| Both the police and the DFC dropped their charges. What
| information could there be that we still need to hear from the
| other side?
| thwayunion wrote:
| 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...
| standardUser wrote:
| We're hearing the side of the parents. They live there. It's
| their kids. What other side do you need to hear?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| So the inhabitants lose the right to go for a walk?
|
| Enforced by the same who did not manage to prevent the
| circumstances?
| anoonmoose wrote:
| 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."
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.'
| mdp2021 wrote:
| 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".
| colpabar wrote:
| _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?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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
| codexb wrote:
| 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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| roboscides wrote:
| > Fuck the police
|
| Haha nice one dude, very edgy.
| nullc wrote:
| 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?
| burkaman wrote:
| 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...
| dahfizz wrote:
| Let me google that for you...
|
| https://www.prepscholar.com/gre/blog/average-gre-scores/
|
| Social workers scored well below the median percentile in
| all categories.
| burkaman wrote:
| Thanks. Looking at the numbers, Verbal is a bit below
| average but above other fields that you might not
| consider filled with morons, like CS and electrical
| engineering. Quant is indeed the lowest but also the
| least important for the field. Maybe that's the only one
| you were looking at? Writing is above average.
|
| Going by the percentiles here
| https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-
| data-2016.p... they are indeed below the Verbal and Quant
| medians, Writing is unclear. Overall it does not come
| close to the "literal moron" bar, especially since they
| are presumably aware that Quant skills are unimportant
| for the field so they don't need to focus on it much.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I agree that "literal moron" is inflammatory. I
| definitely would not trust the communication skills of
| the average software engineer to navigate a situation
| where a child's life is potentially at stake either! This
| is supposed to be what a social worker excels at.
| nullc wrote:
| Social workers also score poorly on communication skills,
| in aggregate.
|
| I'll happily agree that my description was extremely
| critical-- more than it needed to be--, but we should
| hold anyone whit the authority to invade our lives with
| minimal oversight or accountability to an extremely high
| standard. What what I've seen, we've often failed to do
| so.
|
| We don't send our best out to become law enforcement or
| social workers. These are extremely difficult, even
| dangerous jobs, and we fantastically underpay them.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| It's because they aren't accountable to anyone.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Right. I don't want to blame the parents, but all they had
| to do was deny the case workers entry and an interview, and
| say come back with a warrant or when my attorney is
| present. That would have saved a lot of headache and been
| well within their rights.
| nullc wrote:
| Demanding that court order can work out extremely poorly
| for you.
| notch898a wrote:
| I mean maybe? I had a court order served against me for
| something non-child related. The order was obvious
| bullshit. The drones involved in executing it were
| gnashing at the teeth to do what it said but by the time
| they were delayed hours getting the judge to approve it,
| their gusto was gone and they started pondering their own
| precarious legal situation when they would inevitably
| find what they did was bullshit and unjustified and
| they'd be looking at a massive lawsuit. They were smart
| not to too, because I'm quite certain they would have
| found nothing and counsel I would later invoke would
| uncover the warrant was not obtained in a legal manner.
|
| It got them to back off even though they had the order in
| hand with the judge's signature.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It goes one of two ways. One is that they don't have
| probable cause that abuse has occurred and nothing
| happens. Police dropping the charges seem to support this
| for this scenario. The other is that they do get the
| order and you have the same situation of visits and
| questions.
| nullc wrote:
| I had a friend who had a false report made against her by
| her husbands ex-wife to Florida DCF after they refused to
| babysit the ex-wifes' profoundly disabled child (by her
| new husband) while the ex-wife went out partying.
|
| A social worker showed up demanding to enter my friends
| home. My friend was a paralegal and was aware of her
| rights and told the social worker to come back with a
| warrant if she wanted to enter the home. No doubt
| extremely offended about the false report, I'm sure she
| was not polite about it.
