That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.

I'd recommend people skip the article and go directly the advocacy site it links to and affect change locally. The event happened in 2019, involves the typical dumb ACAB trope and then is swept away.

They most likely dropped charges because it was an unlawful arrest and the parents could have sued and most likely won. When the DA found out they most likely shut the whole thing down.

https://letgrow.org/resources/state-policy-maps/

Indemnification protects officers, but no one ever talks about it.

Indemnification means that their employer (i.e. municipalities) must pay for their legal defense in a civil suit and any judgment that arises under it.

1983 cases are technically against individuals but not at all in a practical sense.

For some reason activists have zero interest in tackling this issue even though it could be done on a divide and conquer basis and even though it would provide much more deterrence than eliminating QI. I almost suspect the influence of the plaintiffs’ bar is at play.

Are you saying that, for practical purposes, qualified immunity doesn't matter to the individual as they will almost always be indemnified anyway? I suppose this is true in a pragmatic way, but not in theory. As you say, there's no law that says the government agency has to indemnify. While I'd be surprised to find a case where the official ended up paying anything out of their own pocket, there are plenty of cases where the official has lost their job over a judgement against them and none that I could find where they won the case due to being covered under qualified immunity but still lost their job over it.

Are you saying that, for practical purposes, qualified immunity doesn't matter to the individual as they will almost always be indemnified anyway?

Yep, except the almost part.

A couple years ago BLM had energy yet was distracted and diverted from the enabling problem - USSC qualified immunity.

Eliminating qualified immunity only helps with the second part and does zero with respect to the first, but advocates of reform never make that clear.

Even with qualified immunity sometimes victims win judgments. On the other hand indemnification is 100% universal and effective at protecting cops. No cop ever pays anything out of his own pocket, period.

Instead of hoping for trickle down to work why not attack the problem directly?

My kids are very very little now, but it's something my partner and I discuss how to handle in the future. We live in a typical suburb now, but we're planning a move to the city for several reasons. Counterintuitively, we think this will provide our children more freedom to grow. Our impression is that police authority goes unchecked in the suburbs, while the city resists police overreach (sometimes).

Father of 5 here and you are fully correct. Our kids are not meaningfully safer with constant supervision - and by mandating it, we're knee-capping their ability to develop problem solving skills.

America lacks community in many places. I don't know if it's uniquely American, but it's very common. Neighbors don't know neighbors, the shop owner doesn't know who kid's parents are. This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.

Arguably the most painful aspect of survival in our late-stage capitalist society.

I guess this is polar opposite: the situation is like this because kids are not allowed outside. Since kids are not allowed outside, you build "suburban sprawls": rows of houses with literally nowhere for those kids to go even if they wanted. And then you transport them directly to school and sports with a personal car. So the kids do not have interaction with other kids, because they are neither allowed to nor there is a field to play in. Naturally the other parents don't know the kids further than immediate neighbors.

The twist is that now the infrastructure is suddenly lone-kid-hostile.

Imagine if the street-scene was crowded with kids. They would witness vandalism and bad behaviour, and wrongdoers would be much more cautious. I wish kids would play outside on the estate where I live.

And how do we contribute to it ourselves? Lately I've been wanting to be intentional about getting involved, getting to know people, etc. I came across this blog post on the topic from HN a few months ago: https://www.seanblanda.com/its-time-for-localism-in-america/

* A two parent working household meant that there were less stay-at-home moms around to network in the community and build familiarity with other moms and neighboring families.

* The use of cars meant that there was less opportunity for interaction while walking in the neighborhood.

* Local church where people built a community through faith.

All other developed nations have big, urban areas where people don't know all their neighbors, yet they don't have this weird problem America has. I live in Tokyo, the most populated metro area on the planet, and I see little kids riding around on their bikes, by themselves, at night. Little kids riding the subways to places far from home, by themselves, is perfectly normal. I've also seen kids walking by themselves in Europe.

This is uniquely an American problem. IMO, Americans are simply paranoid.

Parents in the States were much more permissive in the 80s, and to a certain extent the 90s. That started to change in the 2000s, with far greater "helicopter parenting."

So are these descriptions of idyllic life in ex-Yugoslavia five years ago, or twenty?

I grew up in central Europe in the 80s and was given plenty of freedom, but I don't know whether kids there have the same amount as before, or if it has been changed like in the US.

I have no issue with my kids (8 and 9) playing outside alone provided they don't venture out onto the thoroughfare street. My concern is with irresponsible and inattentive drivers, including residential construction traffic.

For police to come and arrest parents for trusting their children with some basic freedom is unbelievably oppressive. It's bizarre to hear this coming from a country that once claimed to be the "land of the free". And this is hardly the first story like this.

Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do sex offenders?

Unless the EB was radically different from the rest of 1970s Earth, nothing.

In the US, pre-1980s kids knew not to take any kind of abuse to the police. At best they'd be gaslit or outed to their abuser (who was commonly family). For most of LEO history cops (who reflected society in general) were not there to protect kids. Perps certainly knew this.

Source: We kids talked to each other and figured out reality pretty fast.

As smart people, let's get a grip and realize that outlier incidents happen all the time, and just question the why and when they get coverage.

Only children that you can see in parks or on the streets of Bratislava alone are refugees from Ukraine.

It is just as well, because USSR preceded USA and Europe by a few decades to have BOTH parents work and thus the actual neglect of the kids began. Under socialism this was “emancipation of women” and proceeded also in Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, where women now worked all day in the same professions as men. Socialists were far ahead by decades in this regard.

But of course, this leads to a generation of kids who grow up without any parents most of the time, and raised by the state and the street — it is also what we have in the USA now too. The only difference is that most people work for large corporations instead of socialist cooperatives or government jobs:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286

Now I'm in Ontario and statuary limit for leaving child alone is... sixteen years :O

We can see school from out house but do not dare let our (independent safe and bright) child walk, not due to fear of crime, but the real fear of some overzealous bored neighbour calling it in.

Boo.

I think this is the root of it. Before the advent of mass media, you would hear about crimes if those crimes happened to people you personally know, but probably not otherwise. Rare crimes were rarely heard about and therefore people had an intuitive understanding that those crimes were rare. Mass media changed all of this. The most rare sort of crime is the most newsworthy because novelty sells newspapers. So the media has people fixated, worrying, about very rare sorts of crimes and this has made the general population much more irrational about rare crimes than it ever was before. Journalists may sometimes say that their job is to inform the public, but very often they induce a perception of reality that is less accurate than what people would have formed on their own with no journalist around to make a huge deal out of freak rare occurrences.

>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

I went to a hospital and the building looked in rough shape not really clean. The examination room had a leak in the corner. But you bet the doc knew what she was doing, was thorough and sterilized everything. It's not pretty, but gets the job done.

In the 2000s we used to pirate like there was no tomorrow. But cp is taken seriously.

We have elections... but having some wine at your picnic in the park may get you a citation.

We have elections... but, this article.

We have elections... but civil forfeiture.

We have elections... but you'll spend tons of your "free" time fighting with our healthcare system, should you ever actually need to use it. Ditto the time and contortions required to navigate our benefits systems if you ever hit our "social safety net". In either case, you're not gonna be feeling all that "freedom".

We have elections... but an LOLWTF-high incarceration rate.

We have elections... but are constantly scared shitless of civil litigation and liability and there are rules and disclaimers posted on every flat surface.

