> As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace
> "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'"
Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.
> Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade-off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
This is the fault of the nosey neighbor AND the fault of the police AND the fault of the district attorney AND the fault of the CPS case worker. All four bear blame for this travesty.
When I write software, I know that users will do dumb things and it is my responsibility to write my code in such a way that they can cause no damage.
The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
Only in the most unproductive way. You're not going to fix the problem by exterminating all nosy neighbors. If your new roof leaks when it rains, it's not the rain's fault, blame it on the person who builds roofs ignoring the unavoidable fact that rain will eventually fall.
To me this is a side effect of people getting trained to see crime, terrorism and evil deeds everywhere.
It was always a joke that you will be arrested for going for a walk in the land of the free. Until it isn't just a joke anymore.
Sure, there certainly are bad neighborhoods, but to me the focus on security has everyone getting crazy. A lot of countries don't need armed guards at school.
Cops see a lot of crime and have a lot of contact to criminals. I can understand why they would have such a perspective. But everyone else involved should have done a thorough sanity check. And in my opinion they should get some audit if they are in any way able to discern if there is any real danger or not. That is the minimal requirement for their jobs.
It's not at all the fault of the nosy neighbor. The neighbor made a bad choice, but could plausibly have been motivated by good intentions. A young child walking alone may seem a cause for concern, and, perhaps all the neighbor wanted was to make sure the child was safe. I certainly see no evidence that the neighbor acted maliciously - some people are just legitimately unaware that the police are frequently comically evil.
It is absolutely the fault of the justice system, the police officers who abused their power to arrest a mother for no reason in front of her kids. They made a considered decision to teach her a lesson - they asked her if she had learned her lesson and when she didn't answer how they wanted they arrested her, handcuffed her in front of her children, and took her to prison.
It's also the fault of prosecutors and judges involved who overlooked and participated in this egregious abuse of the justice system. They are each responsible for stemming the overreaches of the police. We can't expect police to always make good decisions - they are people who go fight with criminals, not legal scholars, after all. That's partly why we have lawyers and judges involved - to stop overzealous policing. Of course, the prosecutors and judges involved failed miserably here, as they frequently do.
And of course child services are at fault too for their participation in this farce.
Well, obviously American are extremely weird with their constant desire to solve all problems (and non-problems) with police and then wondering why does the police have too much power.
But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.
It's deeper than that. It's a systemic and cultural issue. All of the parties you named think that they have the right to behave the way they did. In their own minds, they are all the good guy. It's a realm of petty tyrants, "Little Eichmans".
People are idiots, but the cops and everyone else in the justice system had a legal requirement to actually know the law, and letting their kid walk half a mile straight up isn't child endangerment. These people had thier lives turned completely upside down, over the dumbest shit I've heard all year.
It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.
The neighbor bears the least responsibility by a wide margin which is why despite non-zero involvement they really shouldn't be on the same table for discussion. If I ask an entire hospital system to believe in my crazy theory for Leukemia and that leads to patients getting screwed, the discussion shouldn't have the inclination to focus on how one patient communicated their bad medical theory.
That would mean they would be responsible for the damage they caused, which includes years lost income (ie. a LOT of money). So no, they bear no blame.
No state accepts CPS bear any responsibility for the damage they cause. Not a single one.
> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors
No, let's not. According to the article, the neighbor who called the cops asked the boy where he lived, "verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless". Excuse me? What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house?
I agree the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place, but one of the things you're supposed to do as a neighbor is to understand that we have an insane legal system and not invoke it on one of your neighbors unless you really, really have to.
I mean... this is a case where the police should also say "it's ok, it's not that far mr/mrs neighbor, you don't have to call us for that".
it's also a case if the police actually cuffed and brought the mom to jail, someone there should tell them they won't book them for something stupid.
If a DA is involved, it's also a case where the DA should say that they won't prosecute such a stupid thing.
This failure is not one crazy individual, but a whole failed system, from the bottom up. You'll always have a crazy neighbor, a paranoid cop, etc., but having a whole chain this rotten really sucks, and something should really be changed.
It puts neighbors in a bad situation. Yesterday there was a kid, probably about eight years old, outside my house wandering around by himself, yelling at passing cars. There are lots of kids in my neighborhood and I'm accustomed to them being loud when they're out playing but this kid was alone, going out into the road, and just acting a bit weird. It wasn't a kid I knew so I couldn't call the parents but calling the police also seemed like a questionable thing to do. I'm near a speed bump so cars generally go slow through here but there are other parts of the street when they often have more speed. I didn't want to approach him (all manner of trouble can come from an adult approaching a child they don't know), police seemed like overkill, but being out in the road, especially since he was walking away from the speed bump area, seemed potentially dangerous. Eventually he went into a house across the street five or six houses down which recently sold so probably is a new family to the neighborhood.
Still not sure what I should have done if he hadn't gone home or really if this is a problem waiting to happen. At his age I wandered much further from home and put myself in worse potential danger at times, though I probably never yelled at passing cars. No one ever called the police on me though there were a few times when an adult told me to stop doing whatever I was up to or go somewhere else.
> the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place
Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this. Lots of people are to blame here, but the cops escalated by arresting her on a flimsy basis. The incident could have stopped there.
> What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house?