|
| The worker contacted the sheriffs office and they got a
| judge to sign off on an emergency order by saying the
| lives of the children were at risk. The social worker
| returned with multiple law enforcement officers who broke
| down the door of the home, entered with with guns drawn,
| terrorizing her children, cuffed and arrested her. No
| charges were filed.
|
| The worker continually harassed my friend for most of a
| year with numerous additional incidents before the friend
| was able to obtain a court order barring Florida DCF from
| contacting her or her family, and restraining the worker
| from contact specifically. You could say that eventually
| she "won", but it's was a hollow victory in that it came
| at a cost she couldn't really afford and caused harm for
| which there could be no compensation.
|
| There are rights you have on paper and then there are the
| actual consequences in reality if you try to stand up for
| them. When you're facing a petty dictator with almost
| complete power over your life and almost no
| accountability for their actions it can be pragmatic to
| play along and not risk inspiring a vendetta.
| notch898a wrote:
| Your friend saved a lot of other parents during that
| time.
|
| Thankfully I have not been terrorized by DCS but having
| been terrorized by police, I at least knew standing up
| for my rights meant those police were tied up with me for
| hours to days on end rather than terrorizing dozens of
| push-overs in the same time. I had a scenario recently
| where two tyrants were forced to babysit me for almost a
| full day, which meant that probably 200 push-overs who
| could be worked over in 15 minutes each were saved thanks
| to my standing up for my rights. When everyone invokes
| their rights the system locks up.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This sounds like notch556. Is there a reason you're using
| a different name? Did your previous account get banned by
| @dang?
| notch898a wrote:
| I have a habit of speaking with a bit too much liberty
| for the taste of HN :P
| giantg2 wrote:
| Did the social worker lose their job? It sounds like if
| they had multiple issues and there was a restraining
| order, then they should have. If so, they removed one
| abusive social worker. Without that, that social worker
| would continue to do similar things to others. I'm
| guessing the emergency order was granted without
| supporting evidence (ie illegally by the social worker
| made things up).
|
| Also, there's a big difference in _how_ you invoke those
| rights. If you get aggressive, that can be a problem.
| Probably the best thing to do is ask for their card, say
| that you want to help and that you 'll have your attorney
| contact them. If there's a claim of immediate danger, a
| quick show of your kids being happy and unharmed should
| suffice.
|
| The main point is, if everyone just rolls over, these
| abuses and terrible bureaucrats will not be uncovered.
| The system will never improve unless people hear about
| these abuses. That itself is highly valuable, even if the
| personal cost is high.
| nullc wrote:
| > Did the social worker lose their job?
|
| Certainly not initially, DCF backed them up. Maybe
| eventually? I'd ask but the friend passed away a number
| of years ago. This happened just pre-internet enough that
| it's not well documented online.
|
| > The main point is, if everyone just rolls over, these
| abuses and terrible bureaucrats will not be uncovered.
|
| That's true but it doesn't mean that standing up works
| out for the betterment of you and your family.
|
| Not everyone has the freedom to make a martyr of
| themselves. I'm grateful for those who do.
|
| > Also, there's a big difference in how you invoke those
| rights. If you get aggressive, that can be a problem.
|
| More precisely, if you're _perceived_ as being aggressive
| it 's a problem. The distinction is important because we
| have less control over how we're perceived than how we
| act-- particularly because an important characteristic
| (perhaps even defining) of abusive bureaucrats is
| perceiving anything short of complete submission as an
| attack.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Not everyone has the freedom to make a martyr of
| themselves."
|
| True, but without knowledge that saying no is an option,
| those people effectively don't have a choice, and you end
| up with few people volunteering to stand up.
|
| "More precisely, if you're perceived as being aggressive
| it's a problem."
|
| Also true, but with today's technology it's fairly easy
| to document the interaction. If the official's account is
| a lie, then you've got them. If it's not an outright lie,
| you have a record for an object 3rd party to rule on
| (although there are plenty of bad judges too).
