7 ms·

"We" should be replaced with Americans. This is just one more of those nutty things which are particular to America but which doesn't really generally happen in

"We" should be replaced with Americans. This is just one more of those nutty things which are particular to America but which doesn't really generally happen in the rest of the west. This is a much broader issue. America is simply developing a very dysfunctional way of dealing with children. America is the only developed country I know of (maybe only country period) where police is routinely used to deal with school discipline issues. Even parents in the US call police to discipline their kids for silly stuff like drinking alcohol. I am actually surprised by how normal this is in the US even among intelligent and seemingly normal families. With the extensive killing of blacks it is clear that the US has a general police dysfunction. The police is seen as a solution to almost every issue in society. America needs a serious re-evaluation of what role police and punishment should play in society. Police and the justice system can't become a substitute for parents and teachers.

meowface 10y ago
You may be partly basing those views on anecdata (except the alcohol one; but blame the lawmakers for that, not the police or the parents). From my own subjective anecdata living on the East Coast, police are rarely involved in school discipline unless someone has been very seriously assaulted. Parents I've seen also tend to be very protective of their children and apologetic for their actions, usually not wanting them to be subject even to basic discipline like detention or suspension, let alone arrest. Overparenting is rampant, but parenting-by-police seems rare. As for shooting of blacks, there is not currently any conclusive evidence that it is or isn't caused by racist policing or biased officers. A few highly publicized cases of police brutality, mixed with even more heavily publicized cases of ambiguous police response (were they really being attacked? / did they really see what looked like a gun?), don't necessarily indicate a pervasive trend. Studies to the contrary include this Harvard one (conducted by a black, liberal professor, if it matters) which even the New York Times doesn't challenge: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid... This 2008 analysis is also interesting, albeit it from a somewhat conservative (yet respected) source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/criminal-justice-system-racist-13078.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/criminal-justice-system-rac... (Note that these only argue against disproprotionate number of shootings, not racial profiling or bias.)
- maxerickson 10y ago
  did they really see what looked like a gun? is a pretty low bar for opening fire. Especially when taking into account that training is shoot to kill.
  - jerf 10y ago
    You have to consider both sides of the equation, though. You have to consider that the cop is a human being in the heat of the moment, who wants to survive every encounter they have in the course of their career (they're not just playing the odds in this one, they're playing them all), and whom society would also like to survive. If you overspecify caution and requirements for the cop, you'll end up in a situation we are quite arguably already starting to see in some places, where it becomes impossible to be an effective police force at all, and crime starts going up very quickly [1]. And now even more people are dead, as well as communities, and hope for the future, and all the other things like that. And this almost instantly turns out to be even worse than anything the cops ever did; we go from once-every-few-years news stories about police in a given city shooting a guy in dubious circumstances (that often, a couple of weeks later, turn out to be fairly justified, but that news story doesn't get around anything like the first one did) to "yup, another day of 10 more murders than we had per day last year". Hardly strikes me as a win. [1]: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-violent-crime-has-soared-in-2016.-What-s-the-response http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-viole... - and I should point out to many of you that while you politically filter that story, please note everyone involved is a Democrat.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      The typical police officer never discharges their weapon in the line of duty. Here's an example. New York City has 35,000 uniformed officers. In a given year, they have ~100 incidents involving use of firearms. So even over a 30 year period ("a career"), only a smaller portion of the force will have cause to discharge their weapon (multiple 10,000s of officers over 30 years, ballpark 5,000 incidents, so a single 10,000 ballpark of involved officers). http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2011.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... To be clear, that includes all incidents, so if they shoot a dog or whatever, that's in there.
deerpig 10y ago
America wasn't like this when I left in the late 80's. I'm not saying that America had no problems -- clearly it did, but there wasn't so much fear, and things felt more free (at least if you were white) and different parts of the country still were different -- the chain stores hadn't yet homoginized the country -- and turn coffee into a fetish. It was a shock to see it happen in slow motion from the opposite side of the world over the next three decades, the country just seemed like a frog being slowly boiled without it being aware. From time to time people ask me why I don't move back and I just smile and say that this is my home now. Few people would understand the sadness I feel for those left behind.