Well, what decent neighbour isn't able to, at the very least, recognize his neighbors?
Maybe this child's parents have kept him locked in the closet, never seen by anyone before, until this one time he emerged unto the world and the police were called not because he was on the street, but because he's never been on the street before.
But more likely this person isn't a neighbor, at least not mentally.
>> > As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace
Then go downtown and.. do some police work? What the hell man, stop harassing an innocent mother.
The counterpoint to this is that this is exactly what the police do in downtown Waco as well. It just doesn't normally happen to "respectable" society, so you don't hear about it.
This is crazy. No one is out there kidnapping and sex-trafficking 8-year olds in any numbers more than typical child kidnappings. That's a politically-motivated myth.
Minor sex-trafficking is almost always done by someone known to the child, usually a relative. And the child is usually in their teens, although occasionally younger.
Just a warning, more than a few of the videos on AuditTheAudit are infuriating due to the level of arrogance, incompetence, negligence, and abuse of authority displayed. But, it is nice that there is a way to air this dirty laundry in public. As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle".
Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful.
To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and 99% execution.
Audit the audit is great because it's actually very balanced, and they spend equal if not more time digging up laws that might justify the police officers actions, often with some surprising results.
Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them.
If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it.
Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
> Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
>> the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 ... clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger.
The police did not enforce the law. Hence the anger towards the police officers and the DA.
Edit: I stand corrected, this is family law not criminal law.
> If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it.
Easy to say, but you're voting for them for a lot more than that. If that's the only thing you care about, you can easily vote for that person. If you care about other things, it gets a lot, lot harder.
> Fundamentally it's the fault of the politicians who passed the law and the people who voted for them.
But this way beyond what the law was intended for. It was passed in 1973, and there's no way that in 1973 lawmakers would think it should be used against this mother. Any law can be overzealously enforced.
As someone who has been constantly annoyed for 20 years by Fortune 250 corporate IT policies, I see this slightly differently. All the confusing, contradictory, usually-non-specific-yet-sometimes-wildly-specific polices the IT department decrees come from some nice-sounding reason, usually from some white paper or consultant, or just some major screwup that caused embarrassment. But, like ISO9000 and SOX and all the rest, they inevitably wind up, as implemented, as make-work policy.
It's the same in government. Government is so large now, that every law that gets passed is now make-work law. And for all the same reasons that people with no critical thinking make it their job to enforce stupid ideas like "all code used for authentication in web apps must be written in C", people in the legal system, including and ESPECIALLY "soft" jobs like CPS, have to justify their existence by making the most work out of the least situation.
So I'll do you one better: it's the fault of politicians tugging on heart strings to pass overreaching, touchy-feely laws, that give government too much power, in order to get themselves reelected.
The Waco justice system was the one who open fired on that biker meet up at Twin Peaks, arrested everyone in the area, and held them on million dollar bonds to send a strong message.
Another observation is that this doesn't prevent kidnapping or sex trafficking. Individuals choose to do those things to other people, and those actions are illegal. We don't blame the victims for this reason, we don't blame prey either for their availability to be preyed on.
> Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.
there is not a finite supply of culpability. they can _all_ bear (varying degrees of) responsibility for it.
>A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.
this is the real problem here. who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
> who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
I wish I knew. My children have had the cops called on them for playing in our front yard. I wish they could spend their afternoons climbing trees and playing in the grass like I did growing up, but there's a group of people who see children playing outside of direct parent supervision as a categorically dangerous activity.
I'm always struck when I take my kids to school and see the high schoolers gathered around waiting for their bus to pick them up. You wouldn't even know they exist otherwise - there's no other signs of their existence, no groups of them playing at the park, no sounds of games in the streets, no hoots or hollers from down the block - just nothing, silence. Each house is an island and each teen a castaway from 4pm when they get home to 7am when they leave for school, severed from the neighborhood and each other while the same folks say, "How come kids don't play outside anymore?"
Kudos to you for bucking the trend and encouraging your kids to do things like spending afternoons romping around outside!
Complete anecdata, but the parents in my close friend group are split between "parents with a more free-range kid mindset" and "typical upper-middle-class parental paranoia."
The free-range kids are mostly happy-go-lucky, emotionally stable, and thriving. Almost every single kid over the age of 10 with paranoid parents is diagnosed with a mental health condition of some sort. I mean I literally can only think of one who is not in therapy or taking medication. I think the isolation and lack of unsupervised group activities that you describe is a big part of it.
One of my more paranoid friends made a judgmental comment recently regarding my other friend's daughter not being in therapy. I was extremely confused and asked if the kiddo was having emotional issues. Her response was, "Well not yet, but 12 is a very stressful age, and I think that when you have the money to do so, it's just good parenting to ensure your kid is talking to a therapist on a regular basis."
The level of paranoia needed to believe that every single perfectly stable 12-year-old needs weekly visits with a mental health professional to ensure their health and safety, and that not supplying this is neglectful, is just... bizarre.
I cannot help but believe this sort of behavior is severely damaging the psyche of these kids. And I also don't see how it can't be hurting the parents as well. Imagine how incredibly stressful it must be to be a parent who believes every stranger, every walk around the block, and every pre-teen mood swing is a serious danger to their child.
