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> As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where yo

> As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace > "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'" Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.

make3 4y ago
Texas is so insane. SO INSANE
bhelkey 4y ago
> Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade-off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded. This is the fault of the nosey neighbor AND the fault of the police AND the fault of the district attorney AND the fault of the CPS case worker. All four bear blame for this travesty.
- candiodari 4y ago
  > All four bear blame for this travesty. That would mean they would be responsible for the damage they caused, which includes years lost income (ie. a LOT of money). So no, they bear no blame. No state accepts CPS bear any responsibility for the damage they cause. Not a single one.
- nineplay 4y ago
  When I write software, I know that users will do dumb things and it is my responsibility to write my code in such a way that they can cause no damage. The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    "Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be." -Lyndon B. Johnson
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      I think a lot of people take this to mean "laws bad" when in reality I think LBJ was saying to be careful in how you craft your laws so you can prevent this kind of abuse.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        That's what I read from it, too.
      - pdpi 4y ago
        If you adapted it for software, it's almost the same as saying "don't focus too much on the happy path, make sure you limit the blast radius for the failures cases", which just sounds like sensible advice. You really have to take the adversarial mindset when thinking about large scale systems like this, to make sense of how they can break.
        Sharlin 4y ago
        Thinking about the failure modes is the default mindset of a traditional engineer. Unfortunately software engineers in general are entirely too focused on the happy path and nothing else.
        sublinear 4y ago
        Focusing on anything besides the happy path requires the approval and support to do so from other teams and their respective management and QA. No, they'd rather not coordinate any of that and just play the blame game. Many workplaces employing software engineers are actively hostile towards any kind of engineering. I have a very hard time believing anyone writing code is sloppy on purpose. Incentives are often very misaligned. These are pretty much always organizational problems. Instead of immediately blaming software engineers, you should consider questioning whether it ever makes sense to have non-technical leadership in charge of them. Most places where "real" engineering is done don't have idiots at the wheel.
- fluidcruft 4y ago
  CPS investigated and cleared them and then dropped the case. It's the cops and DA who kept going.
  - cbsmith 4y ago
    ...and really, CPS does need to investigate. Yes, most often it's just a nosey neighbour, but every now and then those nosey neighbours are on to something, and while unpleasant for the families, missing that one case is the horror story they want to avoid.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      This is the fork in the road, they need investigatory power, but not punitory power. They should be empowered to investigate the reports but their investigation should simply be evidence. The evidence should be passed into the legal system and treated no different to other evidence… presumption of innocence snd burden of proof should not be abrogated … lest we simply abandon any pretence of jurisprudence on such matters.
      - cbsmith 4y ago
        I think you're confusing the role of CPS with the police. It's the police who investigate crimes and provide evidence to the courts, who will in turn mete out any punishments. CPS's job is to protect the kids. AFAIK they aren't involved in any kind of punishment. Any measures they take are limited in scope to the best interests of the children. Now, they're indifferent to the impact on the parents, so some of the measures to protect the kids can feel like punishment to the parents, but that's not their concern. I keep feel like people aren't able to draw the line here between what CPS did and what the cops did. Absent more details on the story (and we always have to keep in mind that we're getting the version of the story that is most charitable to the mom), it sure seems like the cops really messed up here. Once the cops arrested her, that's when CPS got involved, and the consequences from CPS's involvement were pretty much inevitable, and frankly the least of the hardships placed on that family.
    - handoflixue 4y ago
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  It's not at all the fault of the nosy neighbor. The neighbor made a bad choice, but could plausibly have been motivated by good intentions. A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe. I certainly see no evidence that the neighbor acted maliciously - some people are just legitimately unaware that the police are frequently comically evil. It is absolutely the fault of the justice system, the police officers who abused their power to arrest a mother for no reason in front of her kids. They made a considered decision to teach her a lesson - they asked her if she had learned her lesson and when she didn't answer how they wanted they arrested her, handcuffed her in front of her children, and took her to prison. It's also the fault of prosecutors and judges involved who overlooked and participated in this egregious abuse of the justice system. They are each responsible for stemming the overreaches of the police. We can't expect police to always make good decisions - they are people who go fight with criminals, not legal scholars, after all. That's partly why we have lawyers and judges involved - to stop overzealous policing. Of course, the prosecutors and judges involved failed miserably here, as they frequently do. And of course child services are at fault too for their participation in this farce.