- Gracana 10y ago
  In the late eighties we imprisoned a bunch of daycare workers for satanic ritual sexual abuse, based on tedtimony coerced from children over long periods. No physical evidence was ever found.
- mildbow 10y ago
  I didn't grow up in the US. I have to say the biggest cultural shock in my ~15 years here has been the lack of freedom in day to day life. Ironic.
- vijayr 10y ago
  Is it okay to ask where you moved to?
adventured 10y ago
> Even parents in the US call police to discipline their kids for silly stuff like drinking alcohol. I think you're drastically exaggerating. The opposite is true. In my opinion parents very rarely call the police to discipline their own children, particularly for things like alcohol. The police are also very rarely involved in school discipline, unless it involves higher level violence or weapons. Of the N instances of discipline problems at a school, a sub 1% number of those would involve calls to the police. In an average American high school with 1,000 students, there are going to be at least a dozen instances per day of discipline problems with students, the police are not getting called that often.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > The police are also very rarely involved in school discipline, Police are so involved in school discipline that it has its own name -- School to prison pipeline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
  - enkid 10y ago
    A lot of rare things have names.
    - Ensorceled 10y ago
      I took a quick read of the wiki article and it doesn't seem rare at all. Do you have counterfactuals to the wiki article and it's references?
      - enkid 10y ago
        I don't know how common or uncommon it is. I know in my situation growing up in the US it was uncommon. I was simply arguing over the statement made in the comment, that if something has a name, it is common.
        10y ago
cJ0th 10y ago
> This is just one more of those nutty things which are particular to America but which doesn't really generally happen in the rest of the west. I'd second this. A while ago there was an interesting television reportage on German Tv about this phenomenon. They showed things like people who called the police when their neighbors kids played on the street or parents monitoring their kids kindergarten via online webcams. Quite irritating stuff. Certainly, not every American is like this but the program was done by a serious public broadcaster so I guess there is something to it. It's on youtube (in German language, obvs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOkBI65TRjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOkBI65TRjY
- kaeluka 10y ago
  I'm watching your link now. That's sad: the oldest son stopped asking about going to school alone.
bambax 10y ago
True, but this is the first sentence of the article: > America is experiencing a bizarre disconnect between real and perceived danger when it comes to kids. America, not "the West". There is a very specific crazyness in America and kids. Apparently you can now be arrested in Arizona for touching kids genitalia for any reason whatsoever, including parents changing diapers, doctors examining children, etc. etc. Kids are not fragile angels, they are just little people.
schrodinger 10y ago
My experience in America is that police very rarely get involved in the discipline of children. Although it definitely would appear otherwise going by TV.
- marpstar 10y ago
  how old are you and did you go through the American public school system? From 7th grade on up our lockers were randomly searched by police and K9 dogs walked through the school parking lot. I'm not saying they have no right to do that, but it was pretty routine for the police to be involved. My high school had less than 200 pupils.
dorfsmay 10y ago
The US might be more extreme, or ahead of the rest of the west, but it's not limited to the US. The first step in this phenomenon is limiting how far kids can roam along. This study shows the restriction over four generations in England (very drastic): http://thackara.com/learning-institutions/space-time-and-childhood/ http://thackara.com/learning-institutions/space-time-and-chi...
Houshalter 10y ago
It doesn't seem like it's just America. This is from the UK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... America might be slightly ahead of the rest of the world because of its car culture (reducing the need for children to walk places independently.) But it's a trend everywhere.
threepipeproblm 10y ago
No, this is not a uniquely American problem. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11498123/Arrests-for-leaving-kids-home-alone-made-every-day.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1149812... Even in European countries that are more liberal about this it's now relatively easy to find individual accounts of parents being harassed for leaving children unattended. But "we" haven't arrested anyone. "We" should be replaced by "police officers" IMO.
sgnelson 10y ago
Honestly, I think what you're seeing has more do do with the media than with the truth. You hear about it in the media, so it must be occurring all over. But I believe that for the most part, for most people, these types of things (calling police on children, parents arrested for different parenting techniques, police dealing with children in schools, etc.) are unusual. Which is to say; these things do happen, but it is far from the norm. I believe very very few people in America would disagree that "Police and the justice system can't become a substitute for parents and teachers."
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Media? I can see it with my own eyes- the lack of children outside without their parents is obvious.