This is a serious worry of mine. I often let my elementary kids walk home from school by themselves because we live close enough and they have good sense around what little traffic there is. But I always worry that someone will throw a fit about it. I worry about that a LOT more than kidnappers.
Of the high school and jr high kids I know, for most of them their life is on their phone. It doesn't cover that age group but I thought this graph was pretty interesting:
Generally the younger you are the more likely you are to be a heavy user of your phone. There is no data for it but I would expect that high school and jr high kids are probably even higher users than 18 - 34.
Reminds me of the time my son finally gathered the confidence to take the training wheels off his bike and learn to ride it without them. My wife and I were walking, and he was on his bike, and he was so happy and pumped about his achievement, that he asked to ride farther away, out of our sight.
Now, this is a peaceful suburban neighborhood we're talking about, and we're on a stretch between his school and a park near our home. He's riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he's being careful about it.
Off he goes, and the two of us stroll peacefully until we see him stopped, with an old lady talking to him. He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
Somewhere along the way, our society blurred the line between "stepping in to prevent child abuse" and "thinking you're entitled to being hostile and sanctimonious to other parents".
That attitude, while perhaps more comfortable in some ways, just enables the sort of behaviour you encountered, and apparently disliked, from that woman.
A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future.
Depending on where you are, she might have gone decades without any kind of resistance to her behaviour.
Too much politeness can be worse than none at all.
"I will call 911 right now as a stranger is trying to abduct my son" should be the correct response.
Not a jab at you, but so tired of random people thinking they know what is best for my son from a 3 second interaction. We really need to bring back some shaming as I truly believe that is how you get a community to work together again instead of against each other.
> He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
You shouldn't have had to endure a lecture or be threatened by your neighbor. If the kid is just learning to ride a bike without training wheels, it would have been worth it to go back and get his helmet. I hope the lesson isn't "you shouldn't tell people when they are doing something dangerous," but that you shouldn't be a complete prick about it.
There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
> There will always be people who overreact and call the police for inappropriate reasons. That isn't the problem.
It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
> The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
Yes, but what's their incentive to do so? The more I look at the society in this country, the more I see that the incentives for LEOs are perfectly aligned with corruption and abuse of power.
Correct! There's a lot of crazy people out in the world who'll call the cops for all manner of things. The correct response would have been to ignore the call following a couple questions by the 911 operator. "Is the child in danger in any way?" the response would be "No." and then hang up on them.
Part of it is the procedural philosophy on crime that simultaneously makes crimes easy to prosecute, and demands the police act on any letter-of-the-law violation, without thinking.
You can get phony DUIs now too. How many people are on some pharmaceutical? Well if so, you’re automatically guilty, even if your doctors tells you that you can drive, and must take the meds.
I am with your neighbor, I hate dogs left alone which annoy all neighbors with constant barking, while their owner doesn't have to listen to it. It's less of an problem in the house, but huge problem in residential apartment building, so obviously you call cops to annoy neighbor to force him to do soemthing about it by police harassing him, not that because you would genuinely think there is animal in distress. If your dog barks at everyone passing around your house, there is something wrong with your dog and you raising it. If you can't take care of dog and raise it properly, don't get one.
My neighbor (not old) threatened to call the police on my 12 year old daughter because she didn't stop for him... to scold her. On the surface he's a reasonable, responsible adult but for some reason was/is triggered by neighborhood kids simply "having fun". People can be strange.
You usually only notice people when they do something weird-- maybe 999 days out of 1000 that neighbor is perfectly normal, but on that one day they were having an off day. That's the day you notice them.
An advantage of living further from people is that just fewer interactions with strangers and near-strangers so fewer opportunities to be the victim of someone's off-day.
Paranoid suburbanites. In the US, happened to me twice as an 11/12 year old north of Chicago, just for walking down the street - and once in Charlottesville, in the burbs, aged 24 - again for walking down the street. Once in Germany, aged 10 in a suburb of Frankfurt - I was sitting in a park with a book. Oh, and once in the U.K., in Hatfield aged 22, waiting outside my girlfriend’s house having arrived a bit before her.
Only got put in a cop car in the US - in both Germany and the U.K. they realised I was just doing normal human stuff - both childhood occasions in the US they gave my parents a talking to, as an adult they were unreasonably suspicious as to why I would be walking rather than driving, but let me go with a warning to drive in future.
So - the problem is the police, and the justice system, as curtain-twitchers live the world over.
It sounds like the cop had the discretion and chose to arrest her after she answered a question negatively. This seems to be another big part of the problem.
IMO, too many people took the wrong lessons from being ignored as children themselves, and they swung too hard into "Watch over your children 24/7 or you're hurting your children."
They're watching the same newscasts and true-crime documentaries that are leading to perceptions of nonexistent "crime waves" with all the pathologies that come along.
I think it's mostly an artifact of 1980s and 1990s daytime TV hyping every single missing child and making a generation of parents think this was happening everywhere all the time.
Doesn't help that every few months a certain political party screams about a 'caravan' of migrants coming to the borders with the sole purpose of causing crime.
> who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
The profoundly innumerate, that’s who. They overestimate the risk of an adverse event because they rely solely on media reports of child safety events to anchor their estimates, never stopping to consider that the media doesn’t report on children safely walking home.
Had the cops called on me for wearing a hood and walking home at 7:30PM from my friends house, gun put in my face and told to get on the ground. I was 10.
