It seems like they wasted two weeks of this family's time and added a ton of unnecessary stress, before even figuring out if the complaint was warranted. That seems deeply dysfunctional, and violently at odds with "innocent until proven guilty"

I’m not; there should be some reasonable basis for this level of intrusion, which there was not (note that the facts of the report were true and confirmed and still did not violate family law that CPS enforces; this isn't a case where someone reported something which would have warranted CPS intervention if confirmed.)

If CPS is going to force this sort of thing on parents, they could also reasonably be expected to compensate for the involved expenses - force CPS to pay for a nanny if CPS really thinks that's essential. If CPS can't afford to do that, then we as a society have already voted that the nanny wasn't actually worth the cost.

Yes, these kind of ”no unsupervised time, but children remain with parents” agreements are one alternative that CPS sometimes gives, where what they see as suitable supervisers are available, to putting the children in temporary foster care during an investigation.

They are justified in exactly the same cases where what they are an alternative to would be justified.

It's safe to assume if that legal barrier was actually met they would have put them in a foster home as staying with the parents would be too unsafe.

The parents got bluffed by tyrants. Personally I would never open the door to, nor sign any document, nor speak with CPS outside of court proceedings. Let them gather whatever evidence they need with a warrant and enforce any order by mechanism of the judge rather than agreeing to whatever pompous authoritarian bullshit is spewed out by some 3rd-rate bureaucrat in a "voluntary safety plan."

>”no unsupervised time, but children remain with parents” agreements are one alternative that CPS sometimes gives,

IANAL but I don't think anyone but a judge can give that order, and I would certainly bet my freedom and even my life on that.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/atlanta-judge-chews-lawyer-missed...

Stuff like due process is what our forefathers died to at least ostensibly give us.

Unfortunately, due process is whatever the judge say it is.

CPS is basically the adversary in the court proceedings so I see the judge more as an additional layer in the swiss cheese rather than a replacement layer in the swiss cheese, which your previous statement seems to allude towards.

The parents agreed to the surveillance plan. Unless they go to a judge for an order mandating it, it's voluntary. It's likely the lawyer recommended they go along with it.

This is like the 5th time you've commented on my stuff while missing major information from the article, or simply going off on some random tangent.

From the beginning I indicated I would force them to go through the court for the "voluntary" agreement. Your snark "but judges are better?" completely bypassed that, seemingly completely missing the request for the order would never even get to the judge if the adversary CPS never pushed for the order in the first place.

> nor did they bring it to a judge.

Which is why I proposed a scenario where they were forced to if they wanted it to happen. I'm well aware many of my opinions were not expressed in the "information" of the article (oh no!).

>This is like the 5th time you've commented on my stuff

If you check this thread, you initially commented to me on this thread. It was your choice to reply to me unsolicited, although your statement here is a nice attempt to try to turn that on its head.

Cheers and have a good day.

The same way they knew when the investigation confirmed the initial report, and it wasn't a violation.

Hahaha. Government employees lol.

Now, I am not saying that a report which on its face does not describe a violation does not warrant investigation, but absent some other evidence which provides cause to believe a violation exists which would legally impact parental suitability, it doesn’t warrant limiting parental rights during the investigation, just as a report to police that raises articulable suspicion but not probable cause to believe a specific crime has occurred warrants investigation, but not arrest.

It's the CPS equivalent of "let me in your house or else I'll get a search warrant and things will go worse for you." If they had the evidence to get in the house, they wouldn't be standing there asking you, the police would be there with battering rams busting in.

It's a bluff. If there is actually evidence they need to remove the child they will go get the order from the judge and execute it. And if that evidence exists, in no way would anyone in their right mind let you keep the kid by signing a "safety plan" to pretty please keep grandma and grandma around, who are not in any way credentialled/vetted to host supervised visitation.

Whereas if - as you seem to be assuming - CPS only heard "this parent commited neglect and possibly abuse of their child", investigation would indeed be needed to figure out they were being lied to. But other people are assuming CPS got accurate information in the first place.

Edit: apparently dragonwriter already explained this (better) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33629395.

Every parent within my hometown would be getting arrested. And god forbid when these people learn that we were riding the public bus service to and from school at 10 years old...

