...

Anonymous tips from skeezballs, are given the weight of a policeman's sworn affidavit...

This is one of those weird supposedly-balanced posts. The balance is, "on the one hand" CPS persecutes a lot of innocent people. "On the other hand", CPS fails to find determined and intelligent pedophiles working to evade it. You ever think that this isn't sane balance at all? Like maybe CPS is failing to find people doing calculated horrible things because it's approach is this abusive scattershot? Especially, any enforcement agency has a incentive laziness (heck everyone has one). If a worker can effortlessly produce cases against random schmucks, they have less incentive to work hard to find the people systematically evading them.

Hey, here's a suggestion:

Instead of sending out thinly-veiled insults, why not try just addressing the point you want to make (which is quite valid)? Wrapping it in ineffective ad hominem actually destroys it. I suspect that you may have some real experience, and could bring an important viewpoint to this thread.

As someone who has had close, intimate relationships with folks on both sides of this really heartbreaking and awful issue, I feel that I actually have the ability to see "both sides," so your insult looks a little flaccid, to me.

Bruce Schneier popularized the term "security theater." I would broaden that to "policing theater."

I've noticed that a lot of public protection agencies like to demonstrate to the normies that they're on the job by prosecuting the normies. After all, normies are much less likely to fight back than real pedophiles. And they still count as "enforcement actions."

There's no personal insult involved in my above. It's true I think the opinion of the above poster is both problematic and an approach that actually does real damage.

I mean, certainly "you ever think about that?" is a rhetorical turn of phrase but so is "I've seen both sides?" The discussion is informal here and emotional appeals happen on both sides. I don't really see the problem.

Edit: The problem with "balance both sides" is that it really is the position of one side. It's "sum of a (negative) utility function" outcome argument but generally put very emotionally. William Blackstone articulated the basic principle "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" but today's justice asks instead "What is the cost of persecuting ten innocent persons if it allows one guilty person to be caught" and then tells you of the (indeed true) horrors some guilty person has done. And one can't argue "small chunk" with that kind of bullshit. One has to attack this very conceptual framework for what it is, a pernicious approach. I feel no reason to be nice about it. This is not ad hominem, I'm not arguing from someone's personal failing to a claim of their argument being wrong. But there's requirement to be "touchy feely" and talk how much I respect everyone. We're beyond that at HN I think.

That's a fascinating thing to say, when discussing being polite and empathetic.

I could tell you stories (again from personal relationships with the folks being persecuted, and from friends that are social workers that are the "persecutors"), that would bolster my statement (which, for some strange reason, you can't seem to accept as valid).

But I won't, because they are not my stories to tell.

It's entirely possible to see multiple sides of difficult issues. We may not have the answer, but we can recognize the validity of everyone's position. I've been doing that for decades. It's not a "superpower." We're all quite capable of it. It's just that we seem to live in a culture that demands we "choose a side."

I don't really care whether or not you believe me. I said my piece, and I'll leave it at that.

Have a great day.

My argument above is not some claim either that horrible things don't happen or that you don't have experience with these horrible things - or even that you don't have experience with CPS getting out of hand. So it's false imo to say that there is something I "can't seem to accept as valid" in itself.

Which is to say, you're being very respectable while flagrantly misstating my position. This is a bad kind of "meeting in the middle" view.

I'm talking systems. I think we should talk systems - millions of people and millions of children are affected. There isn't an experience you could personally offer that's going fundamental change our concept of what CPS has become as a system.

Edit: A big thing is that in many US social services, we have a giant machine which does horrible, horrible things but where each person who's a part of it can honestly say they're doing their best and can point to other horrible things that might happen if they stopped doing the problematic thing they do now. It's a "tensile structure" ... of evil. It can't be fixed by balancing, it maintains itself with arguments of apparent balance. Which is why I feel justified making a call to cut through the broad "balance" perspective.

> Which is to say, you're being very respectable while flagrantly misstating my position. This is a bad kind of "meeting in the middle" view.

