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> 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—

> 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.
        ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  - Aloha 4y ago
    Thats a great LBJ quote.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    That puts the onus on solving this problem entirely into the legislative branch. The executive and judicial branches hold equal responsibility to this problem. Why not include them in the solution?
- arwhatever 4y ago
  I’ve noticed this same similarity. Writing code to affect millions of people’s data, or controlling millions of people’s actions they can perform with software, has a lot in common with passing legislation that will affect millions of people, in terms of the edge cases and unintended consequences that you must consider beforehand. Not to mention the potential for malicious actors.
- nadieyninguno1 4y ago
  The legal system long ago worked around this - they allow virtually every person at every level to exercise "discretion." An officer can frequently choose how to handle an issue, a prosecutor can choose not to prosecute, etc. Occasionally, we see well meaning policies going astray - the "must arrest someone" domestic calls in jurisdictions are a contentious-but-great example. Sometimes calls get put in spuriously and now someone must go to jail for a relative non-issue / non-altercation that a neighbor called in.
  - throwawaycab 4y ago
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    It is good that the agents have this wiggle room, because you cannot craft a law that could handle any case. This is why it is important to have competent people that represent the state and see that laws are followed. On the contrary, people should be incentivised to constantly reflect if a law really serves justice. If not, the legislative branch needs to change it. Problem here is that the success of policing in politics is measured by number of closed cases or by how many people got convicted after their arrest. By crime rate and success in fighting it. This of course creates perverse incentives for the most part. Budget fights and politics leave justice far behind. If there is no more crime in a country, it shouldn't mean that police are getting pressured because they arrest fewer people. But exactly that would probably follow in a political discussion.
- euroderf 4y ago
  I would rephrase it as, prosecutorial immunity must die.
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  I agree with your point in this context 100% but I would like to push back on the vibe in *all* software contexts. Obviously in some contexts sure, nobody wants another Therac-25. However, in general I believe modern software is overly concerned with preventing the user from doing dumb things at the expense of expandability and user control. Metaphorically it feels like we've adopted a model that has safety interlocks and authenticated access for every screwdriver and light switch in your house. Some of the inaccessible to the end user without serious reverse engineering. To some extent I get why absurd proliferation of IoT devices necessitates some of this but I think there's a better way. A world where we have a decent lock on the front door and you're the one who's responsible for not putting the drill through your eyeball, not the drill.
- necovek 4y ago
  Considering that programming language compilers or interpreters are also written by human "software writers", where you the developer are the "user" doing dumb things, hopefully you are using a language that stops you from doing dumb things. Dumb things like spamming others, issuing hundreds of unnecessary requests to external APIs or databases, trashing all the memory of a system, filling up the disk... A "general purpose" language which basically doesn't exist? Anything even a bit non-trivial can be used to do dumb things. It is a responsibility for everyone in the chain not to do them, and if dumb things happen, everyone in the chain _is_ responsible. We can debate how much blame each of them should take, but we should not ignore the blame an individual doing a dumb thing should take simply because there were people in "official" roles being even dumber. I mean, this was already depicted in the South Park when all the parents get sent to jail by their kids.
- rufflez 4y ago
  That’s part of the problem… everything can’t be reduced to if-then-else; situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing. In this case, how helpful is it to the child to remove the mother from the child, to teach her a lesson not to remove herself from the child?
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    More importantly, is making an 8 year old kid a km by themselves in rural America a significant risk ? I feel like I would have done this 1000 times by the time i was 8 in the rural Australia, is the danger in the US that much larger ?
  - ownlife 4y ago
    My guess is that the mother was removed from the child not as a punishment to her, but in order to ensure the safety of the child. In other words, deterrence rather than retributive justice. FWIW, I do agree that this is a huge overreach on the part of the police and that "situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing."
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.

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.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
- Aloha 4y ago
  Thats a great LBJ quote.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  That puts the onus on solving this problem entirely into the legislative branch. The executive and judicial branches hold equal responsibility to this problem. Why not include them in the solution?
arwhatever 4y ago
I’ve noticed this same similarity. Writing code to affect millions of people’s data, or controlling millions of people’s actions they can perform with software, has a lot in common with passing legislation that will affect millions of people, in terms of the edge cases and unintended consequences that you must consider beforehand. Not to mention the potential for malicious actors.
nadieyninguno1 4y ago
The legal system long ago worked around this - they allow virtually every person at every level to exercise "discretion." An officer can frequently choose how to handle an issue, a prosecutor can choose not to prosecute, etc. Occasionally, we see well meaning policies going astray - the "must arrest someone" domestic calls in jurisdictions are a contentious-but-great example. Sometimes calls get put in spuriously and now someone must go to jail for a relative non-issue / non-altercation that a neighbor called in.
- throwawaycab 4y ago
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  It is good that the agents have this wiggle room, because you cannot craft a law that could handle any case. This is why it is important to have competent people that represent the state and see that laws are followed. On the contrary, people should be incentivised to constantly reflect if a law really serves justice. If not, the legislative branch needs to change it. Problem here is that the success of policing in politics is measured by number of closed cases or by how many people got convicted after their arrest. By crime rate and success in fighting it. This of course creates perverse incentives for the most part. Budget fights and politics leave justice far behind. If there is no more crime in a country, it shouldn't mean that police are getting pressured because they arrest fewer people. But exactly that would probably follow in a political discussion.
euroderf 4y ago
I would rephrase it as, prosecutorial immunity must die.
thot_experiment 4y ago
I agree with your point in this context 100% but I would like to push back on the vibe in *all* software contexts. Obviously in some contexts sure, nobody wants another Therac-25. However, in general I believe modern software is overly concerned with preventing the user from doing dumb things at the expense of expandability and user control. Metaphorically it feels like we've adopted a model that has safety interlocks and authenticated access for every screwdriver and light switch in your house. Some of the inaccessible to the end user without serious reverse engineering. To some extent I get why absurd proliferation of IoT devices necessitates some of this but I think there's a better way. A world where we have a decent lock on the front door and you're the one who's responsible for not putting the drill through your eyeball, not the drill.
necovek 4y ago
Considering that programming language compilers or interpreters are also written by human "software writers", where you the developer are the "user" doing dumb things, hopefully you are using a language that stops you from doing dumb things. Dumb things like spamming others, issuing hundreds of unnecessary requests to external APIs or databases, trashing all the memory of a system, filling up the disk... A "general purpose" language which basically doesn't exist? Anything even a bit non-trivial can be used to do dumb things. It is a responsibility for everyone in the chain not to do them, and if dumb things happen, everyone in the chain _is_ responsible. We can debate how much blame each of them should take, but we should not ignore the blame an individual doing a dumb thing should take simply because there were people in "official" roles being even dumber. I mean, this was already depicted in the South Park when all the parents get sent to jail by their kids.
rufflez 4y ago
That’s part of the problem… everything can’t be reduced to if-then-else; situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing. In this case, how helpful is it to the child to remove the mother from the child, to teach her a lesson not to remove herself from the child?
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  More importantly, is making an 8 year old kid a km by themselves in rural America a significant risk ? I feel like I would have done this 1000 times by the time i was 8 in the rural Australia, is the danger in the US that much larger ?
- ownlife 4y ago
  My guess is that the mother was removed from the child not as a punishment to her, but in order to ensure the safety of the child. In other words, deterrence rather than retributive justice. FWIW, I do agree that this is a huge overreach on the part of the police and that "situational awareness, perspective, nuance and understanding are completely missing."

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.