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. "
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > 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?
| terminatornet wrote:
| cops are terrified babies and credulous morons who will believe
| anything
| bdw5204 wrote:
| 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.
| acegopher wrote:
| 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.
| trgn wrote:
| 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.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| 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.
| MrRiddle wrote:
| [dead]
| stirlo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| It likely continues today via things like true crime
| podcasts. Listening to a long string of awful stories can
| leave one with the false sense that these things are
| common.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Even though I have an appreciation for some true crime
| content, I've come to really loathe most of it. Long ago,
| I was obsessed with Forensic Files, Unsolved Mysteries,
| etc. This was of course back before true crime podcasts
| and Netflix documentaries. I also got interested in
| forensics, criminal psychology, and helping to try and
| identify and locate decedents/missing people. My heart
| genuinely goes out to victims. But witnessing from afar
| the worst aspects of humanity eventually took a toll on
| me. That combined with the absolute state of the news
| media convinced me to quit consuming that stuff all
| together. I truly think it should be microdosed only, if
| at all.
|
| What makes me loathe it now is I can see the
| psychological impact it has on others. I won't name
| names, but I've known a fair share of women who got into
| the new wave of true crime content and have significantly
| skewed views on men as a result. Women should be well
| aware of what a man is capable of and what to do to
| mitigate risk, but true crime content can create this
| picture that more men are criminally capable than is
| actually the case. Simultaneously, entirely from the
| women I know who watch true crime, I hear views
| suggesting that the common man is too weak or incompetent
| to intervene and stop bad men, which is also not
| representative. I'm only being vague here because if any
| of these people happen to read my comments, they'll know
| I'm talking about _them_ , but others won't know.
|
| Some may disagree with my perspective, but it's my honest
| impression. I've seen women in my life who are family
| members and colleagues get into true crime content and
| notice their views shift as a result. If it's said that
| porn can damage the views that men have of women, surely
| it's not such a large leap to believe that watching women
| get victimized over and over again by a small minority
| can impact one's views on men without even realizing it.
| nullc wrote:
| The media is still constantly pumping out a deceptive
| narrative about the dangers of child abduction, it has
| people genuinely afraid.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I don't think you need to go that far. Mainstream news like
| 60 Minutes will always feature some sort of terror porn.
| lawkwok wrote:
| I hate that this is a self-perpetuating fear. The more
| people fear, the less people walk on the streets, which
| makes the neighbourhood appear less safe and vibrant.
| thechao wrote:
| 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.
| qball wrote:
| >"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.
| jehb wrote:
| Fear is the mind-killer.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yep, and police training deliberately cultivates it.
|
| https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-
| tra...
|
| > His overly aggressive style prepares law enforcement
| officers for a job under siege, where they're front line
| troops who are "at war" with the streets. Officers need to
| be prepared to battle the communities they're told to
| protect, Grossman has said. And ideally in Grossman's eyes,
| officers need to learn to kill less hesitantly.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| My friend married a guy who ended up becoming a cop.
| Within weeks of him starting training she sends me a
| snapchat about how "When we go places he always wants to
| sit facing the exit" and another of him quite literally
| _playing_ with one of his service weapons, like a damn
| nerf toy.
|
| Police training is garbage, and the police community is
| pathetic.
| notch898a wrote:
| > "When we go places he always wants to sit facing the
| exit"
|
| I mean this isn't bad advice. I was cornered by a large
| man once as a child and ever since I've tried to always
| be aware of an exit and ideally be in view of it.
| jehb wrote:
| Yep. What I left unstated, which I now realize the lack
| of leaves my comment ambiguous, was "and that's why they
| use it."
| derelicta wrote:
| "But why do ppl hate cops??"