"My mom made me walk home because I was mean to my siblings."

"Where do you live?"

"That house over there."

Alternative, less dumb reality:

"Carry on."

A bit more concerned, still less dumb reality:

"I'll walk with you."

Dumb reality:

"I am calling the cops!"

And that fear needs to grow a lot before any action will be taken, so it's still a net loss for the present time.

Is that actually a harm, given the evidence?

So while the buck did eventually stop with them, it wasn't before they did harm of their own.

When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.

I wasn't suggesting that the ends justify the means. I'm simply speaking to the realities of the situation. However, from an ends justifying the means perspective, if you're not going to investigate, there's little point in hearing the case, and more importantly in people making the call in the first place.

"When an organization has the power to destroy families, I think we might want to require a standard of evidence above one nosy neighbor - or at least evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint."

We do have a higher standard of evidence for that power to be invoked; that's what applied here, and why CPS ultimately passed on this one. If anything, the bar is generally pretty high, and you can get away with some pretty dastardly things with the odds of CPS taking any kind of "family destroying" action very low.

> Otherwise, we should be OK with the government monitoring us 24/7 so that they don't miss any terrorists or child molesters.

I think that's unreasonably slippery sloping this story.

Sure, there are horror stories about CPS being overzealous, but this isn't one of those stories. I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring... and CPS obviously wasn't worried about terrorist or child molesters in this case.

It's a hard problem to get right. There's a LOT of really bad stuff going on (estimates are that 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse or neglect at some point). No matter how you do it, families will be destroyed and children will suffer horribly. However, the system errs on keeping families together, which is what you'd want. Given that bias in the system, engaging in at least a lightweight investigation is entirely reasonable.

> evaluate how many kids are protected VS how many suffer in Foster care VS how many had their lives ruined because their parents had a marijuana joint.

I encourage you to look at the data on this. It's one sided.

The parents were forced in to two weeks of supervision, requiring another adult around them 24/7. The innocent parents, who had not actually done anything wrong.

How is that not "overzealous"?

> I don't much like the "family safety plans", but it's a huge leap from there to 24/7 monitoring...

"Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second."

That sure sounds like 24/7 monitoring, even if it's not the government doing it.

> How is that not "overzealous"?

I didn't say it wasn't overzealous. I said it wasn't one of the horror stories about them being overzealous. I was specifically referring to the power to "destroy families". That didn't happen here.

> "Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second."

>

> That sure sounds like 24/7 monitoring, even if it's not the government doing it.

At best that's 24/7 for 14 days. In truth though, it's not monitoring at all, as there was no monitoring requirement, just that they couldn't be left alone with the kids. I mean, they literally considered a sleeping grandmother somewhere in the house to be sufficient. It's certainly intrusive and unpleasant, but it's not 24/7 monitoring, nor is it a slippery slope towards that.

No, they don't. CPS does not need to investigate observations that, even if they are true, imply nothing. That's just sentencing everyone who deviates from orthodoxy to constant investigation. CPS should be investigating claims of something and should have clear standards for those claims instead of being aggressive as a defense.

Or you can be a black man with a white stepdaughter, or a white-passing daughter, and literally get authorities called every time you walk outside with her.

I think you're taking a slippery slope argument well past the point of reason.

For starters, there'd be no reason for constant investigation: once you've completed an investigation, there is no reason to have another investigation in response to a similar report. At worst, every family would get a cursory investigation once. Admittedly, that's not great. Realistically, that would not happen either, as CPS does not have unlimited resources and would of course prioritize their time. So, the more people make spurious complaints, the less likely they'll get investigated. Similarly, it's pretty trivial to identify cases where someone is just spamming the system with complaints, and deprioritize it accordingly.

While it's not unusual for complainants to exaggerate, it's also not unusual for complainants to understate; you get a call about a family you've never heard of before, from someone who has never called in before, you just have no idea what you're going to find.

> Or you can be a black man with a white stepdaughter, or a white-passing daughter, and literally get authorities called every time you walk outside with her.

...and again, in that case, you're going to learn to ignore those calls pretty quickly.

Imagine how that'd work. If you called in a complaint about a ten-year old today, the kid would no longer be a minor by the time the investigation began. ;-)

I get that sometimes pro-active measures are prudent, but "hey, police, I saw my neighbor's kid walking outside unattended" is not one of those times.

