Right: what do we care about more, ideals or outcomes? Certainly we don't want to be doing immoral or unethical things to achieve the outcomes we want, but sometimes the ideal is just not particularly achievable.

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.

> So the law needs to be structured (and law enforcement trained) to ensure nosy neighbors can't cause damage like this.

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.

But rain has no brain, it goes down the drain.

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.

I don't understand what you're saying, but nosy neighbors are as inevitable as the rain, both are entirely natural, and planning that assumes that either will ever disappear is already a failure.

The problem is not that the neighbour is nosy, but that they are making a dumb decision in spite of all visible evidence that nobody is in immediate danger.

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.

those "nosey neighbours" are why these stupid rules exist in the first place

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.

I think humans discovered child welfare was important long before there were any organizations at all.

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-...

"argues", "contends"...

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.

> 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.

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

That woman has no certification or authority to decide whether a child is in danger, and the fact that the kid was a block away from home is not some undeniable indicator that he wasn't.

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.)

That woman is dumb. Authorities are indeed incompetent to pursue this further, but those two are unrelated. If either of those were not true, dumb thing would not have happened — as humans, we are all in this together, and it's all of our responsibility to do better. That neighbour included.

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 woman is an authority. It takes a village. Instead of calling the police, the guys with guns whose job is to detain and sometimes kill people, she should have asked the child what's up.

The police are the guard dogs who arrest criminals.

I‘ve had to call the police, several times, to help with a mentally ill family member having a psychotic episode.

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.

> The authorities have a responsibility to be competent.

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

What? No. People have a civic responsibility to protect exercise good judgment and common sense. If the people are broken the justice system, or any system, can’t fix it.

In other words, the nosey neighbor will likely not be involved in the solution.