We have elections... but no mandatory annual leave, with the result that for most people 2 weeks off a year is considered decent. How many people feel "free" at their job?

But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)

My brother lived and worked in China for many years as a professional photographer and basically made the same points as you when we would ask him about what life is like over there. That was until he fell under suspicion at some point because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time taking pictures. He was under house arrest for over a year. They confiscated his passport but eventually let him leave because of Covid. He had zero due process. It was decided by the local police that he should be under house arrest. My family hired a lawyer but he had to present the lawyer to the police as a "concerned family friend who lives in China".

That anecdote is relatively tame compared to what some people go through in authoritarian countries. If the government targets you in one of those countries, your life is over with near zero chance of getting out of trouble.

They have rules as well. Your list of grievances has some small issuss. Why do you think an authoritarian state would better. For example in Sir Lanka chewing gum is banned. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_sales_ban_in_Sin...

That's a easy one because it's mentioned often but I guess my question is how do you know the US is less free than other countries? What if you are being manipulated to feel anger at the government?

> He had zero due process.

Are you saying that Chinese law wasn't followed?

You aren't going to see many (or any?) media stories that are critical of the government in China.

Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

It struck me as really bizarre.

Also it is the system that was designed over 100-200 years ago. The problem is the lack of meaningful reform because the people in power are there only because of the current system.

That’s the reason why is it so hard to change electoral system without some external/internal shock. And “unfortunately” US has been way too stable politically during the 20th century compared to most other countries.

Republican controlled states don't want people's votes to count, so none of them have passed the bill.

Actually, it does: more specifically, degree of proportionality does, and antimajoritarianism (systems in which an absolute majority-preferred option can lose to a minority option) are an extreme case of nonproportionality. Having a powerful central executive elected by nonmajoritarian election itself weights the government to nonresponsiveness (though the US has many other factors reinforcing that.)

The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.

Right now, effectively, the land votes, and the people's vote is often ignored. Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.

I haven't read the bill but if certain states are committing themselves to popular distribution of their electoral votes while the red states stick to all or nothing, the reality is that 40% of CA's electoral votes go red and blue candidates don't have a chance at winning.

More like that the votes of people outside their state matter more than the votes of their own people. Nothing weird about that being recognized as the disenfranchisement that it is.

> Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.

The Electoral College - and this compact of states pertaining to it - has precisely zero impact on any legislative branch, federal or state. It solely pertains to presidential elections (and in turn the rest of the Executive Branch).

The solution to the problem you describe would be to address gerrymandering and other instances of geographic electoral manipulation.

Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to vote for one party regardless of what they or the other party does, of course neither party is going to bother catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you will always buy apple products, then complaining that apple doesn't address your grievances.

I’ve heard Americans lament about this exact concept and coming from Canada I don’t know what the solution. Sometimes I think Ross Perot was the country’s last shot at anything but the present status quo.

And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.

If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.

The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise, and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many of the relevant issues in order to make an informed choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped with the core problem of most folks—justifiably!—knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state deals with).

This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which, while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented) idea originally, is now simply very bad—we get all the noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.

Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.

Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind, but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of the Senate.

States which have a say (or are heard really) during presidential elections are states with large enough populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough that there's a chance to swing them.

The actual number of potentially contested states is quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.

There are many "within the constitution" ways of adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual state would do this by itself because an inconsistent implementation would (IE if california or texas stop sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the balance to one or the other party for forever.

There's some indications that the republicans won the house in this current election cycle because new york didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several republicans to be elected when the absolute math would have made it trivial to exclude them.

Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.

Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have district voting, so they allocate one elector per congressional district (based on that district’s vote), plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9 electors combined. And it’s still far from proportional representation.

Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it’s not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully negligent deaths annually in <country name of your choice>.

Modern politics isn’t about stopping the deaths, it’s just better at hiding how the sausage is made.

- let say you’re a “solid” state (whether red or blue), odds are that’s on both presidential and state (governor, possibly to likely assembly), if you adopt district voting you parcel out EVs to “the other party” without that favour coming back the other way

- if you’re a purple state, then you lose out on campaign presence, money, and publicity, because instead of shifting, say, 10+ EVs getting that extra % popular votes shifts 2 EVs if they’re not in a purple district, 3 if they are

That’s why the NPVIC was designed with a threshold: when the NPVIC covers 270EVs it comes into force and everybody gets the same thing at the same time.

I’m assuming that’s because you’re not trying to vote in candidates who consistently support a small group of loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast majority of the country.

The electoral college was created because it was expected that state governments would elect the president, not citizens. In the presence of direct election of the president, it's an anachronism at best. It was never about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is just a tyranny of the minority.

If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll still be a much more fair and equitable system than the electoral college, which effectively means that anyone outside a swing state has no representation.

Of course, doing it that way would make it much more obvious that there's no credible reason we should give 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000 farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.

If you read historians opinions there are several reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically not cited [1], however one important reason which does get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to count slaves as population without actually letting them vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]

[1] https://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcol...

[2] https://historyofyesterday.com/the-racist-origins-of-america... [3] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929609038/how-electoral-colle... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/electoral-...

That's the case of every state which is away enough from swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential elections.

Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few months every 4 years.

[0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter

I live in Texas, around Houston. Here we certainly do have representatives (but not members of the Senate) who send mail to constituents with information. Our Senators send emails once in a while, if you sign up for them.

But good luck ever figuring out the real information from the spam and ~~malicious dis~~incorrect information and opinions.

More generally, any single-winner election system is prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%. This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy" Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly my whole life.

Then Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act during WW1. In Schenck v US and Debs v US, the supreme court upheld convictions (first for the crime of distributing literature arguing the draft was illegal, and second just for hinting that the US shouldnt have joined the war).

But yeah allowing the Federal government to have more power is definitely a double-edged sword

Additionally, the US' kinetic operations in the Middle East have shrunk substantially as the drone strikes have been substantially curtailed, again under the same president that recently extracted the US from a long-running foreign war. He got no credit for that either; it turns out nobody in the US really cares very much, and even the people who generally disapprove of US foreign military involvements don't seem excited to give credit to the current guy.

The US has always ping-ponged between loving foreign wars and hating foreign wars. Not having a reliably anti-war party is not great, but that's at least as much the fault of the voters.

If they knew about it in late 2020, that info must not have made it to the upper levels of the military, given how much crying and foot-dragging they engaged in when Trump tried for his (IIRC) 90-day withdrawal. One wonders how ready our military actually is if they act like moving low-thousands troops of and some equipment out of—not into!—a theater in which we control the airspace, within in a couple months, is a crazy thing to ask of them. It may have been a bad idea to withdraw that fast, sure, but some of their spokespeople they had on the circuits whining about how hard it was weren't saying it was a bad idea, but that it literally couldn't be done. Sure, Jan. Certainly, if The Shadowy Figures That Control Everything (riffing on the vibe of GP's post) had already decided we needed to shift to Ukraine, that was still a closely-kept secret in late 2020.

And I'm not as sure as GP that Biden's following through on the withdrawal was because of Ukraine, but I'd also not rule it out as extremely-unlikely—the timeline is such that it's possible.