meowface 10y ago

You may be partly basing those views on anecdata (except the alcohol one; but blame the lawmakers for that, not the police or the parents). From my own subjective anecdata living on the East Coast, police are rarely involved in school discipline unless someone has been very seriously assaulted. Parents I've seen also tend to be very protective of their children and apologetic for their actions, usually not wanting them to be subject even to basic discipline like detention or suspension, let alone arrest. Overparenting is rampant, but parenting-by-police seems rare. As for shooting of blacks, there is not currently any conclusive evidence that it is or isn't caused by racist policing or biased officers. A few highly publicized cases of police brutality, mixed with even more heavily publicized cases of ambiguous police response (were they really being attacked? / did they really see what looked like a gun?), don't necessarily indicate a pervasive trend. Studies to the contrary include this Harvard one (conducted by a black, liberal professor, if it matters) which even the New York Times doesn't challenge: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid... This 2008 analysis is also interesting, albeit it from a somewhat conservative (yet respected) source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/criminal-justice-system-racist-13078.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/criminal-justice-system-rac... (Note that these only argue against disproprotionate number of shootings, not racial profiling or bias.)

maxerickson 10y ago
did they really see what looked like a gun? is a pretty low bar for opening fire. Especially when taking into account that training is shoot to kill.
- jerf 10y ago
  You have to consider both sides of the equation, though. You have to consider that the cop is a human being in the heat of the moment, who wants to survive every encounter they have in the course of their career (they're not just playing the odds in this one, they're playing them all), and whom society would also like to survive. If you overspecify caution and requirements for the cop, you'll end up in a situation we are quite arguably already starting to see in some places, where it becomes impossible to be an effective police force at all, and crime starts going up very quickly [1]. And now even more people are dead, as well as communities, and hope for the future, and all the other things like that. And this almost instantly turns out to be even worse than anything the cops ever did; we go from once-every-few-years news stories about police in a given city shooting a guy in dubious circumstances (that often, a couple of weeks later, turn out to be fairly justified, but that news story doesn't get around anything like the first one did) to "yup, another day of 10 more murders than we had per day last year". Hardly strikes me as a win. [1]: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-violent-crime-has-soared-in-2016.-What-s-the-response http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-viole... - and I should point out to many of you that while you politically filter that story, please note everyone involved is a Democrat.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The typical police officer never discharges their weapon in the line of duty. Here's an example. New York City has 35,000 uniformed officers. In a given year, they have ~100 incidents involving use of firearms. So even over a 30 year period ("a career"), only a smaller portion of the force will have cause to discharge their weapon (multiple 10,000s of officers over 30 years, ballpark 5,000 incidents, so a single 10,000 ballpark of involved officers). http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2011.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... To be clear, that includes all incidents, so if they shoot a dog or whatever, that's in there.

deerpig 10y ago

America wasn't like this when I left in the late 80's. I'm not saying that America had no problems -- clearly it did, but there wasn't so much fear, and things felt more free (at least if you were white) and different parts of the country still were different -- the chain stores hadn't yet homoginized the country -- and turn coffee into a fetish. It was a shock to see it happen in slow motion from the opposite side of the world over the next three decades, the country just seemed like a frog being slowly boiled without it being aware. From time to time people ask me why I don't move back and I just smile and say that this is my home now. Few people would understand the sadness I feel for those left behind.