And even if we did agree that these parents were in the wrong, and that the kid shouldn't have been walking alone, the "safety plan" CPS came up with was still a huge unnecessary overreaction. That kind of plan should be reserved for situations when CPS is investigating reports of active abuse.

That's true, but the thinking you are describing also enables all sorts of abuse.

> the "safety plan" CPS came up with was still a huge unnecessary overreaction

Yeah, at least as described in the article, it seemed excessive and unnecessary. I could see where they don't have a smaller scale mitigation to put in place during an investigation. It's definitely not ideal.

It's possible that "I saw a kid walking alone" isn't enough to justify an CPS investigation but "This child's parent was just arrested and is being charged with a felony for endangering this child" is reason enough.

At the point CPS got involved, they were investigating the home of someone being charged with felony child endangerment. We don't know what CPS polices demand n that situation, or what alternatives were available to the family, but after hearing what options they had the family agreed to the safety plan. If the alternative was "this or we have to remove you or your children from your home" I'd say it was the right choice.

It's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have and were required to do under the circumstances. In fact, if the family had gone to trial it would have helped their case that CPS investigated the home and determined that that the complaint was unfounded.

There's no reason to think that a neighbor with a beef could have called CPS and had this happen to anyone else. There's not even reason to think that a neighbor calling the cops would do it since those cops would have to be as dumb as the one in this story and arrest and charge an innocent person with felony child endangerment for it to work. That should be a pretty high bar to clear. The police screwed this one up, and that's what opened the door to all the other grief.

It's also worth noting that CPS's investigation would no doubt serve as helpful for the parent's defense against the charges.

Look at the hoops you’re willing to jump through to apologize for this behavior… the banality of evil.

“Of course it’s reasonable to report a parent because their child went for a stroll. Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law. Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids coulda got kidnapped. Let’s solve this by kidnapping them, strip searching them, and putting them in an abusive home.” (the stuff about strip searching was an amalgamation w/the propublica story. Not a part of your story, but not fake.)

Anything is reasonable as long as you follow policy? You were just following orders?

There was no comment about how it was reasonable to make the phone call, and there's specific criticism of the police conduct... All they said was that at the point CPS got involved, it's entirely possible that CPS did their job exactly as they should have.

I would point out that all we know that CPS did was a) require that the parents not be left alone in the house with the kids while they were conducting their investigation (and even for that, it's not clear from the story that that requirement came from CPS, but it seems likely that's the case) and b) perform an investigation that concluded there was no observable risk to the kids. They weren't involve in the decision to perform the arrest, not involved in setting bail, not involved in any strip search, etc.

I would suspect the first step of any investigation would be to find out why they are investigating and not just set everything in motion based on a vague report from police?

One could imagine that is how the investigation proceeded.

never said that. It's worth noting also that the person who called didn't report the parent. They reported the child who was alone. I don't know why she was concerned about the fact that a kid was walking unaccompanied, but as others have pointed out, we've only got one move when there's concern about some strange child's immediate welfare and we don't want to get involved directly and that's to call the police. It'd be nice we had a better option, like an agency to call who didn't see everyone without a badge as the enemy, but we don't.

> Then the police would have no choice, but to charge her with a felony; laws the law.

Again, I said nothing of the sort. In fact I explicitly stated that the cop was in the wrong.

> Then of course CPS must follow procedure; the kids coulda got kidnapped.

Yes, CPS should follow procedure. That doesn't mean that they should act as mindless drones, but they depend on police to alert them to situations where they need to be involved and once they are involved they should do their job. The concern the CPS should have had wasn't to make sure the kid isn't going to be kidnapped. It's to make sure that the child isn't being neglected or abused.

CPS has a tough job. If they a get a case and blow it off as no big deal and the kid they were supposed to protect gets killed that's an injustice too and sadly it happens (see https://abc7.com/gabriel-fernandez-anthony-avalos-noah-cuatr... or https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/cps-cases-workers-fired-aft...).