Another fun exercise is to ponder how much - if any - influence Trump's supposed ties with Russia have on these hypotheticals. There was some other issue, recently, whose details have since slipped my mind, that made me think, "Oh, this 100% makes sense if you assume that Trump is being told to do Thing by a party who is trying to weaken America's position ahead of a resumption/escalation of 2014's hostilities." I believe it was something that Democrats uncharacteristically reversed course on, which, again, would lend credence to the notion that this was something of a clandestine pitched battle from the start. I wouldn't rule it out. Not from a Secret Society Ruling The World standpoint, more like Leaders In A Desperate Position Pulling Out All The Stops.

https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/15 https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/09

(I HIGHLY suggest reading at least a few weeks forward, starting from the second link.)

I'm sure Doonesbury got in on it, too. Eventually. After the Napster arc.

>(I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns

Yeah I often imagine myself in the scenario of what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms. I calculated it would take me about 2 weeks to print an FGC-9 and source the various ammo components (by doing things like using primers from nail gun ammo etc this can be done all from unregulated sources).

Also: I've seen this many times, foreigners from rich countries get completely different treatment.

I'm aware of my privilege, but since I have it does it not make sense to use it for my maximum liberty? At the end of the day I have to act with the resources I have, not the resources someone else has.

As for freedom, it's going to be relative. Each person has unique resources and abilities that dictate where they will find the most freedom. You don't have to victimize others to improve your own freedom.

In the US, flashing a PBA card[0] or the fire department/ambulance alternative will get you out of most of what police consider ‘low-level’ infractions(ie. Covering a license plate, speeding, etc…).

Or in less corrupt cases(like the ones I unfortunately have used mine for), it gets the cops to leave you alone or listen to you when you get profiled for no good reason.

I guess it’s technically not a bribe since no money is exchanging hands, but last I checked, each PBA card raises ~$150/year for the police union.

[0] https://www.the-sun.com/news/4212777/what-is-a-pba-card/

It's not that it's impossible for me to manufacture an illegal gun for myself. What's the point of doing that? I'm not a criminal. I don't plan to overthrow the government or anything like that. Why risk getting a criminal record for no gain?

Even where I live now (constitutional carry state, extremely lax on guns) pulling from the holster without a threat is gonna get you tossed in prison. Nobody knows you have it until you do that.

In practice I just live in a place that does not even require a permit.

I don't mean to be rude, but this phrasing makes you sound like an addict trying to work out if you can smoke banana peel to get high. You can just .. not have a gun for a bit on holiday? Rather than engaging in illegal activities? Heck, several countries have tourist hunting industries! (The tourists do the hunting, not hunting the tourists)

Turkey is a much freer country than the US. If the people of Turkey were to enjoy seeing their leader (Erdogan now) being ridiculed, this guy will be showing in circus shows.

Highly unlikely in one election cycle. The parties control both houses, the presidency, the states and the locals almost completely.

Step one is stop voting for incumbents and seriously consider voting out incumbents unless they are really, really good; exceptional. The longer someone stays in power, the more power they get, the more deals they make, the less accountable they feel. It's good to get fresh blood and a fresh outlook every term too. Really the bottom line is we expect change, but we keep voting the same people in and those people serve for decades. It's almost an insanity.

Once the existing political parties are weakened by turnover, you can start placing third party people in there. Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.

Most of the ground the mainstream media has lost is to absolutely whacko q-anon and alt-right podcasters and video bloggers and alt-news, which is not a great environment for third-party people, unless the third-party that you're trying to start is a christo-fascist movement.

So what prevents parties similar to the SNP and LibDems to get elected in the USA?

We have a uniquely-bad electoral system, which is why so much of this day-to-day stuff ends up so insanely dysfunctional compared to most other developed democracies, and we've had mass-media special interest propaganda running rampant in a way it doesn't elsewhere, since the 80s (loss of the fairness doctrine—which, admitted ickiness aside, did seem to keep things on the rails a bit—and deregulation of media outlet ownership leading to unprecedented, extreme levels of consolidation; hard to tell which of those is most responsible, since they both happened around the same time) and that propaganda's able to be unusually effective in part because of our bad electoral system.

The result is that as long as factions in favor of these shitty things can stay under one of the two big tents, they get the tacit support of all the rest of the factions under those tents, even if most of them don't like that first group of factions. "Of course civil forfeiture's bullshit, obviously it is... but I can't vote for a pro-choicer/communist/whatever!" et c. (and, yes, the effect is on "both sides"—it's why we hear a ton of noise from "no abortion ever!" and "zero restrictions until the baby takes its first breath!" while the majority of voters, who just want more-or-less what Roe guaranteed, get little attention)

So, our freedom to vote is even, arguably, quite a bit less-free than for a fair proportion of our peers, since our ability, in practice, to express our actual desires through the electoral process is much more curtailed than in most of them—though, obviously, that part doesn't apply to authoritarians states.

OTOH they also scared them enough that we got The New Deal. So. Mixed bag?

two parties. (Still better then one.)

This is possible in most of the developed world. You don't have to have the peculiarities of the American concept of "freedom" to have this one. Someone in Norway gets to enjoy both healthcare and being able to make mean comments about the Prime Minister.

And, again, these tend to be matter of perspective; balancing the right of free speech against the right to be free of discrimination. Each country is picking in these scenarios where rights conflict; I tend to prefer Norway's selections.

I'm not super familiar with Norway's speech protections, but it has a smaller population than the US state of Maryland, so it seems to be the exception more than the rule or at least not an easily scalable solution to America's problems. Saying "[Insert Scandinavian country proves it's possible]" is like saying "Look at how well Hacker News is moderated! Facebook and Twitter should take notes on how to do it right and fix the moderation issues with their services."

Neither society is 100% free; that's the point, really. The trade-offs like this that the American system has selected seem insane.

> They have very specific speech restrictions around things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly criticizing the government".

Germany, maybe. In UK a scottish man was arrested for tweeting "The only good brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuurrn." about the late Tom Moore. Apparently being arrested for offensive tweets is not uncommon in the UK. Lots of arrested around the time of the queen's death for making fun of the monarchy/dead queen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novak_v._City_of_Parma

> Novak v. City of Parma, No. 21-3290, is a 2022 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granting qualified immunity to the city of Parma, Ohio, and its officials for prosecuting Anthony Novak over a Facebook page parodying the Parma Police Department's page. As of December 2022, the case is pending certiorari before the Supreme Court of the United States.

> cherry-picked quirks of individual states

Civil forfeiture? Healthcare? Incarceration? Paid leave? These are each widespread national problems in the US.

Also in the UK being arrested doesn’t equate to being punished, legally the police have to arrest you before you can be questioned.

Googling Heinrich Bücker doesn't turn up much other than "World Socialist Web Site", and it appears Germany permits opposition to war just fine; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa0PevmD6EI

No. Here's a protip which applies to every country across the globe: if you're donating money to people doing things your government decided is illegal with the express purpose of enabling continued illegal acts, you're gonna have a bad time.

People are flocking to all kinds of places you are apparently not aware of:

> Saudi Arabia is among the top five immigrant destination countries around the world, currently hosting 5.3 million international migrants in its borders

That's just one example even though this one is probably not the "feel freer" type. There are others.

People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).

A lot of things were worse, but a lot were better. You're definitely not going to be arrested or harassed for letting your kids walk alone. Not sure how good their record is for actual child abuse (bad cases would make the news, so there was some enforcement).