  - muwtyhg 4y ago
    > A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe. They verified where the child lived, which was just down the block, and still proceeded to call the police instead of... escorting the kid home? > 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 down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.
    - rrauenza 4y ago
      I thought the same.. but who knows, in all serious, maybe the woman feared someone would accuse her of attempted kidnapping.
      - 4y ago
- xeromal 4y ago
  I agree that all 4 bear the blame but what that tells me is that this is a societal issue if that many bad decisions lined up
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > This is the fault of the nosey neighbor Only in the most unproductive way. You're not going to fix the problem by exterminating all nosy neighbors. If your new roof leaks when it rains, it's not the rain's fault, blame it on the person who builds roofs ignoring the unavoidable fact that rain will eventually fall.
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    those "nosey neighbours" are why these stupid rules exist in the first place
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      No, child abuse is why these rules exist. They may not be calibrated well because they overreach from prevention to prescription (from telling you how not to treat your child to telling you how you should treat your child), but they're a necessity. The first people to decide that child welfare was important were anti-animal cruelty organizations, so any protection for children is new and not at all obvious or intrinsic to us.
      - spfzero 4y ago
        I think humans discovered child welfare was important long before there were any organizations at all.
        pessimizer 4y ago
        It's not usually safe to assume that current values are somehow invariant. Humans have never discovered child welfare was important, because that's not something you discover, it's something you decide. > Animals were legally defined as property, but Bergh's watershed legislation recognized cruelty as an offense to the animal itself—irrespective of ownership.(3) Historian Susan Pearson argues that these laws helped transform American liberalism—from a classical conception of rights in the negative—to augur the rise of the modern "interventionist" liberal state. Pearson contends that this positive conception of rights drew animal protectionists into child protection in the 1870s. Bergh's chief counsel, Elbridge Gerry, founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 after he secured the arrest and conviction of an abusive foster mother for felonious assault. Animal protectionists across the nation subsequently instituted amalgamated "humane societies," which safeguarded animals and children under a singular protective fold, positing that helpless "beasts and babes" had a right to protection because they could suffer. https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2015/november/the-history-of-animal-protection-in-the-united-states/ https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2015/november/the-history-of-...
- weberer 4y ago
  Aren't you forgetting the legislators who wrote these overbearing laws in the first place?
- ben7799 4y ago
  CPS dismissed the case.. it seems it's the police and/or district attorney that kept pushing it.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  It's deeper than that. It's a systemic and cultural issue. All of the parties you named think that they have the right to behave the way they did. In their own minds, they are all the good guy. It's a realm of petty tyrants, "Little Eichmans".
- threatofrain 4y ago
  The neighbor bears the least responsibility by a wide margin which is why despite non-zero involvement they really shouldn't be on the same table for discussion. If I ask an entire hospital system to believe in my crazy theory for Leukemia and that leads to patients getting screwed, the discussion shouldn't have the inclination to focus on how one patient communicated their bad medical theory.
  - necovek 4y ago
    It's not a good comparison: everyone has an ability and authority to get police at your door. Police acting on a report and arriving at your doorstep threateningly is not a pleasant experience. And depending on how much it scares you, police might think you are more suspicious instead of less. This is why false police reports are generally forbidden and can put you, a reporter, in jail. You shouting out a crazy theory on leukemia will not compel anyone to listen at the hospital. Police are obligated to act out on all reports. So while they do bear the least responsibility, I disagree it's by a wide margin.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - threatofrain 4y ago
      > Police are obligated to act out on all reports. The police are not obligated to act out on all reports and they exercise this executive discretion all the time. In this case the police choose to arrest and the DA choose to file charges. Nothing obligates the law enforcement professionals to behave this way — not even a sense of PR as this only stains their image. This train could've been stopped by professionals at every step of the way but instead they choose to power through. The mother pled guilty. This is not swatting. In the eyes of law enforcement, the neighbor did not engage in false reporting.