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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.
| anm89 wrote:
| God damn this is fucking insane.
|
| Our society is broken
| matt123456789 wrote:
| Ah, I see you're somewhat disillusioned by the legal system.
| Allow me to introduce you to the healthcare system.
| manojlds wrote:
| They said society is broken. Broken healthcare is within that
| already.
| Lapsa wrote:
| 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
| MarvinYork wrote:
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| 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.
| someonewhocar3s wrote:
| [dead]
| bastardoperator wrote:
| 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.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| "Arrested for child endangerment", and the mug shot will stay in
| his record forever. Also fingerprints and possibly DNA record in
| the database forever.
| truesy wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > 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
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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).
| wyager wrote:
| I can think of a lot of (historically) recent changes in
| the American environment that are more alienating than
| cars.
| woodruffw wrote:
| So can I, but I can't think of many that share the
| magnitude and ubiquity of cars!
|
| (You shouldn't read this as a fixation or totem: there
| are plenty of other problems in this country. But it
| isn't a coincidence that aggressive
| deurbanization/suburbanization is closely tracked by
| increases in isolation, which in turn is tracked by a
| decline in personal trust[1].)
|
| [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/the-
| state-of...
| wyager wrote:
| I can: the destruction of religion as a civic activity in
| the US. I'm not even religious but that's a _huge_ one.
|
| Another is the effort (by HUD and others) to eliminate
| regions of ethno-cultural homogeneity.
|
| Both of these are A) much more numerically significant
| (on a per-capita basis) than changes in vehicle use
| since, say, 1950 and B) well-understood to reduce social
| factors like trust and cohesion.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Fear of "Drug dealers and sex offenders" isn't a car
| culture problem.
|
| A rapist can follow you to your apartment door.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is exactly my point: "drug dealers and sex
| offenders" are on your mind, despite the US being an
| _overwhelmingly_ safe and criminally uneventful place.
| Car culture encourages fixation on crime and risk, even
| when all available evidence points to the US being a
| _radically_ safer place than it was even 30 years ago[1].
|
| We're still not a safe country on an absolute scale
| (relative to our economic and social peers), but our
| cultural histrionics around crime are unsupported by the
| actual trendline.
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I agree our social histronics around crime are quite
| irrational. But I think the problem is primarily rooted
| in the media, not car culture.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The two are intertwined! "If it bleeds, it leads" works
| _especially_ well on low-trust societies, and car culture
| enables and enforces low-trust social growth.
|
| Put another way: the media might be a primary driver of
| the problem, but American culture is uniquely
| _susceptible_ to it because of car dependence and the
| cultural /demographic structures that dependence
| incentivizes.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > US being an overwhelmingly safe and criminally
| uneventful place.
|
| Just the homicide rate in the US is unbecoming of a
| developed country.
| wyager wrote:
| Worth noting that US homicide is highly localized.
| Certain cities/regions represent a vastly
| disproportionate fraction.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| "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...
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| trgn wrote:
| 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.
| fnimick wrote:
| It's called "motornormativity", and it's measurable. https://
| www.sciencetimes.com/articles/42160/20230201/breakin...
| ironmagma wrote:
| 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.
| trgn wrote:
| Yes, 100% agreed.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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...
| ninjagoo wrote:
| This is a fascinating discussion. Maybe something to
| consider is that American society is a lot more
| individualistic than other cultures. And that individualism
| is facilitated by distance - after all, proximity forces
| interaction: even if no on talks or communicates your brain
| is still processing the other presence(s), it's a cognitive
| load.
|
| And the car is a consequence of that culture, not the
| cause. In present day and age, that tension between less
| and more interaction doesn't go away - it simply
| precipitates into cities and rural areas. The car may be
| unsuitable in the former, and a necessity in the latter.
| Tier 3 and 4 cities or communities, like the one in
| question, are in a constant tug of war between these
| opposing forces. Sure, the car itself, like any other tool,
| may change the society it operates within in fundamental
| ways, but when has that not been true for any society
| anywhere in place and time? And at the end of the day, has
| any society, of significant size, been able to eliminate a
| significant tool altogether from use?
|
| Even European cities don't ban vehicles, they
| disincentivize their use through a combination of factors,
| starting with making them unnecessary. The only time a
| significant tool has been eliminated from use is when it
| has been supplanted by another - horse & buggy comes to
| mind.