While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists, and I believe many more were impacted from the latter than prevented from leaving that country.

No one is disputing things can get really bad in those countries. It's more about probabilities. One thing that becomes very clear in the US if you poke around: It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges, and I know plenty who faced them (some convicted). The number of people I knew in the authoritarian country who had a criminal record? Miniscule. Raising my kid here, the chances of him getting a criminal record is significantly higher here than there and is a source of worry.

And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.

And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).

> someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great place to live?).

Classic false dichotomy.

> It's more about probabilities.

I totally agree.

>People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).

As long as its not me - it is ok. Do I read it correctly?

Let me ask a set of questions and I am curious what you'd pick.

>While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists

What would you take: a higher chance to get on no fly list but still be able to drive to Mexico or Canada and fly from there or leave by boat or lower chance to not being able to leave the country at all for quite some time (potentially ever)?

>It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges...

What would you take: a higher chance to get felony charges or a lower chance to be in a wrong place and wrong time (killed for fun) with someone who paid their way out criminal justice (that's my explanation of a part of low criminal record)?

>And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.

The country were I lived a bit earlier would tell you were you can live. What would you take: a higher chance to have problems with apartments search or not being legally allowed to move cities without power tripping local bureaucrat giving you permission?

>And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).

That is how it works, you need to have loyal people in local places. You can call it however you want: mayor of the city, ruling party local political leader, etc.

Edit: formatting.

To me this is a non-distinction. That reasoning applies in the US as well. As long as the cops are stopping the guys who don't look like me and beating/killing them and not me, it is OK, right?

> What would you take: a higher chance to get on no fly list but still be able to drive to Mexico or Canada and fly from there or leave by boat or lower chance to not being able to leave the country at all for quite some time (potentially ever)?

Given that I personally have known a number of people on the no fly list (which increases my chance of getting on it), but no one in that country who was prevented from leaving, I'll take the latter.

As I said, it's about probabilities.

> What would you take: a higher chance to get felony charges or a lower chance to be in a wrong place and wrong time (killed for fun) with someone who paid their way out criminal justice (that's my explanation of a part of low criminal record)?

In the country I lived in, paying your way out of criminal justice was not something that happened much - I'm not sure if it happens more in the US or not.

Remember: My country is not your country. And do not make the mistake of conflating authoritarian with corruption - these are separate vectors.

And speaking of killing, the homicide rate is much higher in the US (more than triple that country). And if I'm getting killed, I really don't care about the murderer's back story. There's not much to choose here - the US is clearly worse.

Don't conflate authoritarian with high crime.

> The country were I lived a bit earlier would tell you were you can live. What would you take: a higher chance to have problems with apartments search or not being legally allowed to move cities without power tripping local bureaucrat giving you permission?

My country could have had the same problem under certain circumstances. Yet I know more people in the US who have trouble finding apartments for prior crimes (or credit issues, or whatever) than I know people who had trouble moving cities. I can easily see identity theft really screwing up my credit history leading to this problem. Not a concern there. So yes, I would prefer the other country.

> That is how it works, you need to have loyal people in local places. You can call it however you want: mayor of the city, ruling party local political leader, etc.

Maybe in your country, but that's not how it worked in the one I lived in. As long as you yourself were not a threat to the top level staff (president, etc), the judiciary was relatively effective and didn't care about local oligarchs. And we just didn't have any overlords.

That's in addition to the hard-to-quantify harm to freedom from having to worry about terrified, trigger-happy cops.

Got half a mind to research it and write a book about whatever I find....

We have elections... but everyone is so terrified of the LOLWTF numbers of guns in society that we never leave the house

So authoritarianism often gets a lot of the small stuff right at the cost of the big stuff while freedom often means sacrificing a lot of those small things to get the big stuff right. Having a society where you’ve got the best of both worlds is a really hard balance to strike.

And while it’s really easy to say that the big stuff is more important, the subjective feeling of freedom can be more affected by the small stuff because it’s much more a part of daily life. I don’t need to criticize my government on a daily basis, I only need to do that at critical moments. But I have to park my car multiple times a day, and needing to keep it safe becomes a front-of-mind concern that makes me feel less free.

Actually that semi quote is typically used in relation to the Spanish civil war and it's an old lady saying "the anarchists were certainly a weird bunch, but they did make the trains run on time).

Also the correlation between harsh punishment and lower crime rates is dubious at best. The US has harsher penalties than most other Western democracies, but higher crime rates. This applies in particular to murder, where the rates are higher despite the death penalty. To add some anecdotal evidence, the only place I was ever pickpocketed was in Shanghai (where punishment is extremely harsh) and I have visited places like Nigeria which has a much less functioning law enforcement system.

>We have elections... but civil forfeiture.

We have elections... but once in a while a shadowy organization within the government assassinates the President if he becomes too much of a threat to the establishment, allegedly.

Democracy isn't about getting what you want. This reminds me of people who say "not my president " or "I didn't vote for that"

Maybe the real enemy of the American people is ... the American electorate?

Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

Except babushka didn't have a dumpling shop because private enterprise was outlawed. You probably mean the Pastry Workers' Cooperative, an organization that didn't actually make dumplings because flour and vegetable oil was ratoinalized. The state was exporting those ingredients to the West at a loss in order to obtain dollars and pay back the IMF loans. Instead, the PWC shop had lots of vinegar and pickled cucumbers for sale. Which was too bad, because nobody wanted to buy those things.

> That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.

I gently suggest that you might be missing the forest for the trees here. OP is referring to the well documented (Eastern block level authoritarianism) practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved).

That happens here, it's just not coordinated before the fact. If you piss a policeman off by taking too long to pull over, they will beat you and get away with it. There are many examples of this on YouTube, here is a relatively minor one. This poor woman will be forever traumatized by this event. Those police won't get fired and it's pretty obvious they have some serious anger issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vFupklNSs0

I feel policing and the overall justice system is the single largest threat to our country right now and if it isn't rectified will lead to massive civil unrest. This channel covers a lot of it.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCSd9ZNL0nshOhXwtfIJBA

This is a more recent channel that covers quite a bit as well.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMcW0MFzOAgfQ-7et47zw

The police did drop charges. But then a social worker got involved and they had years of grief afterwards because of it. Which couldn't have been reported on back when the event happened, and makes it a lot more than just "stupid cops got immediately corrected".

Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere. Which is another can of worms.

QI doesn't stop you from suing “the police” (as in, the public agency responsible), it stops (absent clear precedent eatablishing the right on which you are suing) individual public officers.

It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here. And if they were, then it would do a whole lot more to dissuade other police officers than any official department policies.

And that is exactly what qualified immunity keeps from happening.

So?

> The police department did nothing egregiously wrong.

Insofar as the officers, as agents of the department, were trained and supervised in such a way that they did something egregiously wrong in the conduct of their duties, the police department did, in fact, due something equally wrong.

> It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here.

Then you should favor suing the responsible department because, given QI, you need a clearly established right for their to be personal liability, and the only way to get there is to sue someone to clearly establish the right. Which can't be the individuals, because QI.

(Even without QI, you should favor suing the deoartment, because individual officers can be disposable and replaced with people selected and trained for the same tendencies, but department leadership and policies that keeping turning into a liability hole for the local government are more likely to trigger more significant changes.)