This sort of thing happens two for a penny on hacker news lol, you get used to it. I see more coherent discussions that are less vicious on somethingawful these days

I fail to see how cases against random schmucks require significantly less effort than "real" cases. A case worker getting the tips doesn't know a priori whether the tip is credible and they still need to go out and take a look at the same things either way. If anything, an open-and-shut case where there are clear signs of abuse should be quicker than a wild goose chase. Sure there are some monsters out there that are really good at covering their tracks, and it would take a lot of effort in those cases to find the evidence of abuse, but how do you tell the difference between someone who is fantastic at covering their tracks and someone who never made tracks to begin with?

Social workers are not paid much, it takes substantial effort to become one, and the work is extremely emotionally taxing. If someone wanted an easy job, there are a lot of better options out there. While I'm sure there are some people who have lost faith in the system and are just working till retirement, the overwhelming majority legitimately want to help kids escape abuse. If it's the same amount of effort either way, why not go for the more fulfilling option?

The simple fact is that innocent people should not be treated like criminals, but abuse can and does happen anywhere. Either you dismiss more tips and make it easier for abusers to cover their tracks, or you follow up more bs tips which leads to more innocent people being harassed. At the end of the day there is always going to be somebody unhappy.

Most CPS workers have good intentions, and would be competent. Except that they have to take on way too many cases with limited resources.

Yes but ... this process creates a rottenness that can't be fixed by more money by itself. CPS' understaffing problem isn't a matter of there being a fixed load that not enough money is given to. It is a natural product of the ideology of "government inefficiency" that pervades legislatures. So an increase in funding would result in an increase in mandates which would still be satisfied by finding easy targets rather than appropriate targets.

The situation is pernicious and I don't really have a suggestion for improving things. I do know throw more money would make things even worse for the reasons above.

This is true for many groups, public and private, and across all sorts of problem domains. I see it frequently in teams chartered to build software.

You can always make the case “we can do more with more resources”. But I want to see that you can be effective with only modest resources first. I want to see that you can make a dent in the worst part of the problem with the resources you have.

Too many groups of all sorts start with limited resources and focus on edge cases that don’t really do much to solve the problem that they’re chartered to solve. Such cases often are easier to address, or the solution is more obvious, or whatever- as other posters have said, it’s basic laziness. Hence, in the case of CPS, harassing people for minor issues.

In commercial endeavors, it’s mainly just waste resources on projects that won’t really help anyone. In public endeavors, it’s much worse - it erodes trust in the system, and often victimizes people due to the power of the state.

Between four(!) and twenty eight(!!!) more times:

https://www.focusforhealth.org/sex-abuse-and-the-foster-care...

And when these sorts of things happen, it never fails, all the 'parental rights advocates' out there that were previously pushing to be more lenient with parents scatter. And the judge and CPS are left holding the bag. (Some of the 'parental rights advocates' even flip flop, and now call for heads to roll, because now all of a sudden they are child welfare advocates. :eye roll:)

So now the judge, the police and CPS have not only the political leaders and the general population asking uncomfortable questions, but CNN and Fox News trucks outside their homes asking questions as well. For the judge and the CPS workers, their careers are ruined not only locally, but nationally. There's no coming back from that.

Well the other judges and CPS workers see what happens, and are that much less likely to give a single mother a break in the future for example. And it just iterates and escalates with each tortured, raped, or murdered (or all three) child.

[0] - https://www.invisiblechildren.org/2022/06/23/kamari-gholston...

This "learning" does not seem to me to be a sane evolution but rather a degeneration. A friend of mine describes how his father being a policeman let him see the worst in people. And there's a logical progression from seeing the worst to thinking the worst to not caring if you ruin someone's life through abusive prosecution. As I mentioned, catching a determined pedophile is hard but the "just put people in jail for nuisance and hope some of them are pedophiles" isn't protecting or helping anyone ... except an abusive and metastasized (in)justice system.

Off topic, but thanks for this idiom.