Don't forget about the child safety services/social workers - they should have to be reasonable too.

My armchair analysis here is that behaving in a reasonable fashion would not result in being able to obtain and exercise more power.

The desire for more power, and thus funding, and thus better career aspirations is as relevant to CPS as it is the local PD.

Of all the spilled ink on the topic of how this stuff happens, there seems to be a culture of, "We lock up the bad guys and throw away the key". It doesn't take much to put you into the "Bad Guy" territory, and once you're there, you're not a person, a mother, a son or spouse with a life all your own. You're a threat to the societal order (no longer a human being), and deserve the full weight of punishment regardless of its implications.

The police departments which manage to actually take high crime areas, and turn them around into lower crime areas despite widespread poverty have undertaken a paradigm shift from, "Putting away bad guys" to "Building a community". Getting to know the community, its problems, its major players and learning what their struggles are and trying to find a way to integrate into solving those problems, using law enforcement as a tool and not its own pursuit.

I suspect child services / social workers are punished far more severely for false negatives than false positives. I think it is safe to say the outrage of failing to save a child would outweigh the embarrassment of a false positive such as this. I could easily see major news outlets and local politicians raising hell for failing to stop abuse but raising far less hell for something like this.

I have had multiple experiences with multiple CPS departments through multiple friends and family members. CPS hardly ever does anything and are largely useless. The only time they did anything was when the police opened up a second investigation because of the problems, and they told them "Don't talk to CPS talk to the cops and have them talk to CPS".

Assume the default for these kinds of agencies is false negatives.

No one wants to be the weak link that gets their name blasted in newspapers when a kid gets harmed. Not that it would really be their fault, but the incentives are obvious to "play it safe".

I feel like "playing it safe" could have been accomplished with the officers just dropping the kid back off back home. I don't see why it would escalate to pressing charges.

2 months later when something happens to the kid this entire thing will get replayed in the media and everyone that didn't do anything will be made out to be a villain.

Correct! There's a lot of crazy people out in the world who'll call the cops for all manner of things. The correct response would have been to ignore the call following a couple questions by the 911 operator. "Is the child in danger in any way?" the response would be "No." and then hang up on them.

The problem is the person calling will lie or exaggerate instead of saying no. If questioned later, they can fall back on claiming they were just trying to help and avoid getting in trouble.

Angry or nosy neighbors, police and social services can get each other caught up in a cycle of escalation that lasts years for some unfortunate families.

In that case the police should investigate and then rightfully conclude there is no danger and leave the child alone to continue walking in the street. After that they should arrest the caller for exaggerating (i.e. lying) regardless of their claimed intentions.

This assume some sort of rationality in our legal bureaucracy of course. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to exist.

> The problem is the person calling will lie or exaggerate instead of saying no.

The person calling is likely not "lying" about anything. If they believe it is dangerous for a kid to walk in the street, then the answer is a truthful "yes".

These people simply have different worldviews.

"Yes" is not an answer that should be responded to. Details are what should be responded to. Cops shouldn't be asking the neighbor's approval to investigate. They should treat a report as a witness, and refer to a checklist of types of observations that need to be investigated.

If a neighbor makes up details in a report to police, they should be charged with a crime. If the cops are asking "do you think we should investigate" to private citizens, they have abandoned all responsibility as law enforcement.

Imagine crowdsourcing your authority, making the justice system a militia for lazy mobs. Completely upside-down.

I agree. The problem is that police in much of the US are poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly managed, and increasingly marginalized. The US system of strong local governance means that only the nice neighborhoods get nice public services.

""Is the child in danger in any way?" the response would be "No." and then hang up on them."

After informing them, that unlike childs walking outside, abuse of 911 is a real crime.

> There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem.

It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.

> The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.

Yes, but what's their incentive to do so? The more I look at the society in this country, the more I see that the incentives for LEOs are perfectly aligned with corruption and abuse of power.

The check and balance part isn't working. Any decent judge should see this lacks probable cause. But judges are not impartial and instead side with the DA/police by default.

> any decent judge should see this lacks probable cause

You're shoehorning complaints about the judiciary into a case which never made it to a judge.

She paid bail. Bail is set by a judge. Plus, felony charges generally require a hearing before the trial.

Judges, DAs and by extension any public arm including police should remember that doctrine coming from Roman law "It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished" (John Adams, 1770) or likewise "the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer" (William Blackstone, 1769) or "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent" (SCOTUS, 1895).

Maybe we should remind everyone about this when they cry about cashless bail.

I think the main resistance to cashless bail is the poor implementation in many jurisdictions.

DAs more than judges, since DAs need successful convictions on crimes important to their constituency to get re-elected, and they need police cooperation to get successful convictions.

A judge may well throw this out on its merits, but the case has to progress far enough that a judge has the chance to consider it on its merits. A DA offering a plea deal "so you avoid risking jail time" is basically circumventing that, as the judge doesn't have the resources or authority to investigate every plea deal that comes their way.

You're supposed to have a hearing at which a judge determines if probably cause was met and then set bail. So a judge should have reviewed this.

> But judges are not impartial and instead side with the DA/police by default.

Anybody, and I do mean ANYBODY, who has been to traffic court knows the courts are the extension of the cops. Worse yet, in criminal court, judges tell the jury that "being a cop doesnt give any more or less truthfulness or power on their words".

The judges work with with cops and prosecution on a daily basis. They work against you extremely rarely.

> Yes, but what's their incentive to do so?

Not only that, they have a reverse incentive: Say something bad happens to that kid, now the cops will be on the hook for letting them alone.

The real problem is that the fabric of society is mostly gone. In years past, those cops would be chewed out by the old ladies at church the next Sunday. No wonder there is such a backlash building up in conservative areas of the country.

False. Police have zero duty to protect anyone, per the Supreme Court.

In fact, I’d argue that is part of the problem here: there is no liability for police, CPS agents, prosecutors, or judges for overreach and absurd enforcement actions.

> It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.

There's problems, and then there's unavoidable problems. Failure to design a system with checks and balances for the unavoidable problem is an avoidable problem. ;-)

> It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.

There's one reason: that overreaction is retrospective, and that if you can't cure cop overreaction (when you have complete control over training and livelihood), and you can't cure the entire system's overreaction when they have all the time in the world to think about what they're doing, you have no business dictating to individuals whether they're overreacting or not.

Blaming CPS overreactions on nosy neighbors is just like blaming SWATting on SWATters: an excuse for law enforcement failure, and in that an encouragement to law enforcement to continue to fail in exactly the same way.

Part of it is the procedural philosophy on crime that simultaneously makes crimes easy to prosecute, and demands the police act on any letter-of-the-law violation, without thinking.

You can get phony DUIs now too. How many people are on some pharmaceutical? Well if so, you’re automatically guilty, even if your doctors tells you that you can drive, and must take the meds.