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> 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

• 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.
    • cool_dude85 4y ago
      I don't think you want a lot of "Ron Swanson types", by which I infer you mean libertarians, getting involved in child protective services.
      • SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        Why not?
        • cool_dude85 4y ago
          Well, I personally believe that the logical outcome of libertarian thought as it regards kids is that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. So that's one reason you wouldn't want a libertarian CPS agent.
          • pdonis 4y ago
            Your claim about the logical outcome of libertarian thought is wrong, because it fails to consider a key fact: the child is there because of the parents' choice. They chose to bring the child into the world. Or, if they adopted the child, they chose to do that. And when you make that choice, you accept the obligations that come with it. There is nothing in libertarianism that prevents people from making choices that come with obligations that they must accept. The only thing libertarianism would be against would be forcing people to raise children they did not bring into the world or did not adopt. There are edge cases, such as a woman becoming pregnant against her will (rape, for example); but those are edge cases and don't change the basic principle.
          • nearbuy 4y ago
            Good luck finding a libertarian that believes parents shouldn't have to feed their children. I think you've made a straw man argument.
• COGlory 4y ago
  It isn't the neighbors job to be mentally functional. It is, however, the police's, DA, and CPS's job.
  • z9znz 4y ago
    It's also suburban Waco, Texas. That's not exactly the epicenter of education in the US, much less even in Texas. Ironically, more rural Texas regions tend to ha√e more independent kids; after all, you'll see 10 year old kids driving the family truck on farms and ranches.
    • steelframe 4y ago
      > more rural Texas regions tend to ha√e more independent kids Genuinely curious. How did you manage to type '√' rather than 'v'? It this a keyboard or locale issue?
      • moreati 4y ago
        Not OP, speculating. On a Mac option + v types a √, which is a fairly easy typo.
        • jonny_eh 4y ago
          It is?
        • z9znz 4y ago
          Yes, this seems to be what is happening. I now think that on rare occasions the side of my left hand may be brushing the opt key while I type. Until today, it has only been a very rare † instead of t. √ is a new one for me.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • z9znz 4y ago
        That's the first time I've gotten that instead of a V. I didn't bother editing it because I thought it was amusing. More often (but still rare), I'll end up with a † instead of t. As someone below mentioned, it appears to be (on Mac) opt+key. I use a Razer Blackwidow something something mechanical keyboard, and it sits pretty tall. Only just now I figured out how I think this opt thing is happening. The side of my left hand appears to sometimes sit low enough that it may be bumping the opt key. Prior to this moment, the whole † thing had been a mystery to me :P.
• nineplay 4y ago
  [flagged]
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  It puts neighbors in a bad situation. Yesterday there was a kid, probably about eight years old, outside my house wandering around by himself, yelling at passing cars. There are lots of kids in my neighborhood and I'm accustomed to them being loud when they're out playing but this kid was alone, going out into the road, and just acting a bit weird. It wasn't a kid I knew so I couldn't call the parents but calling the police also seemed like a questionable thing to do. I'm near a speed bump so cars generally go slow through here but there are other parts of the street when they often have more speed. I didn't want to approach him (all manner of trouble can come from an adult approaching a child they don't know), police seemed like overkill, but being out in the road, especially since he was walking away from the speed bump area, seemed potentially dangerous. Eventually he went into a house across the street five or six houses down which recently sold so probably is a new family to the neighborhood. Still not sure what I should have done if he hadn't gone home or really if this is a problem waiting to happen. At his age I wandered much further from home and put myself in worse potential danger at times, though I probably never yelled at passing cars. No one ever called the police on me though there were a few times when an adult told me to stop doing whatever I was up to or go somewhere else.
  • SuperQue 4y ago
    Ugh, speedbumps are so dangerous. Sure, they make you slow down for them. But drivers now want to "make up" for that slow down. So they drive even faster between them.
  • pdonis 4y ago
    > Still not sure what I should have done If you don't know which house the kid belongs in, the first thing I would do is to find out. Start knocking on doors and asking if it's their kid. Now that you do know, the obvious thing to do is to introduce yourself to the neighbors and describe what their kid was doing. They're new to the neighborhood so you can pitch it as letting them know that there are a lot of passing cars at that point and kids should be aware of the danger.
  • richx 4y ago
    Why didn’t you just ask the kid what it is doing and where it is living?
• vlunkr 4y ago
  > the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this. Lots of people are to blame here, but the cops escalated by arresting her on a flimsy basis. The incident could have stopped there.
  • pdonis 4y ago
    > Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this. The article points out that that Texas law did not change the criminal code, so even though it was no longer a family law violation (hence CPS dismissed the case), it was still technically a criminal violation (hence the mom still had to plea bargain or go to trial).
• randomdata 4y ago
  > What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house? Well, what decent neighbour isn't able to, at the very least, recognize his neighbors? Maybe this child's parents have kept him locked in the closet, never seen by anyone before, until this one time he emerged unto the world and the police were called not because he was on the street, but because he's never been on the street before. But more likely this person isn't a neighbor, at least not mentally.
  • emodendroket 4y ago
    Most of us?
    • randomdata 4y ago
      You can't be a decent neighbor if you have no concept of who your neighbors are. You may not be best friends or know their entire life story, but if you can't even recognize them then there is simply no neighborly connection to work with. Without that, they're just people, same as any other found the world over. You can try to be decent to all, but that's not quite the same thing.
      • emodendroket 4y ago
        OK. Then probably a majority of Americans aren't "decent neighbors" because having no idea who your neighbors are is extremely common.