CPS has a job to do, and there was very little harm done by them in this case. They had a grandparent stay over for a few days. That was it. It might have been worse if the family didn't have nearby relatives who could stay over during the investigation, but again we don't have information on what CPS was obligated to do or what they would have done, we only know what happened and this was not a CPS horror story (which I know do exist!)

In this case, CPS was inappropriately given the case by the police, but there's no indication that they acted inappropriately in their role. In fact, they correctly identified that there was no need for them to be involved.

So in the end some lady messed up and thought a normal situation was an emergency and called the police. It happens and it wouldn't be reasonable for her to think there would be any harm done by that. The police showed up and failed at their job entirely, gave the mother a felony charge and got CPS involved. CPS did their job and are on record that the police made an error. The cop was the real problem here.

I'll also call out another party that failed here and that's the entire rest of the justice system. Every other officer aware of the circumstances who did nothing, and the folks who decided to go ahead with the charge and offer the "deal" that punished the innocent mother are just as bad. If the police officer involved isn't punished for this it also makes the department guilty.

The problems with our justice system go far beyond police. Anyone so clearly innocent should be able to fight in court with confidence that they can be cleared of the bogus charge and without risk of bankrupting themselves in the process. We clearly don't have that today.

I have had jobs that required me to be a mandatory reporter several times in my life, and none of this was even close to evidence of abuse I'd have to report.

> I have had jobs that required me to be a mandatory reporter several times in my life, and none of this was even close to evidence of abuse I'd have to report.

Mandatory reporting rules are, by design, not intended to include anything and everything that constitutes abuse or neglect.

When the report itself doesn't have any abuse in it, no way.

I have heard that it is shockingly easy to get a judge to issue a search warrant at 2 in the morning on a Saturday. I am not a lawyer, but from what I understand even then there is a minimum bar that needs to be met as far as evidence supporting the petition goes: what is the suspected crime? What evidence is there that supports the suspicion? Why do we believe that a search warrant will produce concrete evidence that the crime occurred and what is the scope of the required search (what property, specifically, are we asking to be able to examine and potentially confiscate?).

Similar, much higher, thresholds need to be met with respects to holding suspects in custody pending a trial.

Under no circumstances should any other government agencies be able to compel anything from anyone "just because." That's what the courts exist for. People have a right to due process and "agree to a safety plan" under threat is an act of force that was not authorized by a court order but by an independent government agency acting alone; outside of the one single entity that we trust to be in charge of doing that both fairly and under extremely tight scrutiny and limitations.

Police are empowered to arrest people on the spot. It seems impractical to add a judge to that process. Once someone has been arrested, you need CPS to step in anyway, at which point it seems silly to bar them from investigating.

> Similar, much higher, thresholds need to be met with respects to holding suspects in custody pending a trial.

I mean, she was released on bail, but she was held in custody. So yes, holding them in jail without bail has a higher standard, but you'd really hope the standard would be higher for that.

> Under no circumstances should any other government agencies be able to compel anything from anyone "just because." That's what the courts exist for.

That seems like a broad and vague statement. In fairness, the parents aren't obligated to do anything, but if they don't, then the courts would get far more involved.

Why does CPS need to restrict parental rights while investigating a report which even if confirmed as true (as it was in this case) does not violate family law and warrant further action.

This would be like saying that, had the law which addressed the family law aspects also (as it should have) made the same changes to criminal law, the police should still have arrested her, even when their information was only of an act that would be a non-crime if true.

So, the police arrested the mom, which means you've got a case where the mom has at least been accused of violating the law. Even if mom has not done a single thing wrong, given that she's been arrested & taken from the home, CPS has to get involved just to make sure the kids are okay. It follows that some degree of investigation is done.

I guess you can characterize it as "restrict parental rights", but really all they were doing was insisting that there be someone else in the home with the kids at all times. That does still seem like a bit much, I agree, but I don't see that as a restriction on parental rights. Let's say that it is then, I don't think it's unreasonable that someone who has been arrested specifically on charges of child abuse/endangerment might have their rights curtailed at least until such time as someone can feel like the kids are okay.

> This would be like saying that, had the law which addressed the family law aspects also (as it should have) made the same changes to criminal law, the police should still have arrested her, even when their information was only of an act that would be a non-crime if true.