Low and behold a few years later I find out that its my highschool police officer I get to see every day!
The real problem is the cop finding a perfectly fine child walking home in his own neighborhood and arresting his mother like a violent criminal for such a grave offense.
> who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
This really depends on your life experience.
For some this is no big deal. For some this means the parents are in a drunken/drug stupor. For some taking care of a kid means being instantly labeled as a pedo by parents, police and neighbours.
No, the real problem is that we continue to elevate low stakes local issues into high stakes national / international news because it advances our own preferred narratives.
In my twice-the-size European city, kids walk twice that distance to school and back home again, alone. Every. Single. Day. If this place isn't safe enough for kids to walk by themselves, maybe the question should be raised whether the police and municipal government really is doing their job the way they're supposed to.
The irony is one of the officers claimed the boy could have been kidnapped or taken into a sex trafficking ring. And their solution is to arrest the mom, not to take care of the kidnapping or sex trafficking.
This is kind of funny. At what age does that stop being a possibility? At least in my country kids are kids until 18... so it would just as illegal let a 17-year old walk alone? He _could_ be kidnapped. Nobody can say it's impossible, however improbable!
The same concern can be voiced for 16 or 20 year old women and men. All of them can be abducted with ease by 2+ trained people. Should they also be accompanied by their moms at all times?
The cop just demosntrated himself that he isnt doing his job and that there is something deeply wrong with society if a child cant even walk half a mile at 8 years old.
See, with rugged individualism the consumer needs to be on the watch for the brands that might kill them and just vote with their wallet. Why would we regulate something when the free market will do the regulating?
This parent was not exercising their responsibility as an individual to watch out for anything and everything that might hurt their child, in the US that is illegal because the free market ideology rules all.
The thing is that the US has much greater freedoms than Europe, after all, we did fight for them. It's every US citizens understanding that with greater freedoms come greater responsibilities to raise children to be future leaders. This can't happen if a child is mowed down in a driveby or if they accidentally trip over while walking.
Every police interaction in the US bears the risk of death. Police will stop kids on the street with or without being called. Ergo, it is unsafe for children to walk to school in the US.
Sure, that's all a bit circular, but good luck breaking the spiral with a "law and order" mentality.
That is everywhere. For that matter every interaction with someone with a little martial arts training (even what you can find on the internet, though you will also find bad training) can be potential deadly. Most people have the ability to kill another human, few attempt it.
This strikes me as crazy. Every interaction with any human or inanimate object bears the risk of death, it's just so low it's not worth thinking about it.
U.S. police kill about ~1000 people per year, and the vast majority of those aren't at all questionable. If there are 330,000,000 people in the U.S., that's 0.000303% of the population per year. Each person has, on average, maybe 10 contentious police interactions in a lifetime of 75 years? That's 0.134 interactions per year.
So, given on this Fermi estimate, you have about a 0.00226% chance of being killed per contentious police interaction if we spread it completely evenly, or 2.26 in 100,000. And spreading it evenly doesn't make any sense at all.
So, if you're young, black, male, and running around Chicago dealing drugs carrying an illegal gun--yeah, maybe worry about it. For everyone here on HN, it's a stupid thing to worry about. Worry about your sedentary lifestyle. Worry about driving safely if you drive a lot. Worry about diabetes. Worry about whether your relationships with friends and family are good. Worry about your diet. Worry about exercise. Worry about falling down the stairs. The cops aren't going to kill you.
Right in the middle of a similar sized European city, very built up, loads of traffic - the children have to walk to school, from aged 6. Parents are actually not allowed to take them in.
This article is complete nonsense and I’m glad I don’t live in Waco, Texas. Your experience was similar to mine I used to walk a mile to school or ride my bike to a friends and then walk. I pick my daughter up near a private school everyday and there are 100 or so kids walking under 13.
There are 8 year olds walking around my neighborhood every weekend and nobody bats an eye.
I took the bus to school in London from age 8 onwards, i.e. not a school bus a normal red double decker bus. It was only two stops, but mum thought it was safer than crossing the busy road.
In most areas it is probably safe enough... but they like to keep the population scared as they are easier to control that way... and the police budgets keep increasing.
On average, the cops are nuts in the US... It just take one hot head in a group to make them all act badly...
To be fair, here in Menlo Park, CA, children of this age bike or walk half a mile to school all the time as well. It's not very different from when I lived in the London suburbs and walked myself 30 years ago. This isn't really a US/Europe split.
I just did a google maps search. In kindergarten at 5 years old I walked approximately 1/3 mile each way. I live in an urban environment now and outside of legal ramifications still would not think twice about allowing my child to do the same.
I live in Seattle. 8 year olds walk past my house to-and-from school every day without parents. I can't say I've seen this in any other major US city though.
I used to walk around 1 mile to school every day along a very busy road when I was 8 years old and nobody batted an eye. I lived in Texas at the time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the point is that the place is plenty safe for the kid to walk by himself, it's just a perfect storm of officious cops and bureaucrats and a nosy neighbor.
In my experience it is fairly normal in the US, too, which is why stories like this are newsworthy. Also, Reason is a libertarian political rag and they have ideological motivations for sharing this particular story.