      - necovek 4y ago
        They are, at the very least, obligated to show up at the scene: this is what I meant by "acting". If you are not used to having police at your door, the mere event can be intimidating.
- watwut 4y ago
  This is 100% fault of CPS. Nosy neighborhood can dislike whatever he dislikes, it is fault of whoever administered policy.
- tikiman163 4y ago
  People are idiots, but the cops and everyone else in the justice system had a legal requirement to actually know the law, and letting their kid walk half a mile straight up isn't child endangerment. These people had thier lives turned completely upside down, over the dumbest shit I've heard all year. It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    Nope. They all have "discretion", and every single one could have prevented this idiocy from happening. Plus other details: The police can refuse to take the complaint. The police can refuse to arrest someone. The prosecutor has "prosecutorial discretion". CPS can outright refuse, both the CPS case worker and the people actually implementing the decision. The people implementing community service can refuse. No this is 100% on each and every one of the government workers involved.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  Well, obviously American are extremely weird with their constant desire to solve all problems (and non-problems) with police and then wondering why does the police have too much power. But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  To me this is a side effect of people getting trained to see crime, terrorism and evil deeds everywhere. It was always a joke that you will be arrested for going for a walk in the land of the free. Until it isn't just a joke anymore. Sure, there certainly are bad neighborhoods, but to me the focus on security has everyone getting crazy. A lot of countries don't need armed guards at school. Cops see a lot of crime and have a lot of contact to criminals. I can understand why they would have such a perspective. But everyone else involved should have done a thorough sanity check. And in my opinion they should get some audit if they are in any way able to discern if there is any real danger or not. That is the minimal requirement for their jobs.
Arrath 4y ago
>> > As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace Then go downtown and.. do some police work? What the hell man, stop harassing an innocent mother.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  This made me sick to my stomach to read. We're down a very dangerous road these days with FUD.
  - vkou 4y ago
    You're just getting a few glimpses of what less-than-affluent communities have been eating from the police for a very, very long time.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  The counterpoint to this is that this is exactly what the police do in downtown Waco as well. It just doesn't normally happen to "respectable" society, so you don't hear about it.
klipt 4y ago
Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them. If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it. Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  > If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it. Easy to say, but you're voting for them for a lot more than that. If that's the only thing you care about, you can easily vote for that person. If you care about other things, it gets a lot, lot harder.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    But I'm a green guy, we all know it we pull the yellow lever civilization will end! A party that never loses an election has no incentive to do anything for the voters.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them. When did it become illegal for children to be outside without adult supervision?
- bhelkey 4y ago
  > Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job. >> the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 ... clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger. The police did not enforce the law. Hence the anger towards the police officers and the DA. Edit: I stand corrected, this is family law not criminal law.
  - 4y ago
pdonis 4y ago
> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors No, let's not. According to the article, the neighbor who called the cops asked the boy where he lived, "verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless". Excuse me? What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house? I agree the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place, but one of the things you're supposed to do as a neighbor is to understand that we have an insane legal system and not invoke it on one of your neighbors unless you really, really have to.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I mean... this is a case where the police should also say "it's ok, it's not that far mr/mrs neighbor, you don't have to call us for that". it's also a case if the police actually cuffed and brought the mom to jail, someone there should tell them they won't book them for something stupid. If a DA is involved, it's also a case where the DA should say that they won't prosecute such a stupid thing. This failure is not one crazy individual, but a whole failed system, from the bottom up. You'll always have a crazy neighbor, a paranoid cop, etc., but having a whole chain this rotten really sucks, and something should really be changed.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    This is what lack of diversity gets you. Nobody in the chain of events thought anything happening was unreasonable enough to say something. There were probably ~8 people involved from the call to the officers to the DA and the administrative people in the middle who would have had a chance to opine. It only would have taken one Ron Swanson type to be like "hey, this is insane and we're gonna wind up being a national news story if we go through with this". It would have only taken one person from a rough part of town to be like "kids where I live walk this far and farther every day, there's nothing to see here". Edit: By "Ron Swannson" I mean "someone who takes a skeptical by default view of things the organization chooses to engage in", not necessarily a libertarian.