|
| So it goes with cars. Maybe those will be supplanted by
| public self-driving/flying on-demand transport in both
| urban and rural areas. But that won't change the tension
| between less and more interaction that determines how
| people spread out - that comes from a more fundamental
| property of living beings interacting with one another and
| the natural variation in biology/brains of people.
|
| That brings us around to the original point - the root
| cause of "bloodthirst for protecting children". As many
| other commenters have noted - this lack of kids roaming is
| a recent phenomenon in the US over the past 2-3 decades,
| while cars have been around for 10 or so, and in widespread
| use for 7 or more. And the pendulum appears to be swinging
| in the other direction with many legislatures taking up the
| right to let kids roam.
|
| Looking at the combination of those 2 factors - cars'
| lengthy history at the interplay of human interaction, and
| kids not roaming' being a transitory phenomenon, I'm having
| a really hard time drawing a connection between the "latent
| fear of strangers" coming from "car-dependent living". In
| fact, I would argue that the fear of losing a child in an
| urban setting with more strangers around would be far
| stronger than a stranger driving in from outside and making
| off with a child.
|
| And police brutality has also been around much longer than
| has the lack of kids roaming. In fact, kids roaming is just
| another in a long litany of excuses for projection of power
| from police or any kind of uniformed service.
|
| This makes me think that the connections between
| "bloodthirst for protecting children" and "latent fear of
| strangers" coming from "car-dependent living" might be a
| bit tenous. I would like to see more actual evidence for
| that before accepting it at face value.
|
| I could even argue that the bloodthirst for protecting
| children is likely more related to the declining birth rate
| - fewer children means each individual one is valued more
| in nuclear families - split attention is a real phenomenon.
| Another factor could be greater awareness and depiction in
| popular US media of crime and the horrors that taken
| children undergo.
| trgn wrote:
| Thank you for the recommendation. Looking forward to read
| it!
|
| > in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation
| (the car) with liberation itself,
|
| It's essentially reification. I often think modernity is
| fully characterized by it. The inability to divorce
| aspirational visions from its material implementation. It's
| essentially the disappearance of imagination. We no longer
| can imagine because we are tethered to a material anchors.
| This is why something like a flying car can be imagined,
| but not something vague like virtuous personal mobility.
| The first is tangible, the latter is a diffuse
| constellation of technologies, mindset, systems, behaviors.
|
| Pulling down that threat, (just going down the rabbit hole
| here), but this process has been playing out for 150 years
| now. Commoditization of everything. Making tangible the
| wealth of human experience. If it cannot be made as a
| marketable object, it cannot exist, cannot be imagined.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| H4ZB7 wrote:
| 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.
| jaccarmac wrote:
| 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_dreamer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 1over137 wrote:
| 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.
| rsaarsoo wrote:
| 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...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Is traffic an issue at that age?
| ensignavenger wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| vidarh wrote:
| 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...
| hgsgm wrote:
| In the US we have Avengers protecting us and/or endangering us.
|
| You shouldn't get your "news" from entertainment TV shows.
| mordae wrote:
| Have you watched Old Enough yet?
|
| https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| hosh wrote:
| 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?
| hpen wrote:
| To all those who believe that "one bad apples spoils the bunch",
| I do question what your proposed solution to that is.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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?
| vogt wrote:
| 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.
| snozolli wrote:
| _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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| agotterer wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| As a parent, the overreach by child protective services and the
| like is terrifying.
| roboscides wrote:
| This comment thread is what happens when politics is allowed on
| HN, just utter trash. I wish dang was a competent moderator.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| > "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.
| confidantlake wrote:
| 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.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| 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.
| Willish42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kunalgupta wrote:
| 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.
| chung8123 wrote:
| Somewhat similar to this story:
| https://www.iheart.com/content/2022-11-18-texas-mom-wrongful...
| evgeniysharapov wrote:
| 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.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I was in a small village pub in England one Boxing Day.
|
| A man at the table next to ours handed a PS10 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.)