Note she also has a GoFundMe to help cover her legal expenses to right this wrong. It's a pretty severe miscarriage of justice that has grievously altered this innocent woman's life going into a recession.
> has a GoFundMe to help cover her legal expenses to right this wrong
To be clear, Wallace "is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program" and "hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again." The GoFundMe is to pay for those costs. It won't do anything to undo the original miscarriage.
Part of the problem is that she pled guilty, thereby endorsing the position of the police and creating a larger problem in the future. I don't know what the correct response is when looking down the barrel of a 2 year sentence for nonsense, but think this publicity battle should have been before the plea.
This is (one of) the logical conclusions of suburban, car-enforced social alienation: if you don't know your neighbors and your neighbors don't know you, then everything that isn't immediately familiar to either party is treated with suspicion. And this holds for the entire "food chain": police who don't live in the areas they patrol, DAs and CPS employees who don't understand their communities, &c. It's civically and socially poisonous.
It would of course be ridiculous to claim that these things don't happen absent of car culture: it's a broader trend than that, and there are suburban areas that buck the trend. But the urban/suburban divide here is stark: I grew up walking to school and riding public transport alone, and it's normal to see kids running around my neighborhood without any supervision. That kind of freedom works because nobody is surprised to see a 6 year old running errands; they're seen doing the same thing every day.
Excellent point.. in these places it is not normal to ever travel from point A to point B without getting in a car. Anyone walking is suspect.
It's bizarre. Where I live the police are not insane like this but people will still be shocked if they find out you walked 1/2 mile instead of taking a car.
When I went to the US for a research visit, I didn't have a car, because my bed and breakfast was in walking distance to the lab (there was even a bus). So, naturally, I walked to a nearby restaurant in the evening, and was stopped by the police, asking me what I was up to. It didn't have any consequences, but still.
I've lived in the city, and I currently live in a suburb. I know a lot more of my neighbors here than I did in the city. And my neighbors know my kids. On top of that, the sidewalk is filled with kids going to & from school each day, and it's noisy all afternoon as they run all over the neighborhood riding bikes and playing.
So I get that you want to find car culture to be the root of all evil, but I don't buy it.
"Evil" is not the world I would (or did) use. And as I said: there are lots of places that buck the trend; I'm glad you live in one.
For every place like yours, there are suburbs like the ones that most of my friends grew up in: ones where everybody drives in and out, where sidewalks exist primarily as a vessel for dogwalking, and nothing can be reached on foot (parks or basic living amenities).
In Japan, children are encouraged from early age to be independent. They even take the subway and bus by themselves, albeit it's significantly safer there than in other parts of the world. Still though, I think people in America have gone off the deep end.
Its funny, because I see young-ish kids alone or in small groups walking around all the time in Brooklyn. Between 2:30 and 4:00 PM the sidewalks around my apartment are choked with unaccompanied kids.
I live in Manhattan and my wife and I just had our first kid a few weeks ago. We've been talking about it for months now, but we want our kid to have that kind of independence and familiarity with the city. On one hand it's good for their development and on another hand it just seems practical that they be able to navigate the city on their own for safety reasons.
I've offended a lot of suburban friends and family though, because they don't understand how we could raise a child in NYC let alone give them any kind of independence. I've been told that it's irresponsible, that I'll be endangering him, and that I'm crazy to think the city is a safe place for a child, among other things.
Japan is extremely culturally homogeneous compared to America. As far as I know, this doesn't actually affect kidnapping statistics all that much, but it does affect perception.
Kids in Washington, DC, often enough get themselves to school via Metrobus. I see them walk to the stop by themselves, three or four blocks in a quiet neighborhood.
Vaguely relevant, from Peter Grey's book "Free to Learn":
> In our culture today, parents and other adults overprotect children from possible dangers in play. We seriously underestimate children’s ability to take care of themselves and make good judgments [...] Our underestimation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—by depriving children of freedom, we deprive them of the opportunities they need to learn how to take control of their own behavior and emotions.
Nobody wants to be the one parent out of a thousand who has their kid scooped up off the street because they were letting their kid explore and be free.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, this comment isn't a judgment on anyone or promoting any type of child-rearing philosophy. It's just an obvious truth. Nobody wants to be that parent, and that obviously influences behavior.
> Nobody wants to be the one parent out of a thousand who has their kid scooped up off the street
I agreed with you ... because I misread your comment as being concerned that the cops would come pick up your kid (like happened here in TFA). My (semi-legitimate) fear is that I'll be harassed as a parent for letting my kids do normal things like walk around the neighborhood. That'd be the only reason I might not encourage it.
Your kid is much more likely to be picked up by the cops over handwringing like this than to be kidnapped.
It's true that parents live in fear of their child being taken (and blamed for some action/inaction that allowed it to occur). Generally it seems like Americans have developed a strong aversion to 'being considered at fault for an adverse event'.
It took me quite some effort to overcome that but I made it easier by reading the statistics on child deaths and other crimes.
The odds of winning the lottery are better. The odds would be one in millions for getting scooped off the street by a random person and slightly more common if the kidnapper happened to be a parent.
Yes, I don't want to be this one parent. But it's many orders of magnitude more likely that I handicap my kids if I don't let my kids explore the world with (reasonable) freedom.
PS. I'm a father of three girls and live in Europe. Kids here navigate on their own with public transport if needed between home/school/etc since the age of 6.