    - 4y ago
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
As someone who has been constantly annoyed for 20 years by Fortune 250 corporate IT policies, I see this slightly differently. All the confusing, contradictory, usually-non-specific-yet-sometimes-wildly-specific polices the IT department decrees come from some nice-sounding reason, usually from some white paper or consultant, or just some major screwup that caused embarrassment. But, like ISO9000 and SOX and all the rest, they inevitably wind up, as implemented, as make-work policy. It's the same in government. Government is so large now, that every law that gets passed is now make-work law. And for all the same reasons that people with no critical thinking make it their job to enforce stupid ideas like "all code used for authentication in web apps must be written in C", people in the legal system, including and ESPECIALLY "soft" jobs like CPS, have to justify their existence by making the most work out of the least situation. So I'll do you one better: it's the fault of politicians tugging on heart strings to pass overreaching, touchy-feely laws, that give government too much power, in order to get themselves reelected.
- Sakos 4y ago
  Oh please, other countries manage to not have this kind of nonsense. If a system is this dysfunctional and destructive, it's intentional.
  - shswkna 4y ago
    I tend to agree. Its a departure from the common sense, middle ground. This is symptomatic in American culture and politics, at least from what can be observed from afar.
cragfar 4y ago
The Waco justice system was the one who open fired on that biker meet up at Twin Peaks, arrested everyone in the area, and held them on million dollar bonds to send a strong message.
tastyfreeze 4y ago
Youtube keeps suggesting https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit to me. In many of the videos the officers just make up what they think the law is. Just a warning, more than a few of the videos on AuditTheAudit are infuriating due to the level of arrogance, incompetence, negligence, and abuse of authority displayed. But, it is nice that there is a way to air this dirty laundry in public. As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle".
- rrauenza 4y ago
  That is a really revealing youtube channel. I can't watch too much of it because it just makes me want to pull my hair out.
- valdiorn 4y ago
  Audit the audit is great because it's actually very balanced, and they spend equal if not more time digging up laws that might justify the police officers actions, often with some surprising results.
- sdsd 4y ago
  >As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle". Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful. To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and 99% execution.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    I never really understood this argument. It is true that _just_ knowing isn't enough, but, you're pretty limited in what you can do if you don't know. I guess my case falls apart when it comes to law enforcement. They don't know the law yet they're enforcing it.
  - tastyfreeze 4y ago
    I don't know what a wellness circle is. You can't do anything about a problem if you don't know what the problem is.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
- nullc 4y ago
  The word Karen in your post is an ageist and racist dog whistle and it is also incredibly insulting to people who happen to be named Karen.
  - scarby2 4y ago
    > The word Karen in your post is an ageist and racist dog whistle and it is also incredibly insulting to people who happen to be named Karen. Karen is now an accepted and understood term referring to a very real phenomenon. Anyone with half a brain knows it's not aimed at people named Karen. There's a huge difference between being named Karen and being a Karen...
    - nullc 4y ago
      Many racist sterotypes have some basis in reality-- at least statistically, that doesn't make them any more excusable.
  - ianhawes 4y ago
    Totally agree, is there a way to tag a HN manager to get the comment deleted?
yieldcrv 4y ago
Another observation is that this doesn't prevent kidnapping or sex trafficking. Individuals choose to do those things to other people, and those actions are illegal. We don't blame the victims for this reason, we don't blame prey either for their availability to be preyed on.
suzzer99 4y ago
This is crazy. No one is out there kidnapping and sex-trafficking 8-year olds in any numbers more than typical child kidnappings. That's a politically-motivated myth. Minor sex-trafficking is almost always done by someone known to the child, usually a relative. And the child is usually in their teens, although occasionally younger.
sigstoat 4y ago
> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud. there is not a finite supply of culpability. they can _all_ bear (varying degrees of) responsibility for it.
acchow 4y ago
Curious how the justice department has decided the solution to sex trafficking is to make walking outside illegal…
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

