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>A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just

• falcolas 4y ago
  IMO, too many people took the wrong lessons from being ignored as children themselves, and they swung too hard into "Watch over your children 24/7 or you're hurting your children."
  • emodendroket 4y ago
    They're watching the same newscasts and true-crime documentaries that are leading to perceptions of nonexistent "crime waves" with all the pathologies that come along.
    • Enginerrrd 4y ago
      Also don't forget the inflation of the term "sex trafficking" which has been twisted to apply to things that most people would not ordinarily apply it to, so that police departments can look better in the news. They bust a prostitution ring, and every prostitute gets counted as a "sex-trafficking victim" so they can spin it as this great liberation of people. Reading the headlines it sounds like Taken, but the reality is much less black and white.
  • giarc 4y ago
    Doesn't help that every few months a certain political party screams about a 'caravan' of migrants coming to the borders with the sole purpose of causing crime.
  • api 4y ago
    I think it's mostly an artifact of 1980s and 1990s daytime TV hyping every single missing child and making a generation of parents think this was happening everywhere all the time.
• leephillips 4y ago
  Half the problem, no? The other half being the police.
  • rmetzler 4y ago
    I upvote this, because you probably mean in this specific case and in this specific country. But my personal experience with the police here where I live is *very different* from the stories I hear from the US.
    • leephillips 4y ago
      Yes, I was talking about an article describing a specific incident in a specific country. But I agree that there’s a real problem with the police in the US, one that most US citizens seem not to be able to see clearly (except for people in black neighborhoods, who know what’s up with the cops—but the rest of the country hasn’t been listening to them). I was born and raised in the US, but I’ve been living outside the country for a few years, and the cop problem is one reason I don’t think I’ll be moving back.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      Remember the stories you hear are outliers the normal is different here, but if you don't watch the local norm can change
• pavon 4y ago
  There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
  • DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
    Don't forget about the child safety services/social workers - they should have to be reasonable too.
    • BitwiseFool 4y ago
      I suspect child services / social workers are punished far more severely for false negatives than false positives. I think it is safe to say the outrage of failing to save a child would outweigh the embarrassment of a false positive such as this. I could easily see major news outlets and local politicians raising hell for failing to stop abuse but raising far less hell for something like this.
      • kneebonian 4y ago
        I have had multiple experiences with multiple CPS departments through multiple friends and family members. CPS hardly ever does anything and are largely useless. The only time they did anything was when the police opened up a second investigation because of the problems, and they told them "Don't talk to CPS talk to the cops and have them talk to CPS". Assume the default for these kinds of agencies is false negatives.
    • dariusj18 4y ago
      No one wants to be the weak link that gets their name blasted in newspapers when a kid gets harmed. Not that it would really be their fault, but the incentives are obvious to "play it safe".
      • 4y ago
• CodeMage 4y ago
  Reminds me of the time my son finally gathered the confidence to take the training wheels off his bike and learn to ride it without them. My wife and I were walking, and he was on his bike, and he was so happy and pumped about his achievement, that he asked to ride farther away, out of our sight. Now, this is a peaceful suburban neighborhood we're talking about, and we're on a stretch between his school and a park near our home. He's riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he's being careful about it. Off he goes, and the two of us stroll peacefully until we see him stopped, with an old lady talking to him. He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating. Somewhere along the way, our society blurred the line between "stepping in to prevent child abuse" and "thinking you're entitled to being hostile and sanctimonious to other parents".
  • renonn 4y ago
    “we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats” no you didn’t you were just too afraid to tell her to fuck off like any normal person would do in that situation
  • VancouverMan 4y ago
    > smile politely all the way to avoid escalating. That attitude, while perhaps more comfortable in some ways, just enables the sort of behaviour you encountered, and apparently disliked, from that woman. A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future. Depending on where you are, she might have gone decades without any kind of resistance to her behaviour. Too much politeness can be worse than none at all.
    • lamontcg 4y ago
      > A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future. Or it means she's definitely calling CPS next time.
• josefresco 4y ago
  My neighbor (not old) threatened to call the police on my 12 year old daughter because she didn't stop for him... to scold her. On the surface he's a reasonable, responsible adult but for some reason was/is triggered by neighborhood kids simply "having fun". People can be strange.
  • nullc 4y ago
    > People can be strange. You usually only notice people when they do something weird-- maybe 999 days out of 1000 that neighbor is perfectly normal, but on that one day they were having an off day. That's the day you notice them. An advantage of living further from people is that just fewer interactions with strangers and near-strangers so fewer opportunities to be the victim of someone's off-day.
  • P_I_Staker 4y ago
    This is very common. We used to get harassed by old farts and security when we lived on a golf course. One came up to our back door ranting and screaming, and my dad had to tell him to fuck off.
• justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood? This really depends on your life experience. For some this is no big deal. For some this means the parents are in a drunken/drug stupor. For some taking care of a kid means being instantly labeled as a pedo by parents, police and neighbours.