| confidantlake wrote:
| Nice story! My father did the same thing as a kid, going to the
| bar to get beer for his father.
| vxNsr wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| taylodl wrote:
| _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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Kids in cities tend to be safer in general than suburbs. Not
| only from strangers, but especially from cars.
| p1esk wrote:
| Link to the source of your data?
| piperswe wrote:
| Found this with a little Googling:
|
| Probst, J., Zahnd, W., & Breneman, C. (2019). Declines In
| Pediatric Mortality Fall Short For Rural US Children. In
| Health Affairs (Vol. 38, Issue 12, pp. 2069-2076). Health
| Affairs (Project Hope).
| https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00892
| wan23 wrote:
| 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.
| hpen wrote:
| Need Data to back this
| piperswe wrote:
| Found this with a little Googling:
|
| Probst, J., Zahnd, W., & Breneman, C. (2019). Declines In
| Pediatric Mortality Fall Short For Rural US Children. In
| Health Affairs (Vol. 38, Issue 12, pp. 2069-2076). Health
| Affairs (Project Hope).
| https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00892
| hpen wrote:
| Interesting. I do wonder though if the environment is
| actually safer, or if kids in urban areas just stay
| inside more. (Aware of threats, the homeless, etc) I
| never lived in an urban area as a child, but can tell you
| that I was allowed to (and did) roam freely in the rural
| areas, the woods, etc.
| kibwen wrote:
| I grew up in a rural area, small town in western PA.
| Woods existed, but you couldn't use them. Firstly, how
| could I get there? There were no sidewalks, and riding a
| bike anywhere on the road with all the hills and blind
| corners would be suicide. Any fields nearby were fenced
| off. Any woods nearby were forbidden by great big NO
| TRESPASSING notices every 50 feet, and I didn't put it
| past them to shoot a child for trespassing. Every other
| property had an unleashed dog waiting to pounce on you
| for getting within sniffing distance of the property
| line. Thus I spent all of my time indoors playing Civ 4.
| In my experience, rural areas are designed for cars and
| are populated by people who wish they didn't have
| neighbors.
| hpen wrote:
| Good response. Definitely had a different experience down
| in rural Tennessee. Lived in several different towns but
| always had access to the woods through some mechanism
| (friends house, neighbors land, etc) never had more than
| a half acre ourselves but sure spent most of my free time
| outside. I appreciate your point, but obviously, we are
| both just spewing anecdotes, which still makes me wonder
| which environment outside of the home is actually safer.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I don't know if it is because you were in a different
| area than I, or if it was because you grew up 20 years
| after I did (based on your Civ 4 comment. I was playing a
| lot of Ultima 3 in my day.) But my growing up in a rural
| area, small town in central MA, I spend almost all of my
| time outside, often in the woods. Nobody was going to
| shoot me for trespassing, as all us kids knew all the
| local farmers and land owners. We went to church with
| them, and we all pitched in at harvest times to help on
| the farms and make a few bucks to spend at the local
| general store, which we got to by riding our bikes
| through trails we'd made in the woods. And traffic on the
| roads was always pretty light, so we never much worried
| about getting hit.
| hpen wrote:
| Not sure it's the time difference. Born in '93 and my
| experience is much closer to yours.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| LarryMullins wrote:
| 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.
| laristine wrote:
| Very good points. I've used this same strategy for decades
| and my interactions with the police have been nothing short
| of overwhelmingly positive. Of course, I remain wary at all
| times, maintain situational awareness, and always try to
| remember the police officer's name and badge in case I need
| to have redress later with their department or the court.
| [deleted]
| pstuart wrote:
| Good advice. Also helps to be white.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| That may be true, but it's not actionable advice on an
| individual level.
|
| I think there's a tendency, particularly on reddit, to
| let perfect be the enemy of good in situations like this.
| Reddit will tell people that if you're not white then
| there's nothing you can do to get better behavior from
| cops and that advice such as mine above is therefore
| invalid. Being black in America changes the baseline
| interaction you can expect on average, but I think my
| advice will still do most people more good than harm most
| of the time.