make3 4y ago

Texas is so insane. SO INSANE

bhelkey 4y ago

> Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade-off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded. This is the fault of the nosey neighbor AND the fault of the police AND the fault of the district attorney AND the fault of the CPS case worker. All four bear blame for this travesty.

candiodari 4y ago
> All four bear blame for this travesty. That would mean they would be responsible for the damage they caused, which includes years lost income (ie. a LOT of money). So no, they bear no blame. No state accepts CPS bear any responsibility for the damage they cause. Not a single one.
nineplay 4y ago
When I write software, I know that users will do dumb things and it is my responsibility to write my code in such a way that they can cause no damage. The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  "Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be." -Lyndon B. Johnson
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    I think a lot of people take this to mean "laws bad" when in reality I think LBJ was saying to be careful in how you craft your laws so you can prevent this kind of abuse.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      That's what I read from it, too.
    - pdpi 4y ago
      If you adapted it for software, it's almost the same as saying "don't focus too much on the happy path, make sure you limit the blast radius for the failures cases", which just sounds like sensible advice. You really have to take the adversarial mindset when thinking about large scale systems like this, to make sense of how they can break.
      - Sharlin 4y ago
        Thinking about the failure modes is the default mindset of a traditional engineer. Unfortunately software engineers in general are entirely too focused on the happy path and nothing else.
        sublinear 4y ago
        Focusing on anything besides the happy path requires the approval and support to do so from other teams and their respective management and QA. No, they'd rather not coordinate any of that and just play the blame game. Many workplaces employing software engineers are actively hostile towards any kind of engineering. I have a very hard time believing anyone writing code is sloppy on purpose. Incentives are often very misaligned. These are pretty much always organizational problems. Instead of immediately blaming software engineers, you should consider questioning whether it ever makes sense to have non-technical leadership in charge of them. Most places where "real" engineering is done don't have idiots at the wheel.
fluidcruft 4y ago
CPS investigated and cleared them and then dropped the case. It's the cops and DA who kept going.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  ...and really, CPS does need to investigate. Yes, most often it's just a nosey neighbour, but every now and then those nosey neighbours are on to something, and while unpleasant for the families, missing that one case is the horror story they want to avoid.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    This is the fork in the road, they need investigatory power, but not punitory power. They should be empowered to investigate the reports but their investigation should simply be evidence. The evidence should be passed into the legal system and treated no different to other evidence… presumption of innocence snd burden of proof should not be abrogated … lest we simply abandon any pretence of jurisprudence on such matters.
    - cbsmith 4y ago
      I think you're confusing the role of CPS with the police. It's the police who investigate crimes and provide evidence to the courts, who will in turn mete out any punishments. CPS's job is to protect the kids. AFAIK they aren't involved in any kind of punishment. Any measures they take are limited in scope to the best interests of the children. Now, they're indifferent to the impact on the parents, so some of the measures to protect the kids can feel like punishment to the parents, but that's not their concern. I keep feel like people aren't able to draw the line here between what CPS did and what the cops did. Absent more details on the story (and we always have to keep in mind that we're getting the version of the story that is most charitable to the mom), it sure seems like the cops really messed up here. Once the cops arrested her, that's when CPS got involved, and the consequences from CPS's involvement were pretty much inevitable, and frankly the least of the hardships placed on that family.
  - handoflixue 4y ago
ALittleLight 4y ago
It's not at all the fault of the nosy neighbor. The neighbor made a bad choice, but could plausibly have been motivated by good intentions. A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe. I certainly see no evidence that the neighbor acted maliciously - some people are just legitimately unaware that the police are frequently comically evil. It is absolutely the fault of the justice system, the police officers who abused their power to arrest a mother for no reason in front of her kids. They made a considered decision to teach her a lesson - they asked her if she had learned her lesson and when she didn't answer how they wanted they arrested her, handcuffed her in front of her children, and took her to prison. It's also the fault of prosecutors and judges involved who overlooked and participated in this egregious abuse of the justice system. They are each responsible for stemming the overreaches of the police. We can't expect police to always make good decisions - they are people who go fight with criminals, not legal scholars, after all. That's partly why we have lawyers and judges involved - to stop overzealous policing. Of course, the prosecutors and judges involved failed miserably here, as they frequently do. And of course child services are at fault too for their participation in this farce.
- muwtyhg 4y ago
  > A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe. They verified where the child lived, which was just down the block, and still proceeded to call the police instead of... escorting the kid home? > 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 down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.
  - rrauenza 4y ago
    I thought the same.. but who knows, in all serious, maybe the woman feared someone would accuse her of attempted kidnapping.
    - 4y ago
xeromal 4y ago
I agree that all 4 bear the blame but what that tells me is that this is a societal issue if that many bad decisions lined up
pessimizer 4y ago
