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?
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.