Gracana 10y ago
In the late eighties we imprisoned a bunch of daycare workers for satanic ritual sexual abuse, based on tedtimony coerced from children over long periods. No physical evidence was ever found.
mildbow 10y ago
I didn't grow up in the US. I have to say the biggest cultural shock in my ~15 years here has been the lack of freedom in day to day life. Ironic.
vijayr 10y ago
Is it okay to ask where you moved to?

adventured 10y ago

> Even parents in the US call police to discipline their kids for silly stuff like drinking alcohol. I think you're drastically exaggerating. The opposite is true. In my opinion parents very rarely call the police to discipline their own children, particularly for things like alcohol. The police are also very rarely involved in school discipline, unless it involves higher level violence or weapons. Of the N instances of discipline problems at a school, a sub 1% number of those would involve calls to the police. In an average American high school with 1,000 students, there are going to be at least a dozen instances per day of discipline problems with students, the police are not getting called that often.

DanBC 10y ago
> The police are also very rarely involved in school discipline, Police are so involved in school discipline that it has its own name -- School to prison pipeline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
- enkid 10y ago
  A lot of rare things have names.
  - Ensorceled 10y ago
    I took a quick read of the wiki article and it doesn't seem rare at all. Do you have counterfactuals to the wiki article and it's references?
    - enkid 10y ago
      I don't know how common or uncommon it is. I know in my situation growing up in the US it was uncommon. I was simply arguing over the statement made in the comment, that if something has a name, it is common.
      - 10y ago

cJ0th 10y ago

> This is just one more of those nutty things which are particular to America but which doesn't really generally happen in the rest of the west. I'd second this. A while ago there was an interesting television reportage on German Tv about this phenomenon. They showed things like people who called the police when their neighbors kids played on the street or parents monitoring their kids kindergarten via online webcams. Quite irritating stuff. Certainly, not every American is like this but the program was done by a serious public broadcaster so I guess there is something to it. It's on youtube (in German language, obvs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOkBI65TRjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOkBI65TRjY

kaeluka 10y ago
I'm watching your link now. That's sad: the oldest son stopped asking about going to school alone.

bambax 10y ago

True, but this is the first sentence of the article: > America is experiencing a bizarre disconnect between real and perceived danger when it comes to kids. America, not "the West". There is a very specific crazyness in America and kids. Apparently you can now be arrested in Arizona for touching kids genitalia for any reason whatsoever, including parents changing diapers, doctors examining children, etc. etc. Kids are not fragile angels, they are just little people.

schrodinger 10y ago

My experience in America is that police very rarely get involved in the discipline of children. Although it definitely would appear otherwise going by TV.

marpstar 10y ago
how old are you and did you go through the American public school system? From 7th grade on up our lockers were randomly searched by police and K9 dogs walked through the school parking lot. I'm not saying they have no right to do that, but it was pretty routine for the police to be involved. My high school had less than 200 pupils.

dorfsmay 10y ago

The US might be more extreme, or ahead of the rest of the west, but it's not limited to the US. The first step in this phenomenon is limiting how far kids can roam along. This study shows the restriction over four generations in England (very drastic): http://thackara.com/learning-institutions/space-time-and-childhood/ http://thackara.com/learning-institutions/space-time-and-chi...

Houshalter 10y ago

It doesn't seem like it's just America. This is from the UK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... America might be slightly ahead of the rest of the world because of its car culture (reducing the need for children to walk places independently.) But it's a trend everywhere.

threepipeproblm 10y ago

No, this is not a uniquely American problem. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11498123/Arrests-for-leaving-kids-home-alone-made-every-day.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1149812... Even in European countries that are more liberal about this it's now relatively easy to find individual accounts of parents being harassed for leaving children unattended. But "we" haven't arrested anyone. "We" should be replaced by "police officers" IMO.

sgnelson 10y ago

Honestly, I think what you're seeing has more do do with the media than with the truth. You hear about it in the media, so it must be occurring all over. But I believe that for the most part, for most people, these types of things (calling police on children, parents arrested for different parenting techniques, police dealing with children in schools, etc.) are unusual. Which is to say; these things do happen, but it is far from the norm. I believe very very few people in America would disagree that "Police and the justice system can't become a substitute for parents and teachers."

nommm-nommm 10y ago
Media? I can see it with my own eyes- the lack of children outside without their parents is obvious.