> This is the fault of the nosey neighbor Only in the most unproductive way. You're not going to fix the problem by exterminating all nosy neighbors. If your new roof leaks when it rains, it's not the rain's fault, blame it on the person who builds roofs ignoring the unavoidable fact that rain will eventually fall.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  those "nosey neighbours" are why these stupid rules exist in the first place
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    No, child abuse is why these rules exist. They may not be calibrated well because they overreach from prevention to prescription (from telling you how not to treat your child to telling you how you should treat your child), but they're a necessity. The first people to decide that child welfare was important were anti-animal cruelty organizations, so any protection for children is new and not at all obvious or intrinsic to us.
    - spfzero 4y ago
      I think humans discovered child welfare was important long before there were any organizations at all.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        It's not usually safe to assume that current values are somehow invariant. Humans have never discovered child welfare was important, because that's not something you discover, it's something you decide. > Animals were legally defined as property, but Bergh's watershed legislation recognized cruelty as an offense to the animal itself—irrespective of ownership.(3) Historian Susan Pearson argues that these laws helped transform American liberalism—from a classical conception of rights in the negative—to augur the rise of the modern "interventionist" liberal state. Pearson contends that this positive conception of rights drew animal protectionists into child protection in the 1870s. Bergh's chief counsel, Elbridge Gerry, founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 after he secured the arrest and conviction of an abusive foster mother for felonious assault. Animal protectionists across the nation subsequently instituted amalgamated "humane societies," which safeguarded animals and children under a singular protective fold, positing that helpless "beasts and babes" had a right to protection because they could suffer. https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2015/november/the-history-of-animal-protection-in-the-united-states/ https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2015/november/the-history-of-...
weberer 4y ago
Aren't you forgetting the legislators who wrote these overbearing laws in the first place?
ben7799 4y ago
CPS dismissed the case.. it seems it's the police and/or district attorney that kept pushing it.
jollyllama 4y ago
It's deeper than that. It's a systemic and cultural issue. All of the parties you named think that they have the right to behave the way they did. In their own minds, they are all the good guy. It's a realm of petty tyrants, "Little Eichmans".
threatofrain 4y ago
The neighbor bears the least responsibility by a wide margin which is why despite non-zero involvement they really shouldn't be on the same table for discussion. If I ask an entire hospital system to believe in my crazy theory for Leukemia and that leads to patients getting screwed, the discussion shouldn't have the inclination to focus on how one patient communicated their bad medical theory.
- necovek 4y ago
  It's not a good comparison: everyone has an ability and authority to get police at your door. Police acting on a report and arriving at your doorstep threateningly is not a pleasant experience. And depending on how much it scares you, police might think you are more suspicious instead of less. This is why false police reports are generally forbidden and can put you, a reporter, in jail. You shouting out a crazy theory on leukemia will not compel anyone to listen at the hospital. Police are obligated to act out on all reports. So while they do bear the least responsibility, I disagree it's by a wide margin.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - threatofrain 4y ago
    > Police are obligated to act out on all reports. The police are not obligated to act out on all reports and they exercise this executive discretion all the time. In this case the police choose to arrest and the DA choose to file charges. Nothing obligates the law enforcement professionals to behave this way — not even a sense of PR as this only stains their image. This train could've been stopped by professionals at every step of the way but instead they choose to power through. The mother pled guilty. This is not swatting. In the eyes of law enforcement, the neighbor did not engage in false reporting.
    - necovek 4y ago
      They are, at the very least, obligated to show up at the scene: this is what I meant by "acting". If you are not used to having police at your door, the mere event can be intimidating.
watwut 4y ago
This is 100% fault of CPS. Nosy neighborhood can dislike whatever he dislikes, it is fault of whoever administered policy.
tikiman163 4y ago
People are idiots, but the cops and everyone else in the justice system had a legal requirement to actually know the law, and letting their kid walk half a mile straight up isn't child endangerment. These people had thier lives turned completely upside down, over the dumbest shit I've heard all year. It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.
- candiodari 4y ago
  Nope. They all have "discretion", and every single one could have prevented this idiocy from happening. Plus other details: The police can refuse to take the complaint. The police can refuse to arrest someone. The prosecutor has "prosecutorial discretion". CPS can outright refuse, both the CPS case worker and the people actually implementing the decision. The people implementing community service can refuse. No this is 100% on each and every one of the government workers involved.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
Well, obviously American are extremely weird with their constant desire to solve all problems (and non-problems) with police and then wondering why does the police have too much power. But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
To me this is a side effect of people getting trained to see crime, terrorism and evil deeds everywhere. It was always a joke that you will be arrested for going for a walk in the land of the free. Until it isn't just a joke anymore. Sure, there certainly are bad neighborhoods, but to me the focus on security has everyone getting crazy. A lot of countries don't need armed guards at school. Cops see a lot of crime and have a lot of contact to criminals. I can understand why they would have such a perspective. But everyone else involved should have done a thorough sanity check. And in my opinion they should get some audit if they are in any way able to discern if there is any real danger or not. That is the minimal requirement for their jobs.