It's very clear that they interpreted her own statement as meaning she did not perceive how she was endangering her children. I think that's a terrible assessment of the situation, as by their own admission, the kid was NOT in serious danger, but given that assessment, yeah, they should arrest her.

In the end, you do end up empowering people to exercise good judgement, and when they get it wrong, there will be terrible consequences.

The police arrested the mom, not CPS. There was no interaction between the family and CPS prior to the arrest. The arrest is what brings CPS in to the picture. Just by virtue of arresting a parent, CPS should to get involved, because arresting the parent potentially puts the kids at risk... and then you double down on that because they've been arrested for endangering the kids. CPS then needs to figure out the lay of the land, so that they can establish that the kids are NOT at risk and they can step out of the picture.

Which is another way of saying that it is just as much a precaution as it is a punishment.

CPS responsibilities are to the children and their safety. The police & courts deal with the parents, collect any evidence, mete out any punishment, etc.

Again, CPS isn't focused on the crime.

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.

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.

-Lyndon B. Johnson

You really have to take the adversarial mindset when thinking about large scale systems like this, to make sense of how they can break.

When I write software, every line of code is accompanied by the thought "I'm a blackhat hacker, with execution thread. How do I leverage this line of code?"

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.

The executive and judicial branches hold equal responsibility to this problem. Why not include them in the solution?

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.

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.

ACAB

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

That would probably not be a safe thing for the neighbor to do in a place like Waco--he/she could be arrested as a pedophile.

But the whole thing sounds totally crazy to me. I walked a half mile to and from school alone from first grade to high school almost every day.

1. I'd think if I stop and offer to pick them up, they might think I'm a potential pedophile/kidnapper. So I'm reticent.

2. They would think, as they likely have been trained, if they put out a hand and ask for a lift it might be be a kidnapper.

Somehow we have conditioned ourselves and our children in the space of maybe 40 years to think the absolute worst is likely when the reality it is actually quite rare.

(I'm in Australia)

I’ve been preaching for years that “stranger danger” has done massive harm to society, far far more harm than the bad actors they’re trying to save us from would have done.

Teaching children that all people are inherently bad and you should be afraid of anyone you don’t know sets the tone for how they are going to relate to other people for the rest of their lives.

In my experience most people are good and helpful, I’ve had far far more people be kind to me than harmful or malicious.

Mr. Rogers taught me to “look for the helpers” and that also told me that there are always good people out there who are trustworthy. We need to go back to that.

- a stranger is someone you don’t know

- most strangers are good

- the safety rules for strangers are to check first with your grown-ups before talking to, going with, or getting something from a stranger

- for kids who are old enough to be out and about on their own, checking first changes to thinking first, i.e. evaluating the situation

- if you are having an emergency where you can’t check first, you can get help from a stranger without needing to check first

https://www.kidpower.org/library/article/safety-on-the-way-t...

Maybe another way to put it is that the neighbor did a slightly bad thing, unnecessary police call, call it 0.01 Bad. The police did a terrible thing, 100 Bad. Judges and prosecutors even worse because they failed at their explicit task - making reasoned judgments about what is right and wrong - 1,000 Bad. CPS also had a complete failure of their explicit task, but maybe it is a little more excusable because hopefully most people who reach this point in the process actually do require some intervention, call it 980 Bad.

When you say that the neighbor is also to blame, it's kind of true in some meaningless technical sense. The neighbor did something slightly bad, but it is so slightly bad as to be totally inconsequential in the broader sense. If you were to try and minimize the badness here you should focus on the justice system, CPS, and the police - and you would basically never get to the neighbor because you could never optimize those other systems enough for the neighbors small fault to be consequential.

The failures here are all of the form "You incorrectly invoked system X. That was a mistake because X is totally broken!" The neighbor incorrectly called the police. The police incorrectly arrested the mother invoking the courts, the courts incorrectly penalized the mother and invoked CPS. All of those systems are completely broken and the solution is not to minimize calls to them, but to fix the systems.

Complaining about the neighbor is like complaining that the child was misbehaving which caused the child to walk home. Yes, it's true that misbehaving is bad, but only very slightly and we expect children to do that sometimes. Making unnecessary police calls is slightly bad and we expect some overly cautious people to do that sometimes.

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.