I should not favor suing the department when I can find no legal theory under which they should be liable. And in this case it was an individual officer mistake that directly did no harm, and was corrected as soon as it came to the department's attention. I'm not going to find anything in police training or general behavior that fits with this mistake being a general pattern that is endemic to the department. I see no damages or legal relief that makes sense here.

Arguing about what good might come from the department losing said lawsuit is like debating how convenient it might be if pigs could fly. The whole conversation is based on something that isn't going to happen, and therefore isn't a real possibility. And any attempt to go from discussion to reality by actually filing said lawsuit is a waste of effort.

OTOH, you could argue the opposite. It made the news (even if the source in this case is especially biased, I will assume good faith). In a country the size of the US, some amount of official misbehavior is going to happen with some regularity, it's just a numbers game. I'll worry more when we stop hearing about it.

He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash and arrogant. If you put someone like that in an environment with other people that are also there for the power trips, these sorts of situations are the outcome you get.

This is how most humans are. My tribe:friends, Everybody else: enemies, let kill them.

It's Jekyll/Hyde.

But, that's probably true in mid eastern and western countries.

It's generally true when there is no competition or pressure of some sort, when there is competition it's start to bring out the latent evil in most people. That is how authoritarian groups evolve.

On the flip side, there's been a definite trend in the militarization of the police forces and other public facing groups. The first big wave of this I personally saw came from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans joining the public service. Is not unreasonable to think that individuals with a background occupying a country with a hostile population transferred norms from that into their new job.

As a consequence, most cops are good human beings who care about their community.

Instead they made their community less safe by creating even more doubt and distrust in police, in their community, and psychologically injuring the parents and children.

Outside of the Polish martial law I don’t think my family ever risked arrest for walking to a cake shop as kids.

Cannot comment on the USSR, but I highly doubt the authorities did that kind of thing either outside of, perhaps, the holodomor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heien_v._North_Carolina

I feel like you just googled that and pasted what the search result.

They could file a FOIA for 911 call recordings during that timeframe. It's likely no calls were made.

It's amazing how effective propaganda can be.

The infuriating thing isn't that the police made mistakes or were jerks. It's that the family can do nothing to achieve justice against the state/the state has no consequences.

I wholeheartedly agree that the fundamental issue is the complete lack of judicial accountability. These people are getting paid a salary while they harass you, clock out at 5, and their morning routine is to get right back at it. Meanwhile your entire life is personally disrupted due to their power trip and/or malicious mistake, and the best case you can hope for is to be able to walk away?

Whether or not these officers' actions were in line with official department policy, there should be automatic compensation to the victims for their arrest and imprisonment, emotional distress, hiring attorneys and other expenses incurred. And if these officers' actions were not in line with written department policy, then they need to be treated as private citizens harassing people under the color of law, and be held personally criminally liable for the false imprisonment, etc.

Have to get rid of qualified immunity first, which we invented (in a total coincidence) at the same time cops really wanted to be thumping civil rights protesters without consequencews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray

That's not how the courts have treated it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1047085626/supreme-court-poli...

> In practice, the doctrine has shielded officers from liability in hundreds of civil cases, even when accused of destroying property, killing innocent people they mistook for suspects or stealing thousands of dollars.

(I would presume stealing thousands of dollars is forbidden by most department policies.)

The main problem is extending blanket sovereign immunity to these actions/positions in the first place. Let's say someone is arrested, even on a good faith suspicion of a bona fide crime, and is then later acquitted or the charges are dropped. From the victim's perspective, what has actually taken place is a kidnapping and false imprisonment. But the current framework just writes off what happened to them as collateral damage, leaving the unlucky individual to fully suffer it. What has actually happened is that they've suffered an externality of policing, for which they should be reimbursed for, with the damages rolled into the overall police budget so that it reflects the true cost of the police department.

Right now these externalities are being covered by a perverse reverse lottery of unlucky citizens, and that is not right. Reform this perverse incentive and correctly attribute blame (economic blame, at least), and many other incentives will fall out from that.

Maybe in Boston. They're not THAT common in CT and other states.

(I live in Boston. The accent is crazy.)

Interesting how that works. My state has zero dunkin donuts. But I live 3 miles from downtown, and pass 5 starbucks, 4 dutch brothers, and a few other independant coffee shops :) but sadly, only one donut shop

Growing up, I was allowed to freely travel within my neighborhood, but not cross the main roads. There was a Dunkin I could safely get to without crossing any big streets.

It's supposed to. This is Reason's schtick, publishing click magnets about terrible overreach by our evil Big Government Overlords, and you need to give this publication a ton of salt if you read it.

Like start out by noticing that this isn't journalism. It's written by Lenore Skenazy "president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement." Quite literally this is an evangelism and fundraising piece by a charity that benefits from exactly the outrage it's trying to drive.

If the guy was arrested, where's a link to the records? Where are the statements from police? This apparently happened four years ago. Where's the contemporary coverage? Why does a Google search for "Killingly CT parent arrested 2019" return a bunch of SEO cross links to the same story by the same person?

I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm saying we need to be a little more careful with what we get upset about.

Not trying to agree/disagree but just sharing what I noticed.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/free-range-pa...

Using this approach doesn't mean that whatever doesn't get printed in NYT or WaPo or doesn't get covered on CNN didn't happen but considering police overreach is a hot topic in recent times with prevalent extensive coverage, it is possible but not probable that something like this (involving kids, which makes it a more "newsworthy" story) hasn't been reported, in any of the major news outlets, just because of undue influence of Police/CPS.

But that's not the standard for good journalism! You appear to be saying we should believe this story in Reason despite the long delay from the events, uncorroborated evidence, and clear bias of the author... because we can't prove it's false?

No, that's wrong. The correct way to interpret the data is that this is a suspect piece of writing that someone should try to verify before trusting.

I never said that.

At some point they went deep Tea Party/MAGA type, but seem to have come back to their roots over the last few years. However the commenters are consistently still MAGA types.

Note all the quotes from law enforcement and details about the event.

But failing to even get that far tells me that either the author doesn't care about whether this is true (not unlikely given her day job), or that they're deliberately hiding something (maybe "Killingly police deny the arrest and have no record of the interaction with Rivers").

I haven't been able to find any reporting about this story[0] till this Reason piece, so I'd be curious to understand their journalistic process in putting this together.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=Killingly+parent+arrested+20...

Edited to remove flamebait swipe at Reason -- I'm better than that. For now.

Without talking to them, I'm not sure that's a fair conclusion.

Regardless, IMHO the real culprit is vagueness / ambiguity in the applicable laws. Which means the legislators are at fault. And in a democracy, ultimately the voters.

How can you seriously think this is anyone’s fault but the cops? Blaming politicians is one thing and they absolutely are to blame for a lot of our policing problems, but blaming “voters” for cops being assholes is just ridiculous.

Cops AND the government giving them the power to do stuff like this are both to blame.

The city government can remove powers from these officers as well. They are just as at fault for letting this exist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

Much of the power of local officials is blunted by agreements in place with police unions.

I'm not electing anyone. I have one vote. I see almost no difference in police violence regardless of what political party is in local power.

Everything you have written is wishful thinking.

Maybe stop living in places that are run this way?

Who let the supposed powerful police unions get that way? The police are an arm of the government. You will change nothing by targeting the result of government overreach instead of the cause.

Congratulations though on personally solving all government problems wherever you live.