Worth noting that child was literally safer walking home alone than being in the car, since the odds of dying in a vehicle related death are multiple times higher than odds of being abducted and killed by a stranger; odds of being abducted and physically harmed by a stranger are even less likely than being injured in vehicle accident.
Would not be surprised to learn that school districts in area even require children to walk to school if they are within that distance to their schools.
Anyone involved in this should at very least should lose their jobs and family should be awarded significant compensation for the harm done to the family.
Readit News
> "I still didn't know it was illegal and I said, 'I don't know,'" says Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'"
Let's quickly drop the idea that this is the fault of nosey neighbors, helicopter parents, soccer moms, or "Karens". This is 100% a justice department problem and anyone from the police to the district attorney could have nipped this nonsense in the bud.
This is the fault of the nosey neighbor AND the fault of the police AND the fault of the district attorney AND the fault of the CPS case worker. All four bear blame for this travesty.
The legal system should have similar responsibilities. If citizens can report crimes, some citizens will incorrectly report non-crimes. If the legal system can't handle that, the that is entirely the fault of the legal system.
Only in the most unproductive way. You're not going to fix the problem by exterminating all nosy neighbors. If your new roof leaks when it rains, it's not the rain's fault, blame it on the person who builds roofs ignoring the unavoidable fact that rain will eventually fall.
It was always a joke that you will be arrested for going for a walk in the land of the free. Until it isn't just a joke anymore.
Sure, there certainly are bad neighborhoods, but to me the focus on security has everyone getting crazy. A lot of countries don't need armed guards at school.
Cops see a lot of crime and have a lot of contact to criminals. I can understand why they would have such a perspective. But everyone else involved should have done a thorough sanity check. And in my opinion they should get some audit if they are in any way able to discern if there is any real danger or not. That is the minimal requirement for their jobs.
It is absolutely the fault of the justice system, the police officers who abused their power to arrest a mother for no reason in front of her kids. They made a considered decision to teach her a lesson - they asked her if she had learned her lesson and when she didn't answer how they wanted they arrested her, handcuffed her in front of her children, and took her to prison.
It's also the fault of prosecutors and judges involved who overlooked and participated in this egregious abuse of the justice system. They are each responsible for stemming the overreaches of the police. We can't expect police to always make good decisions - they are people who go fight with criminals, not legal scholars, after all. That's partly why we have lawyers and judges involved - to stop overzealous policing. Of course, the prosecutors and judges involved failed miserably here, as they frequently do.
And of course child services are at fault too for their participation in this farce.
But the point of a working system is that it should avoid engaging just because of a stupid phone call.
It was extremely shitty what the neighbor did, but the neighbor had no authority or control beyond making an unfounded complaint. The cops and everyone involved after that point she be ashamed at just how much they screwed over the lives of everyone in that family. Most people don't know this, but just being arrested, even if no charges were filed will show up on your credit score and background check forever. Those parents aren't stuck with a couple of shitty weeks they can move past, they'll be explaining that arrest to every potential employer and loan officer for the rest of thier lives. That assumes they even get asked to explain it, rather than a generic rejection letter they can only assume is due to one unbelievably unqualified cop making an insane decision.
That would mean they would be responsible for the damage they caused, which includes years lost income (ie. a LOT of money). So no, they bear no blame.
No state accepts CPS bear any responsibility for the damage they cause. Not a single one.
No, let's not. According to the article, the neighbor who called the cops asked the boy where he lived, "verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless". Excuse me? What decent neighbor calls the cops on a neighbor's kid walking just down the street from his own house?
I agree the law in question shouldn't even be on the books in the first place, but one of the things you're supposed to do as a neighbor is to understand that we have an insane legal system and not invoke it on one of your neighbors unless you really, really have to.
it's also a case if the police actually cuffed and brought the mom to jail, someone there should tell them they won't book them for something stupid.
If a DA is involved, it's also a case where the DA should say that they won't prosecute such a stupid thing.
This failure is not one crazy individual, but a whole failed system, from the bottom up. You'll always have a crazy neighbor, a paranoid cop, etc., but having a whole chain this rotten really sucks, and something should really be changed.
Still not sure what I should have done if he hadn't gone home or really if this is a problem waiting to happen. At his age I wandered much further from home and put myself in worse potential danger at times, though I probably never yelled at passing cars. No one ever called the police on me though there were a few times when an adult told me to stop doing whatever I was up to or go somewhere else.
Based on the article, it's not clear that they are breaking any law, and in fact Texas passed the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that should allow this. Lots of people are to blame here, but the cops escalated by arresting her on a flimsy basis. The incident could have stopped there.
Well, what decent neighbour isn't able to, at the very least, recognize his neighbors?
Maybe this child's parents have kept him locked in the closet, never seen by anyone before, until this one time he emerged unto the world and the police were called not because he was on the street, but because he's never been on the street before.
But more likely this person isn't a neighbor, at least not mentally.
Dead Comment
Then go downtown and.. do some police work? What the hell man, stop harassing an innocent mother.
Minor sex-trafficking is almost always done by someone known to the child, usually a relative. And the child is usually in their teens, although occasionally younger.
Just a warning, more than a few of the videos on AuditTheAudit are infuriating due to the level of arrogance, incompetence, negligence, and abuse of authority displayed. But, it is nice that there is a way to air this dirty laundry in public. As GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle".