• rubyfan 4y ago
  It sounds like the cop had the discretion and chose to arrest her after she answered a question negatively. This seems to be another big part of the problem.
  • P_I_Staker 4y ago
    She probably “didn’t cooperate”… “she wouldn’t lift her sack and spread her cheeks, so we took her to jail.”
• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  > who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood? I wish I knew. My children have had the cops called on them for playing in our front yard. I wish they could spend their afternoons climbing trees and playing in the grass like I did growing up, but there's a group of people who see children playing outside of direct parent supervision as a categorically dangerous activity. I'm always struck when I take my kids to school and see the high schoolers gathered around waiting for their bus to pick them up. You wouldn't even know they exist otherwise - there's no other signs of their existence, no groups of them playing at the park, no sounds of games in the streets, no hoots or hollers from down the block - just nothing, silence. Each house is an island and each teen a castaway from 4pm when they get home to 7am when they leave for school, severed from the neighborhood and each other while the same folks say, "How come kids don't play outside anymore?"
  • menomatter 4y ago
    Kids from the project/poor neighborhood in metro cities still do this to a dangerous extent. I dunno what's a good balanced approach ..
  • kickout 4y ago
    This, unfortunately, mimics my experiences. No idea when or how it happened, but it is noticeable
    • alcover 4y ago
      Could it be the deluge of televised fear-inducing content ? A great deal anxiety feeds on this distorted view of "what's happening". But go and have a walk. What do you see "happening" ? nothing.
    • soco 4y ago
      In Switzerland you'd get called by the teacher if you don't let your kid walk by itself to kindergarten, because independence and learning and all.
      • 4y ago
• mig39 4y ago
  I had neighbour, who lives across the street, call the police because my dog barked when he walked up my driveway. We weren't home at the time. He called because there was "an animal in distress." We pulled into the driveway just as an RCMP officer was arriving "on the scene." She entered the house with us, petted the dog, and rolled her eyes. And "closed the file." The dog was doing its job. Asshole neighbours (even in Canada) are a real problem.
  • Markoff 4y ago
    I am with your neighbor, I hate dogs left alone which annoy all neighbors with constant barking, while their owner doesn't have to listen to it. It's less of an problem in the house, but huge problem in residential apartment building, so obviously you call cops to annoy neighbor to force him to do soemthing about it by police harassing him, not that because you would genuinely think there is animal in distress. If your dog barks at everyone passing around your house, there is something wrong with your dog and you raising it. If you can't take care of dog and raise it properly, don't get one.
    • mig39 4y ago
      To be clear, he doesn't bark at people walking by the house. He barks at people who walk up the driveway, open the gate, and walk towards the house. He didn't bark until the guy was a meter or two away from the house. That's his job. He was left alone in the house for an hour. I have video surveillance showing the neighbour skulking around on my property. Sorry, this is the reason we got a dog. If the neighbour had a problem with the dog barking, he could have asked me "hey, when I come on your property and walk around your house, why does the dog bark?"
      • Markoff 4y ago
        why do you keep gate unlocked when nobody is at home then? seems like easy solution to stop people trespassing and annoying the dog unnecessary and if it was locked and someone was there he can bark as much he wants because nobody should be there, obviously this doesn't work for people without gate
• kashunstva 4y ago
  > who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood? The profoundly innumerate, that’s who. They overestimate the risk of an adverse event because they rely solely on media reports of child safety events to anchor their estimates, never stopping to consider that the media doesn’t report on children safely walking home.
• kyleblarson 4y ago
  The same type of person who likely is on the HOA board for their neighborhood in order to create their own pathetic little fiefdom and sense of power.
• madaxe_again 4y ago
  Paranoid suburbanites. In the US, happened to me twice as an 11/12 year old north of Chicago, just for walking down the street - and once in Charlottesville, in the burbs, aged 24 - again for walking down the street. Once in Germany, aged 10 in a suburb of Frankfurt - I was sitting in a park with a book. Oh, and once in the U.K., in Hatfield aged 22, waiting outside my girlfriend’s house having arrived a bit before her. Only got put in a cop car in the US - in both Germany and the U.K. they realised I was just doing normal human stuff - both childhood occasions in the US they gave my parents a talking to, as an adult they were unreasonably suspicious as to why I would be walking rather than driving, but let me go with a warning to drive in future. So - the problem is the police, and the justice system, as curtain-twitchers live the world over.
• psychlops 4y ago
  Interesting that her child actually told a stranger where he lived. No real street smarts in Waco children cause it's too safe, I guess.
• hobs 4y ago
  Had the cops called on me for wearing a hood and walking home at 7:30PM from my friends house, gun put in my face and told to get on the ground. I was 10. Low and behold a few years later I find out that its my highschool police officer I get to see every day!
• tqi 4y ago
  No, the real problem is that we continue to elevate low stakes local issues into high stakes national / international news because it advances our own preferred narratives.
• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  The real problem is the cop finding a perfectly fine child walking home in his own neighborhood and arresting his mother like a violent criminal for such a grave offense.