Why are you even commenting on this thread at all then?

If I really thought that I would get the fuck out instantly or do my best to fix it. A place like that isn't somewhere I'd willingly live, and I certainly wouldn't want my children growing up in that environment. Are you saying you're ok with your kids potentially getting killed by these rogue cops?

Personally, I think either you weren't serious with your comments, or you're now realizing that what you said doesn't hold water.

Of course I care about it, I never said I didn't. I said there is nothing I can do about it and that I am not going to try.

What have you done to prevent companies dumping poison in your kids drinking water? https://publicintegrity.org/environment/industrial-waste-pol...

What have you done to stop police killings? https://abc7chicago.com/amir-locke-shooting-mark-hanneman-mi...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/03/us/ohio-man-police-shooting-j...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/cleveland-officer-...

It has certainly gotten better in the last couple years; I am sure you are the one responsible for that.

There are hundreds of terrible things that are done by people with more power than us everyday. What are you doing about it?

I'm not. In this situation, there were (at least) two necessary conditions for the arrest to happen:

(1) The law was written in a way that led the police to believe a crime had occurred.

(2) The police chose to perform the arrest.

If either of those conditions weren't true, then I don't think this incident would have happened.

It's entirely possible that the police exercised lousy judgment in this case. I'm simply reserving judgment until I hear their side of the story.

I brought up (2) for several reasons. First, I think it's BS to create politically sticky situations for police, and then skapegoat them things turn out badly. (Imagine the news coverage if they didn't arrest the parents in a situation like this, and then the kids were abducted.) Second, I don't see how, in a democratic form of government, citizens can avoid responsibility for the state of their laws. If the laws are outside their control, it's not a democracy.

'Imagine' is a nice pre-amble to a strawman: that didn't happen.

What did happen is ridiculous, and regardless of the citizens having a very indirect say in the laws that get made to make them first cause rather than the police officers (and their immediate superiors) is - frankly - ridiculous.

I really wonder why you would bend over backwards to find excuses for something like this, it doesn't pass the beginnings of a common sense test. Having your parents arrested because you're walking on the streets as a child makes zero sense, no matter what the law says and no police officer with half a brain should make that arrest. Arrests are for criminals, worst case if they really wanted to test the law they could have simply cited the parents and then they'd have their day in court, this is simply a power play of the very worst kind.

Oh, and it is 'scapegoat'.

The fact that charges were never brought means that the law very likely wasn't written in a way that a reasonable person would believe a crime had occurred. Certainly the DA's office did not believe a crime worth indicting had occurred.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when...

I have two counterpoints.

1) We haven't heard the police officer's side of things. All we're going on is one news story, which didn't even interview them. So we simply have no idea what additional factors they may have considered. I think it's irresponsible to pass judgment on them until getting more info.

2) I agree that laws need to be written with some discretion left to the judiciary. However, there's been enough media coverage on this general topic over the years, that Connecticut voters have had a chance to refine the laws. E.g., to modify the laws to clarify that kids are permitted to roam free in public places. But they didn't.

Are you sure the police dropped the charges? Usually criminal charges are brought by a prosecuting attorney, not police.

Personally, as a parent, I hate these laws. I want my son to be able to explore the neighborhood, have fun, do outside chores etc without myself or my wife monitoring him. Imo forcing parents to be glued to their kids 24/7 makes life more stressful for everyone.

People bashing the cops for this is bullshit too. The cops are the bad guys either way. They enforce the law and they are the bad guys. Something happens to a kid with this law in place and then they are also the bad guy for not doing their job.

The solution to all this is simply to not have children. It is just another of the near daily reminders of how great it is to be child free.

FWIW, I'm not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm simply withholding judgment, which (hopefully) is more neutral.

Please see my other comments about there being two necessary conditions for this arrest to have occurred.

I know several other people already commented, but still I want to add my own view because this pains me.

I grew up in the 1970s/80s in an area of two 35 thousand people towns (plus lots and lots of smaller towns and villages - rural but it's still all densely populated).

We had all the freedoms to go anywhere except doing school hours - as long as we didn't drive (pretty far) to the German-German border area. Which I would not even have been able to point out the direction. I was in the forests and out alone ALL THE TIME, and so was everybody else. I also was a "key child", this too was very common, I had a house key and was left alone in our house all afternoon, and again, that was common.

Independence, education, sports - the East did not want to raise feeble people. Daily life was NOT some dystopian thing. Youth life was full of biking around in the afternoons, visiting friends all over the place or into the fields and woods, weekend parties, and we were mostly left alone, by parents too.

When I visited the US for two months, driving around in an old car I had bought (~20 - rental car was too expensive for that long, surcharge for being young too) - and sleeping in it most of the time. My impression afterwards was that the US was quite the police state. Sleeping in the care alone, never mind driving in an old car near the Mexican border once, got me lots of friendly meetings with ne police friends... never had any problems and it was all friendly, with my German passport and my story of driving from New York to Alaska to San Diego to Key West to Washington D.C. and lots of loops for scenery and NPs on the way, but I don't think I had a SINGLE encounter with East German police in all my life. Okay once, visiting the East Berlin airport, when I was with a friend who looked "non-standard", they only checked his ID and nothing from me.

And when I saw "Employee of the Month" parking at the very first McDonals I drove by in my new (old) car I could not stop laughing. THIS was sooooo East German! And we even had jokes about it, assuming such a thing would never exist in the West! And here I was in the capitalist mother country and saw a key component of "socialist" worker life.

If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned. And they probably would have been suspects for the rest of their life.

I'm pretty sure you can find happy kids in North Korea too, it doesn't mean they're not living in an authoritarian society.

Thank you. I can't believe I had to scroll as far as I did to see your comment.

I'm not saying the comparison is or isn't apt, but what a side-track to bother arguing that the policy wasn't 1:1 identical.

A curious mind would encourage learning more about something you likely have had no real world experience with.

> This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.

So I would say my assumption that he was talking about exactly that incident are quite justified, and this was specifically about children walking around on their own.

I have no idea how in that very specific text and context of OPs comment some general statement about Eastern Bloc authoritarianism can be deduced, or if it can, how it would make any sense to suddenly bring that up in that very specific context, which OPs comment maintains. As far as I can tell it's always within this frame of the story.

I see no reason why my response would not fit perfectly. The Eastern Bloc did not have that problem, it makes no sense to try to reframe it. How does it matter that they (we) had lots of other problems? ones not the subject of the current discussion?

Although I agree with aspects o your general point, this is a bad take.

Pretty sure this is also true of the US-Mexico border wall. It's just much longer so it's easier to get away with, but if you tried to cross illegally in front of a law enforcement official and ignored their orders to stop, odds are very good you'd be shot. And your family would definitely be questions during the ensuing investigation.

How is shooting at someone crossing a border illegally reasonable use of force? It's a nonviolent offense that doesn't harm anyone directly.

By force of law, which is my point :)

I think there's a good chance that you'd be shot at by US law enforcement if you tried to make an end-run through a border checkpoint, regardless of which direction you're going. In fact, they might even be more aggressive in the US -> Mexico direction (because follow-and-detain is less of an option and the presumption that anyone heading that direction illegally is either smuggling or evading arrest).

> But East German border guards were shooting East Germans who were welcomed by West German guards. Pretending that this is a typical state of border affairs is gross revisionism.