|
| If you want to have a boring incident free traffic stop,
| the best you can do is play your role in such an exchange
| and hope the cop reciprocates. Conform to the pattern of
| a mundane traffic stop so that the cop falls into the
| same pattern. If instead you play the role of some sort
| of agitated sovereign citizen, the cops will almost
| certainly reciprocate. In the first case, nothing is ever
| guaranteed but in the second case a negative outcome of
| some sort is virtually certain.
|
| BTW I think this advice applies generally to almost all
| encounters with strangers, not just cops. Superficial
| politeness is a superpower. It works on anyone from
| troublesome new neighbors, crazy threatening people you
| encounter on the street at night, even stiff indifferent
| bureaucrats. Superficial politeness gets better outcomes
| from almost everybody, most of the time.
| air7 wrote:
| This reminds me of this skit by Chris Rock:
| https://youtu.be/uj0mtxXEGE8
| taylodl wrote:
| These are all symptoms of living in a police state. We've
| normalized this behavior so much while living in a police
| state that we no longer see it, much in the same way
| proverbial fish are unaware of water.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I completely agree. In this case, it's about the fish
| being aware that he's in the water and which direction
| the currents flow. If you don't know how the water flows,
| you'll get smashed against the reef.
| fnimick wrote:
| > if you antagonize them within the bounds of the law,
| they'll step outside the law to get you back.
|
| This is exactly the problem. Police shouldn't be allowed to
| mete out extrajudicial punishment for being offended.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Exactly the problem, yes. On a societal level it's a
| problem that we should strive to correct. But on an
| individual level on a case by case basis, it's the
| reality you have to protect yourself from.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > 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.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >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.
|
| The point is that the call didn't come in from one of the
| "more equal animals". Any one of us could have made the
| same call and got the same response. It's not like the cops
| were doing someone a favor by responding.
| quacked wrote:
| > 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".
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > 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.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Jokes are supposed to induce laughter. That paragraph does
| not.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| Maybe "joke" should be in air-quotes too, just like
| "system" !
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| jcfrei wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Hollywood is the culprit for all this militarized police in
| the USA and the arms industry.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Police budget for Berlin (similar in size to LA, at 3.5M
| inhabitants) is about [0] $2 billion per year - that's for
| a region with much lower salaries than the US. They employ
| more than twice the number of police officers (26k vs 12k
| in LA).
|
| And that's comparing a well funded and prestigious police
| force in the US - the comparison would look much worse in
| some poorer cities.
|
| [0]: https://haushaltsdaten.odis-
| berlin.de/share?modus=Funktionen
| [deleted]
| secondcoming wrote:
| Until now I thought the lyric was
|
| > Some of those that law enforce us, are the same that burn
| crosses
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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.
| kritiko wrote:
| "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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The government isn't a monolith but the tens of thousands
| of police departments, containing what, tens of millions of
| officers are?
|
| Here are the facts, a large proportion, if not the vast
| majority of violent police interaction in the United States
| is a direct result of the war on drugs. The people who
| voted those laws in are currently still in power, one is
| the president, and generally they blame the police for this
| state of affairs while making no effort to correct their
| lethal mistake. How many young men would run or resist
| arrest if that bag in their backpack resulted in a small
| fine vs a few decades in prison like today?
| kritiko wrote:
| >The government isn't a monolith but the tens of
| thousands of police departments, containing what, tens of
| millions of officers are?
|
| I think the metaphor "the government is the boss of the
| police" is not very accurate. The police are a political
| force that receives a huge % of most municipal budgets,
| with their own PR team/media relations, etc.
|
| I oppose the war on drugs. However, I don't think
| decriminalization of all drugs solves this issue.
