- Call about the kid
- (Optional) Visit owner (grandparents) in person and take an official statement
- Drop the case
And what is the danger we're protecting the child against here? People seem to like the 'baked in car' setup. You seem to fancy the 'kidnapped wholesale with car' idea? I mean - your neighbor is taking the kid to the car, and gets back in (probably forgot a thing). 30 sec later you look out of the window and the car is gone. What happend?
a) The car was stolen, kid inside
b) The owner of the car and responsible person for the kid inside moved it outside of the viable area from your position
Really?
Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (even if the weather didn't seem to justify it, but the fact is it's very unusual for a parent to leave a kid in car in the US these days. From the police point of view, the confusion about the identity of the car owner and driver is enough to warrant further investigation. When the police hear from the grandparents that the child is inaccessible because the Mom got onto a plane and flew home, that's probably true but they don't know for sure - after all that's the sort of story people give out when they abduct children in custody battles during ugly divorces. It's the police's job to put the welfare of the child first in ambiguous situations like that.
Me, I wouldn't have prosecuted once the full facts came out, but on the other hand a statewide missing child alert uses up a bunch of police resources and that's not free, so the prosecutor may have that demanding some community service in return was justified. I can't tell what state the writer lives in or exactly when this happened, so it would be worth considering those contexts as well.
Read that again.
Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person?
If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is shouted at, throws itself to the ground and needs to be carried, etc. etc..
It's not my argument that is weak (my example might be crap, if you happen to really like your neighbor. But that also means that you missed the point of my post though, inserting real persons wasn't part of the thought experiment and is entirely irrelevant).
Why? Why would a random parent
Yet again, the assumption of parental status based on hindsight. The police who answered the 911 call at the shopping center had no way of knowing that the author was the parent of the child in the car, and given that that person did not match the description of the registered vehicle owner, such an assumption would have been entirely unjustified. In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.
Downvote away, but every single argument you have posted in this thread is built upon hindsight bias.
> In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.
Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?
Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?
Population of CA is ~38 million, of which ~24% are minors, or approximately 10 million children. 10m/~2000 abductions a year in the state = 5000.
http://www.childabductions.org/ Annual abduction rates http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html CA census data
Are you happy now?
The probability of a crime occurring is not the only factor that has to be taken into account here. There's also the severity of the possible criminal outcome. Kidnapping is actually relatively common in the US by international standards, and it is among the most aggressively prosecuted crimes. Until 1972, kidnapping was a capital crime, ie you could get the death sentence for it.
For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves.
I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids and only 1 in 10 of those steal cars. So there's only a 2% chance of that happening at once!
Wow... because I know like at least 30 moms and none of them have snatched any kids. To cover the odds, there must be people out there that know a lot of baby snatchers. Those people should be calling the police. :)
I of course picked an absurdly high number because even with two absurdly high numbers it still only nets 2%.
Are you saying that if there's only a 2% chance of something odd being a criminal incident, they should just blow it off?
First, you have to arrive to the cops checking for that. Before that, you must imagine the "good" samaritan, who hasn't seen any driving license and knows nothing about the minivan, speculating about who was that woman leaving and then coming back to the minivan.
But it's not the reason he or she has called the police and the police, at the moment they reached the house of the parents of the woman, they knew the latter was none but the daughter of the owner of the minivan.
Case closed... Except for the charge of having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. By the way, the good samaritan can be charged of the same crime since the video proved that, since even if he could have "caught" the criminal mom in the instant he was starting her criminal act and thus he could have "saved" the child, he preferred keep filming... so, if there was an actual crime, it would have been too late.
The second half of your premise contains two completely unwarranted assumptions. How exactly were the police supposed to know the now-departed child was a) safe and b) with his parent? Recall that the Mom who wrote the piece was driving a vehicle that wasn't registered to her and so therefore didn't match the description on the registered owners' driving licenses. We know with hindsight that she had borrowed her parents' minivan for the trip, but the police would not have been justified in making that inference.