Of course. I think the point still stands.

>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

You could even extend this and say that the level of authoritarianism on display is what I was told Eastern bloc countries were like (and why they were bad).

Even if you meant authoritarian approach towards citizen in general (not regarding parenting), this is also incorrect. People who stayed out of politics weren't really persecuted here in Poland. Activists, independent journalists and priests were persecuted by the police but ordinary people just went on with their lives (although it is true that the regime used to be very oppresive in the 1940s-50s before Stalin died in 1956).

I’m sure there were children in Moscow, Kyiv or Cracow who had very different experiences from you. Whose parents did something that caught the KGB’s attention and then they were in for a world of pain.

I think it’s very accurate to say that for most people living in a relatively rural area anywhere in the world, they’ll be pretty safe from this sorta attention. The big difference is the degree to which your life is ruined. In China (or USSR) any sort of individual disagreement with the police would virtually guarantee a trip to an undisclosed location, bribes and probably torture. Here in the US you still have to deal with people and their egos but many of the laws will protect you from the worst of other peoples’ power trips.

How is your grabbing at straws, bringing in something completely different - politically persecuted - and making assumptions ("I'm sure") and looking for the worst outliers instead of what is normal inside the distribution curve a "counter"?

Sometimes I'm just disgusted by the discussion. Some people, instead of curiosity and wanting to learn, have some cognitive dissonance issue whenever anyone says anything non-binary about the East. The responses are always exactly the same and perfectly predictable too.

Imagine somebody said something about their nice life in the US of A and then you would always and predictably get a slew of responses along the lines of "but police shootings", "not true democracy because only two parties both heavily dependent on big money", "health care", "prisons", "US wars after WWII", "guns", etc. etc. Point being, anything but pointing out to the negatives is accepted by those people, "Thou must not have any other truths!" kind of.

I think there has been a confusion in our society between well-being and safety. There are definitely circumstances where one is unsafe, but this is for their well-being (letting the teenager drive by themselves for an errand), and there are circumstances where one is safe, but someone’s well-being is degrading (helicopter parenting).

Why do you think they might not have been doing this capriciously in this specific case? The department admitted the stop was over-reach, even before the parents found out the officers had called child proctective services on the parents over walking outside. Is that demonstrating a reasonable concern for well-being? I surely want to have the right to let my kids walk around outside, and I believe that there is no U.S. law that limit this right, nor should there be one.

And yet, this is where things are headed: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-strugg...

Beyond whether parents have a right to do this or not is whether or not children can grow into resilient, confident, independently-thinking citizens. And what we have is not.

Maybe I don’t understand the distinction you made then. If you can’t distinguish them legally, then what is the difference you’re talking about? Are you saying that well-being is safety, and police can and should be able to arrest people & parents for failing to be well?

I am most definitely not saying that well-being is safety, but that it seems the way people are talking about it now conflate those. I am not necessarily talking about police enforcement (though I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future, police are using well-being as a criteria for safety). Rather, I am talking about parenting style. That is something the author of that article is talking about in the broader sense; the author of that article also authored a book about "free range parenting", and why it is needed.

Safety is something that is easier to see, though I think is still problematic. There are statutes and precedence that describes levels of safety in different context. For example, from this site (https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...)

> An adult caring for a child has a legal responsibility to ensure that child is free from unreasonably dangerous situations. When an adult caregiver fails to adequately protect a child, states often punish this as a crime known as "child endangerment."

> Child endangerment occurs whenever a parent, guardian, or other adult caregiver allows a child to be placed or remain in a dangerous, unhealthy, or inappropriate situation. Some states charge this crime as a type of child abuse.

Note that generally, the legal responsibility here is for the circumstances, that is, the situation external to the child. (With the original article that started all of this, the question is, what circumstances are "unreasonable"?)

But what is well-being? Well-being is not the circumstances, but rather what someone experience.. Because it is not describing a circumstance, it's not something that is as easy to observe, measure, or intervene. People can (and probably will try) to use circumstances as a proxy for someone's well-being, and as such, start using the criteria already in use for "safety" as a (poor) proxy for "well-being". Because we are using safety and circumstances as a proxy for "well-being", that scenario where police starts interpreting things that way is ... not at all surprising to me, if it starts happening. Another scenario is that police enforces child safety, but it does nothing for the child's well-being.

More broadly, our society had been fairly poor about taking "well-being" into account. Setting aside the well-being of children, we also have the well-being of students, employees, livestock, family, community and ecology. Our society is setup to organize resources and means of production. Year after year, people are less and less able to participate in their own well-being, and even more importantly, less able to participate in the well-being of the community they belong to. Despite that, there are greater call for "well-being" popping up in news articles or comments from people.

Well-being is how well a living system is capable of ... well, living. If a living system is unable to live, it enters into a degenerate spiral, and dies. This isn't just the physical or biological, and includes emotional well-being and mental well-being. (There's a lot more to explore from here, such as the mental health epidemic of teenagers and young adults going on right now).

Furthermore, living systems are anti-fragile (up to a point). They grow stronger with a certain level of stress. To put it in a different way, trees grow strong because wind will occasionally shake it. The trees that grew in Biosphere 2, having grown without wind, are all fragile.

I'm not advocating you deliberately go out and shake the tree, or put a child in stressful situations. Life will already do that, naturally. And one of the best ways to do that, is to let a child have the opportunity to be independent, where they have to figure things out for themselves. My view on this is that, my job as a parent is not to remove and erase all risks, but rather, curate the environment of any catastrophic risks. The kind where a child cannot easily recover from. You gradually open up the environment to greater challenges as a child grows into their own ability to handle them.

That is difficult to do when child endangerment laws and the ways interpretation of "safety" has been shifting.

Hahah, good one.

Neither of us were there. There are people who genuinely believe in this kind of safety of children.

I've read other articles like this before, and I happen to agree with this author and what this author advocating for. This goes beyond whether parents have the right to let kids go and walk on their own. It has a lot more to do about raising kids that can gain gain the kind of resiliency, grit, self-confidence, independent-thinking from being able to do stuff on their own. My kids will need to be able to do that when they grow into adults, because I am not always going to be there to be their safety net. One day, I will die, and it is their turn to make choices, to vote, to navigate their own lives, and to help raise the next generation.

So besides just advocating for changes in laws, there is a lot more to this kind of parenting than being protected by law to do so, including methods for parent this way when the laws in ones jurisdiction are not necessarily supporting this kind of parenting.

There is an article that describes what happened, which included the department officially stating the event was over-reach.

Maybe some people do think children shouldn’t be allowed to walk outside, and maybe those people are causing us to raise children ill-prepared for adulthood. I did not question whether such people exist, what I questioned is your conclusion that the existence of such people suggests the police were justified. The police should not be those people, and they do know better institutionally, even if individual officers overstep. The U.S. police force has no legal basis for threatening or arresting parents when kids are unaccompanied, there’s no law requiring parents to accompany kids, whether or not there is concern for their well being. Which is why their department admitted they made a mistake…

Instead, the cops left the children who were supposedly in mortal peril to go harass the parents.

These parents are rewarding their kids to go to Dunkin Donut on their own. In their judgement, it was safe enough to do so. If they wanted to be sure, they could have snuck behind them (but they would have to make sure they are not caught doing so, otherwise it would shatter the emerging confidence of the kids).