| willcipriano wrote:
| We could say the same thing about the armed forces or
| teachers. I would agree if we were to call them factions
| within a larger entity, they certainly are distinct
| enough from one another, there is some degree of
| infighting, but I feel that in general a member of the
| governmental caste feels greater affinity for other caste
| members than they do the public at large, and that is why
| it makes sense to look at them as a single unit. At the
| end of the day, individual police officers aren't
| elected, the only form of redress we really have in our
| system is the remove the leadership that allows these
| things to happen, we haven't done that and nothing has
| changed, that shouldn't be surprising.
| quacked wrote:
| If you reference my comment in this same GP thread I
| completely agree with you. If you want to take control of a
| local society, you need a cast of hitmen willing to do what
| you want. Conversely, if you try to take control of a local
| society and you don't have a cast of hitmen willing to do
| what you want, you will not gain control.
| dsq wrote:
| 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.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| 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.
| confidantlake wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Kids can cook unsupervised in cars, so that makes sense.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Kids can die walking unsupervised to Dunkin, too.
|
| Five minutes in a car during mild weather isn't going to
| cook a kid; cops should use their broad discretion and some
| common sense in both scenarios.
| John23832 wrote:
| 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.
| cjrp wrote:
| > Society's urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is
| detrimental
|
| Indoor, sedentary and with a price in general.
| Lapsa wrote:
| forming experience, idea of community - those seem to be
| overlooked arguments [citation needed]
| vidarh wrote:
| 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_.
| nullc wrote:
| > 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| Note that I said "a lot", not a majority.
|
| Combination of the freedom to run around like those of us
| who grew up a decade or two earlier being given to them
| later with that freedom more likely to coincide with
| getting a phone or at least being near in time.
|
| E.g. someone getting a phone at 10 in 2003 would be 30 this
| year already had a substantial likelihood of having had
| less freedom to run around at 10 in 2003 than I had at 8 in
| 1983, or indeed at 6-7. (I'm by no means suggesting every
| 10 year old in 2003 were getting phones).
|
| It's very possible that the number is smaller than I'm
| imagining. It was merely a casual observation that we're
| now _also_ increasingly starting to come across parents who
| grew up _either_ being watched _or_ being reachable, so the
| notion of kids being able to not just roam freely but roam
| freely without at least being able to call to say where
| they were is getting stranger to more and more people.
| notch898a wrote:
| Cellphones were used to make it extraordinarily
| convenient for busybodies to snitch at all moments. Any
| increased freedom of the child to roam by virtue of
| having emergency communication was nixed by the ability
| for any passer by to immediately call police for
| unsupervised children without even the inconvenience of
| driving to a pay phone.
|
| All the places I played alone as a kid: the playground,
| the rural creek, the open fields. It was inconvenient for
| adults to snitch me out from there. Not so anymore.
| nullc wrote:
| Fair enough. I wonder when the change happened, as
| someone born in 1979 in Ft. Lauderdale I had the same
| freedom (even requirement!) to go out on my own as a
| child that many posters have mentioned here.
| [deleted]
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| zaroth wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > I often tell people that a child takes up an infinite
| amount of time and resources.
|
| In so far as the resource(s) is marginally beneficial, why
| not? They have a much greater remaining expectancy and
| future value.
|
| That being said sometimes telling a child/teen "no"
| actually has a higher marginal value than saying "yes".
| eftychis wrote:
| I agree this is detrimental for current and future
| generations.
|
| Also stupid (my opinion).
| jsz0 wrote:
| 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| stephencanon wrote:
| Similar up here in Hanover NH. All the neighborhood kids just
| walk where they want to, and it's totally fine.
| scld wrote:
| Just wanted to pop in to say I love your blog!
| jefftk wrote:
| Thanks!
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 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.
| lawkwok wrote:
| 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.
| bleepblipbloop wrote:
| It's a good thing they were white, otherwise, the cops would
| probably have shot the parents for resisting
| drunkenmagician wrote:
| The death of common sense, not 100% dead yet, but terminal with
| untreatable stage 4 cancer
| wtcactus wrote:
| 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."
| ape4 wrote:
| I guess the cops have never seen Old Enough
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough!
| phkahler wrote:
| "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?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| 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.
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