Again, the situation with my neighbor (someone I know well enough to trust my kid with) is completely different from that of seeing a stranger leaving a kid in a car in a shopping mall parking lot. The fact that you need to change the facts of the situation to make your point should be a clue to the inherent weakness of your argument.

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.

Aha! My argument is weak because your neighbor is more trusted than the general public.

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).

No, your argument is weak because you changed the facts to fit your narrative.

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.

I don't think that darklajid can be the one downvoting -- at least not your post replying to him. I suspect you're being downvoted (and not by me) for suggesting that a statewide missing child alert is warranted in response to a kid being spotted alone in a parking lot for a few minutes, which is the kind of thing that people are mad about in this thread.

> 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?

I'm not suggesting that, and you're being disingenuous for ignoring the fact of the person driving the car not matching the id of the vehicle owner, which I have repeatedly pointed out as the suspicious circumstance.

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?

Your math is broken. It doesn't even have the right units to be a probability (children/(abudctions/year)).