The one where the cop straight up told the husband 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'

Yeah, totally not on a power trip. Definitely. Just doing it for the public good.

While police overreach is an issue, I think that misses the deeper problems that gave rise to this. I have linked a different article in other comments here and elsewhere about the current epidemic of mental health issues teenagers and young adults, and the possible link to not being able to have some kind of childhood independence. Such young adults are not well adapted to the uncertainties of life.

Whatever his intentions behind that statement, that’s what someone on a power trip would say. Not in any way caring about the content, just the utterance of another word would have caused her arrest and the kids taken away.

Forgetting the fact that someone was already arrested as is. For this.

This is prime epitome of a power trip and it amazes me to see someone try to defend it as anything but.

In my view, that is the smaller issue of the bigger issues at play. The author of the article, and what he is advocating for, is broader than that, but hey, if people are motivated to act and speak out because of this, sure, why not?

There are lots of things you can’t tell just by text.

Who said anything about defending this? I happen to agree with the author of that article, including things she did not elaborate on in the article as an advocate of free range parenting.

It boggles my mind that people seem to read things that are not said.

If one person misreads something, maybe they just misread it. If multiple people misread something, then maybe it wasn't expressed well in the first place.

I say, "there are deeper issues at play", yet people are so attached to the idea that this is about police overreach.

Go to the end of the article to the author's link to her foundation, Let Grow, and see what other kind of articles the author has written about. Look at the front page, and the language. What is that foundation advocating for? Are they framing it in terms of police overreach? Is that the most important thing they are advocating for? Did they even talk about police overreach in the front-page text, above the fold?

You minimized the thing others care about because it doesn’t suit your needs. Just because you don’t give a shit about police brutality does not mean everyone thinks the same. By you trying to minimize discussion of it and paint both sides, you actively look like you are defending cops.

Once again, one person, maybe they misread. Multiple people, it’s on you to communicate your thoughts. If everyone is misinterpreting it in the same way, then it was just written that way; don’t blame others for reading the things you wrote.

Life is uncertain, and adults are called to choices weigh risk and opportunities. And there is an epidemic of teenagers and young adults right now, cycling in and out of mental health facilities. There are otherwise healthy kids who are afraid of doing normal things by themselves. They go to learn to “adult” in college, but really, they never have the opportunity to make their own choices and learn from their own successes and failures. And that comes about from a society and legal framework that values “safety” to beyond a reasonable point that is healthy for people.

These laws and the way they are interpreted has shifted dramatically over the past decade or so. And it has a lot to do with how our society views this. Seeing this as only about parental rights misses the point, and in my view, short-sighted.

Yes, I've witnessed this first-hand. My wife and I had our then-nine-year-old niece for the afternoon; we took her out to do a few things, played in the pool, ate dinner, and then took her back to her mother's house. At one point, she wanted some ice cream. Well, sure, why not. We happened to be very close to a grocery store and handed her some money and told her to go inside and get whatever flavor she wanted.

She kept saying we had to go with her, that there might be someone waiting to snatch her. It took a surprisingly long time to convince her that a small grocery store with one customer entrance/exit that we were immediately in front of represented the lowest imaginable risk for something like that. But, in the end, she went in and selected and bought her own ice cream.

By her age, both of us were riding our bikes without adult supervision (but usually with friends) to places a mile or so from the house to get - you guessed it - ice cream (or milkshakes, or whatever). I have read Ms. Skenazy's stories before, and knew how bad this was intellectually, but that was the first time I actually saw just how damaging it is to children to be raised as complete dependents on adults. If you're afraid to walk into a 1960s-size grocery to buy ice cream at age nine, how in the world are you going to be prepared for the maelstrom of your teenage years, let alone being an 18-year-old college student on their own?

You mean there are people who genuinely feel that it should be an arrrestable offence to let an 8-year-old out on their own?

Well, sure; that doesn't surprise me. But what some cop "feels" bears no relation to what the law is.

Agreed. This is one where qualified immunity needs to go. This is a rights violation all the way... against the kids civil rights and against the parents. Also, I'd love to listen to the 911 calls.

B) The arrest record needs to go away forever

C) Arrest records should never be used by government to deny rights or services, only conviction records.

I thought this was going to be about various killings by cops, but it turns out to be a place name.

Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America. I suspect if you went looking for anecdotes involving black children you might find far worse outcomes. Nobody in this story spent even a whole night in jail! Nobody was injured! Nobody had to pay bail fees! No property damage by police! They didn't even shoot the dog.

I mean, I'm not a huge fan of that stuff either, but I lived in Killingly for a number of years, so perhaps this one caught my attention for that reason?

Your axe grinding doesnt make sense here. Police powers are one of the most federated types of power in the country! And these sound like they were the smallest unit of police, town police.

In fact, its difficult to imagine the more centralized police causing this type of trouble. Can you imagine a state trooper wasting time with this? Or the FBI investigating a child walking alone?

I don't have great insight into police, but I've had a little into a few county governments and school districts, and the impression I've gotten is the opposite: the more local interested are insulated from state or federal oversight (de facto, if not de jure) the more wildly-corrupt and tyrannical they get.

Nah, my family is from eastern Europe and the stuff that happens in US was never seen here, ever.

This is what gets me. Even if this town is as dangerous as these police claim that it is, I can think of a hundred other responses that are orders of magnitude more useful than the route they chose, if their priority is indeed the safety of the children.

Follow the kids for a bit to make sure they're ok. "Hey kids, your parents know you're going to the store? ok!" "Hey parents, you gave your kids permission to walk to the store alone? ok!" "Hey just checking in, you know that there's this sex offender around the corner right? ok!" You can surveil the sex offenders. You can, you know, make your town safer (you are the police, right?).

I doubt this town is that unsafe, however. Ironically the polarization, paranoia, untrusting nature, and general hysteria in the US are a vicious cycle that leads to actual danger and more polarization, paranoia, etc.

(*) when not matched by appropriate safe guards.

Norway has a single national police organization which extends the local level. It is well-regarded by the citizens who are also big on free-range parenting. In Oslo you can find teenagers practicing skateboard on the steps of parliament during the day. On the other hand Americans might find certain means of protective services, for adults and for minors, overreaching.

Also, didn't absolutely everybody in the US rally around James Comey, during his unjust firing?

Yep. TFA: "that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them" -- Police should be arresting the shit out of those criminals, not innocent people.

Congratulations, police, by arresting innocent parents you just traumatized some kids, and if they become criminals because they grew up in foster care missing their actually good parents, you have blood on your hands. (I know they dropped charges, but in the shitty slow legal system we have, it's a real possibility this could have played out differently.)

Fix the town so innocent people can live sane lives in it.

They asked us to disarm ourselves, they asked us to trust them, to give them the power to police our behavior, then we do and our societies become less safe. Then they use this as a justification to tell us how to raise our kids.

If society is less safe it's their fault. So they either need to fix the problem or go get a job at McDonalds, either way leave me the fuck alone and don't tell me how to raise my kids.

Nope it's just good old fashioned American police state activities. Once again people on this website love this subtle form of American Exceptionalism where they Pretend that America is not the most oppressive and destructive racist country in history.

If you were a A person of color fighting for your rights, a Communist, or any other ideological enemy of the United States you would realize that this activity from the police is nothing more than a generalization of the official policies of police towards "undesirables" in the 20th century.