Arrath 4y ago

>> > As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace Then go downtown and.. do some police work? What the hell man, stop harassing an innocent mother.

libraryatnight 4y ago
This made me sick to my stomach to read. We're down a very dangerous road these days with FUD.
- vkou 4y ago
  You're just getting a few glimpses of what less-than-affluent communities have been eating from the police for a very, very long time.
woodruffw 4y ago
The counterpoint to this is that this is exactly what the police do in downtown Waco as well. It just doesn't normally happen to "respectable" society, so you don't hear about it.

klipt 4y ago

Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them. If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it. Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.

wccrawford 4y ago
> If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it. Easy to say, but you're voting for them for a lot more than that. If that's the only thing you care about, you can easily vote for that person. If you care about other things, it gets a lot, lot harder.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  But I'm a green guy, we all know it we pull the yellow lever civilization will end! A party that never loses an election has no incentive to do anything for the voters.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them. When did it become illegal for children to be outside without adult supervision?
bhelkey 4y ago
> Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job. >> the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 ... clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger. The police did not enforce the law. Hence the anger towards the police officers and the DA. Edit: I stand corrected, this is family law not criminal law.
- 4y ago

pdonis 4y ago

> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors No, let's not. According to the article, the neighbor who called the cops asked the boy where he lived, "verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless". Excuse me? What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house? I agree the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place, but one of the things you're supposed to do as a neighbor is to understand that we have an insane legal system and not invoke it on one of your neighbors unless you really, really have to.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I mean... this is a case where the police should also say "it's ok, it's not that far mr/mrs neighbor, you don't have to call us for that". it's also a case if the police actually cuffed and brought the mom to jail, someone there should tell them they won't book them for something stupid. If a DA is involved, it's also a case where the DA should say that they won't prosecute such a stupid thing. This failure is not one crazy individual, but a whole failed system, from the bottom up. You'll always have a crazy neighbor, a paranoid cop, etc., but having a whole chain this rotten really sucks, and something should really be changed.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  This is what lack of diversity gets you. Nobody in the chain of events thought anything happening was unreasonable enough to say something. There were probably ~8 people involved from the call to the officers to the DA and the administrative people in the middle who would have had a chance to opine. It only would have taken one Ron Swanson type to be like "hey, this is insane and we're gonna wind up being a national news story if we go through with this". It would have only taken one person from a rough part of town to be like "kids where I live walk this far and farther every day, there's nothing to see here". Edit: By "Ron Swannson" I mean "someone who takes a skeptical by default view of things the organization chooses to engage in", not necessarily a libertarian.
  - 4y ago