Not really disagreeing (and this really is a fantastic channel), but in wellness circles this is called the "GI Joe Fallacy"[1]. The idea being that knowing about something really is a tiny part of actually solving it. Most people are very aware of their problems, and simple awareness isn't very helpful.
To put it in more startup-y terms, success comes from 1% ideas and 99% execution.
If you don't want to be arrested for breaking a stupid law, vote for someone who will repeal it.
Sure the police could in theory neglect to do their job which is enforcing the law but then they'd probably just get fired and replaced by police who did do their job.
>> the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 ... clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger.
The police did not enforce the law. Hence the anger towards the police officers and the DA.
Edit: I stand corrected, this is family law not criminal law.
When did it become illegal for children to be outside without adult supervision?
Easy to say, but you're voting for them for a lot more than that. If that's the only thing you care about, you can easily vote for that person. If you care about other things, it gets a lot, lot harder.
But this way beyond what the law was intended for. It was passed in 1973, and there's no way that in 1973 lawmakers would think it should be used against this mother. Any law can be overzealously enforced.
Outside of incredibly particular offenses, "It's the law, I have to enforce it, I have no choice" is just an excuse.
It's the same in government. Government is so large now, that every law that gets passed is now make-work law. And for all the same reasons that people with no critical thinking make it their job to enforce stupid ideas like "all code used for authentication in web apps must be written in C", people in the legal system, including and ESPECIALLY "soft" jobs like CPS, have to justify their existence by making the most work out of the least situation.
So I'll do you one better: it's the fault of politicians tugging on heart strings to pass overreaching, touchy-feely laws, that give government too much power, in order to get themselves reelected.
there is not a finite supply of culpability. they can _all_ bear (varying degrees of) responsibility for it.
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this is the real problem here. who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
I wish I knew. My children have had the cops called on them for playing in our front yard. I wish they could spend their afternoons climbing trees and playing in the grass like I did growing up, but there's a group of people who see children playing outside of direct parent supervision as a categorically dangerous activity.
I'm always struck when I take my kids to school and see the high schoolers gathered around waiting for their bus to pick them up. You wouldn't even know they exist otherwise - there's no other signs of their existence, no groups of them playing at the park, no sounds of games in the streets, no hoots or hollers from down the block - just nothing, silence. Each house is an island and each teen a castaway from 4pm when they get home to 7am when they leave for school, severed from the neighborhood and each other while the same folks say, "How come kids don't play outside anymore?"
Complete anecdata, but the parents in my close friend group are split between "parents with a more free-range kid mindset" and "typical upper-middle-class parental paranoia."
The free-range kids are mostly happy-go-lucky, emotionally stable, and thriving. Almost every single kid over the age of 10 with paranoid parents is diagnosed with a mental health condition of some sort. I mean I literally can only think of one who is not in therapy or taking medication. I think the isolation and lack of unsupervised group activities that you describe is a big part of it.
One of my more paranoid friends made a judgmental comment recently regarding my other friend's daughter not being in therapy. I was extremely confused and asked if the kiddo was having emotional issues. Her response was, "Well not yet, but 12 is a very stressful age, and I think that when you have the money to do so, it's just good parenting to ensure your kid is talking to a therapist on a regular basis."
The level of paranoia needed to believe that every single perfectly stable 12-year-old needs weekly visits with a mental health professional to ensure their health and safety, and that not supplying this is neglectful, is just... bizarre.
I cannot help but believe this sort of behavior is severely damaging the psyche of these kids. And I also don't see how it can't be hurting the parents as well. Imagine how incredibly stressful it must be to be a parent who believes every stranger, every walk around the block, and every pre-teen mood swing is a serious danger to their child.
We can broaden that a bit to: “There’s an ever growing group of people who think they can and should be the arbiter of other people’s behavior.”
Everyone needs to learn to mind their own fucking business.
We don't live in the states.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310218/time-spent-using...
Generally the younger you are the more likely you are to be a heavy user of your phone. There is no data for it but I would expect that high school and jr high kids are probably even higher users than 18 - 34.
Where do you live?
Whenever I read these stories it feels like I live on a different planet from everyone else.
It was like this when I was in high school as well: There is no place where young people are allowed to gather and explore their personalities.
Now, this is a peaceful suburban neighborhood we're talking about, and we're on a stretch between his school and a park near our home. He's riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he's being careful about it.
Off he goes, and the two of us stroll peacefully until we see him stopped, with an old lady talking to him. He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
Somewhere along the way, our society blurred the line between "stepping in to prevent child abuse" and "thinking you're entitled to being hostile and sanctimonious to other parents".
That attitude, while perhaps more comfortable in some ways, just enables the sort of behaviour you encountered, and apparently disliked, from that woman.
A blunt response like, "Fuck off. Don't talk to my son.", followed by walking away from her, may have been harsher and not particularly polite, but perhaps it'd cause a person like her to avoid such meddling in the future.
Depending on where you are, she might have gone decades without any kind of resistance to her behaviour.
Too much politeness can be worse than none at all.
Not a jab at you, but so tired of random people thinking they know what is best for my son from a 3 second interaction. We really need to bring back some shaming as I truly believe that is how you get a community to work together again instead of against each other.