In this case, we want to avoid situations where parents are punished for their entirely reasonable childcare decisions. We're never going to be able to eliminate all ignorant busybody neighbors; that's just not realistic. So the law needs to be structured (and law enforcement trained) to ensure nosy neighbors can't cause damage like this.

And I think fixing the law enforcement response will actually fix some nosy neighbors: law enforcement telling such people that their report is incorrect and inappropriate will have the effect of reducing the incidence of such calls in the future.

Let's take this a bit further. We are never going to be able to eliminate all ignorant law enforcement regardless of training, that's just not realistic. Or prosecutors. Or...

I mean, this is a case in point (all of them were dumb or unwilling to admit to error in judgement), and I am sure you've seen plenty yourself: I don't know a single person who hasn't first-handedly experienced a dumb police officer (not saying they all are, but some certainly are).

If we accept that we'll never get everyone to be perfect, we should accept that we rely on everyone to not be dumb. It starts with your neighbour and you.

If I was the parent, I'd include the neighbour in my damages (emotional, reputational and lost income) suit along with the police and all the other institutions that didn't put a stop to this. Provided the parents can win anything in court, which I am not even sure about.

If the neighbour was really worried, they could have accompanied the kid to the house and had a chat with the parents.

Planning for nature and planning for failure aren’t exactly the same. And too much planning for failure when there are missed opportunities to plan for success, well, it leads to failure.

If you drove it off the lot, an unrelated point is made.

So you are worried about seeing a neighbour's kid walking near the home alone? Talk to them to check they are ok. Accompany them home. Talk to parents about your concerns.

Do not call the police.

Note that I am in no way saying that they take grunt of the blame, but we put adult people in jails for doing dumb things (hey, that lion in the zoo looked really sad so I released it). When you can hurt someone, it is your responsibility to not be dumb.

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.

> 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-...

And even with those qualifiers, you are only talking of legislative decision to protect child's welfare in USA. Eg. a quick search finds legislation aiming to improve protections for children in UK 50 years prior to your "1870s": http://history.parkfieldprimary.com/victorians/lord-shaftsbu...

Legislation is only needed when a particular behaviour becomes incompatible with current values, or has long been incompatible but becomes so prevalent to need legal recourse to stop. Children were protected by their parents and families through the ages, and while it was certainly not universal, it was prevalent. Though, I do recognize that the very definition of who children were was different, as it was mostly pre-puberty children to be treated with more protection.

I have no problem blaming this behavior. To be clear, it would not be productive to blame only the neighbor.

That woman has a civic responsibility to call authorities when she's worried about the welfare of a child. The authorities have a responsibility to be competent. The woman fulfilled her responsibility, the entire justice system failed. If the police and justice system aren't expected to have or use any expertise beyond some random concerned chick, they're not only failures, but useless. Lone individuals shouldn't be held to a higher standard than these people that we vest with the authority to make these decisions.

If anything, it would be nice if the police would have explained to her, when she called, the minimum standards for intervention when suspecting that a child is in danger. The reason they can't is because they don't have any.

Instead, it's somehow super-important to focus on and villainize this random concerned busybody. It's not important, and that woman could have been a hero for reporting on any other day (or with a legitimate justice system.)

If she was worried about a child, she should have accompanied them home.

Next time, she'll send police over when a kid can't watch more TV (or go to a party, or eat more sweets, or...) and ends up crying her guts out: hey, she's worried about children's welfare. I would be having police at my door almost every other day with a neighbour like that.

The police are the guard dogs who arrest criminals.

The police were very, very helpful and professional, especially the younger ones.

I think there’s a generational change in policing. Younger police (who grew up in a period of low crime) see themselves as social workers.

Older police see themselves as soldiers.

Its also probably because many of the younger police actually were soldiers, and understand that policing is a service you offer to your own soldiers, not a way of attacking the enemy.

Not in clown world USA. The USSC said there is no government responsibility when USSC created the doctrine of government immunity.

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.

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.

If you are not used to having police at your door, the mere event can be intimidating.

Not in USA. Supreme Court said cops have no duty to protect any individual. Supposedly cops provide general protection, or something.

USSC said cops don't have to do anything.

Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005)

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.

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.

But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.

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.

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.