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

As someone who has been constantly annoyed for 20 years by Fortune 250 corporate IT policies, I see this slightly differently. All the confusing, contradictory, usually-non-specific-yet-sometimes-wildly-specific polices the IT department decrees come from some nice-sounding reason, usually from some white paper or consultant, or just some major screwup that caused embarrassment. But, like ISO9000 and SOX and all the rest, they inevitably wind up, as implemented, as make-work policy. It's the same in government. Government is so large now, that every law that gets passed is now make-work law. And for all the same reasons that people with no critical thinking make it their job to enforce stupid ideas like "all code used for authentication in web apps must be written in C", people in the legal system, including and ESPECIALLY "soft" jobs like CPS, have to justify their existence by making the most work out of the least situation. So I'll do you one better: it's the fault of politicians tugging on heart strings to pass overreaching, touchy-feely laws, that give government too much power, in order to get themselves reelected.

Sakos 4y ago
Oh please, other countries manage to not have this kind of nonsense. If a system is this dysfunctional and destructive, it's intentional.
- shswkna 4y ago
  I tend to agree. Its a departure from the common sense, middle ground. This is symptomatic in American culture and politics, at least from what can be observed from afar.

cragfar 4y ago

The Waco justice system was the one who open fired on that biker meet up at Twin Peaks, arrested everyone in the area, and held them on million dollar bonds to send a strong message.

tastyfreeze 4y ago

Youtube keeps suggesting https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit to me. In many of the videos the officers just make up what they think the law is. Just a warning, more than a few of the videos on AuditTheAudit are infuriating due to the level of arrogance, incompetence, negligence, and abuse of authority displayed. But, it is nice that there is a way to air this dirty laundry in public. As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle".

rrauenza 4y ago
That is a really revealing youtube channel. I can't watch too much of it because it just makes me want to pull my hair out.
valdiorn 4y ago
Audit the audit is great because it's actually very balanced, and they spend equal if not more time digging up laws that might justify the police officers actions, often with some surprising results.
sdsd 4y ago
>As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle". Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful. To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and 99% execution.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  I never really understood this argument. It is true that _just_ knowing isn't enough, but, you're pretty limited in what you can do if you don't know. I guess my case falls apart when it comes to law enforcement. They don't know the law yet they're enforcing it.
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  I don't know what a wellness circle is. You can't do anything about a problem if you don't know what the problem is.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

nullc 4y ago
The word Karen in your post is an ageist and racist dog whistle and it is also incredibly insulting to people who happen to be named Karen.
- scarby2 4y ago
  > The word Karen in your post is an ageist and racist dog whistle and it is also incredibly insulting to people who happen to be named Karen. Karen is now an accepted and understood term referring to a very real phenomenon. Anyone with half a brain knows it's not aimed at people named Karen. There's a huge difference between being named Karen and being a Karen...
  - nullc 4y ago
    Many racist sterotypes have some basis in reality-- at least statistically, that doesn't make them any more excusable.
- ianhawes 4y ago
  Totally agree, is there a way to tag a HN manager to get the comment deleted?

yieldcrv 4y ago

Another observation is that this doesn't prevent kidnapping or sex trafficking. Individuals choose to do those things to other people, and those actions are illegal. We don't blame the victims for this reason, we don't blame prey either for their availability to be preyed on.

suzzer99 4y ago

This is crazy. No one is out there kidnapping and sex-trafficking 8-year olds in any numbers more than typical child kidnappings. That's a politically-motivated myth. Minor sex-trafficking is almost always done by someone known to the child, usually a relative. And the child is usually in their teens, although occasionally younger.

sigstoat 4y ago

> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud. there is not a finite supply of culpability. they can _all_ bear (varying degrees of) responsibility for it.

acchow 4y ago

Curious how the justice department has decided the solution to sex trafficking is to make walking outside illegal…

deleted 4y ago

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