You shouldn't have had to endure a lecture or be threatened by your neighbor. If the kid is just learning to ride a bike without training wheels, it would have been worth it to go back and get his helmet. I hope the lesson isn't "you shouldn't tell people when they are doing something dangerous," but that you shouldn't be a complete prick about it.
no you didn’t you were just too afraid to tell her to fuck off like any normal person would do in that situation
It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
> The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
Yes, but what's their incentive to do so? The more I look at the society in this country, the more I see that the incentives for LEOs are perfectly aligned with corruption and abuse of power.
You can get phony DUIs now too. How many people are on some pharmaceutical? Well if so, you’re automatically guilty, even if your doctors tells you that you can drive, and must take the meds.
He called because there was "an animal in distress."
We pulled into the driveway just as an RCMP officer was arriving "on the scene."
She entered the house with us, petted the dog, and rolled her eyes. And "closed the file."
The dog was doing its job.
Asshole neighbours (even in Canada) are a real problem.
One came up to our back door ranting and screaming, and my dad had to tell him to fuck off.
You usually only notice people when they do something weird-- maybe 999 days out of 1000 that neighbor is perfectly normal, but on that one day they were having an off day. That's the day you notice them.
An advantage of living further from people is that just fewer interactions with strangers and near-strangers so fewer opportunities to be the victim of someone's off-day.
Only got put in a cop car in the US - in both Germany and the U.K. they realised I was just doing normal human stuff - both childhood occasions in the US they gave my parents a talking to, as an adult they were unreasonably suspicious as to why I would be walking rather than driving, but let me go with a warning to drive in future.
So - the problem is the police, and the justice system, as curtain-twitchers live the world over.
The profoundly innumerate, that’s who. They overestimate the risk of an adverse event because they rely solely on media reports of child safety events to anchor their estimates, never stopping to consider that the media doesn’t report on children safely walking home.
Low and behold a few years later I find out that its my highschool police officer I get to see every day!
But my personal experience with the police here where I live is *very different* from the stories I hear from the US.
This really depends on your life experience.
For some this is no big deal. For some this means the parents are in a drunken/drug stupor. For some taking care of a kid means being instantly labeled as a pedo by parents, police and neighbours.
Because there was no kidnapping or sex trafficking going on, they were just making shit up.
The cop just demosntrated himself that he isnt doing his job and that there is something deeply wrong with society if a child cant even walk half a mile at 8 years old.
This parent was not exercising their responsibility as an individual to watch out for anything and everything that might hurt their child, in the US that is illegal because the free market ideology rules all.
Does it? I can't see this happening in Europe. What freedoms stand out?
edit: yeah, it was sarcarsm.
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Sure, that's all a bit circular, but good luck breaking the spiral with a "law and order" mentality.
U.S. police kill about ~1000 people per year, and the vast majority of those aren't at all questionable. If there are 330,000,000 people in the U.S., that's 0.000303% of the population per year. Each person has, on average, maybe 10 contentious police interactions in a lifetime of 75 years? That's 0.134 interactions per year.
So, given on this Fermi estimate, you have about a 0.00226% chance of being killed per contentious police interaction if we spread it completely evenly, or 2.26 in 100,000. And spreading it evenly doesn't make any sense at all.
So, if you're young, black, male, and running around Chicago dealing drugs carrying an illegal gun--yeah, maybe worry about it. For everyone here on HN, it's a stupid thing to worry about. Worry about your sedentary lifestyle. Worry about driving safely if you drive a lot. Worry about diabetes. Worry about whether your relationships with friends and family are good. Worry about your diet. Worry about exercise. Worry about falling down the stairs. The cops aren't going to kill you.
There are 8 year olds walking around my neighborhood every weekend and nobody bats an eye.
On average, the cops are nuts in the US... It just take one hot head in a group to make them all act badly...
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Please consider donating what you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...
To be clear, Wallace "is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program" and "hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again." The GoFundMe is to pay for those costs. It won't do anything to undo the original miscarriage.
It would of course be ridiculous to claim that these things don't happen absent of car culture: it's a broader trend than that, and there are suburban areas that buck the trend. But the urban/suburban divide here is stark: I grew up walking to school and riding public transport alone, and it's normal to see kids running around my neighborhood without any supervision. That kind of freedom works because nobody is surprised to see a 6 year old running errands; they're seen doing the same thing every day.
It's bizarre. Where I live the police are not insane like this but people will still be shocked if they find out you walked 1/2 mile instead of taking a car.
When I went to the US for a research visit, I didn't have a car, because my bed and breakfast was in walking distance to the lab (there was even a bus). So, naturally, I walked to a nearby restaurant in the evening, and was stopped by the police, asking me what I was up to. It didn't have any consequences, but still.
So I get that you want to find car culture to be the root of all evil, but I don't buy it.
For every place like yours, there are suburbs like the ones that most of my friends grew up in: ones where everybody drives in and out, where sidewalks exist primarily as a vessel for dogwalking, and nothing can be reached on foot (parks or basic living amenities).
Of course, nothing is monocausal. But if it were, that faulty would be 'car centric suburbia'.
I don't have anything to add, this is just a really important point.
In Japan, children are encouraged from early age to be independent. They even take the subway and bus by themselves, albeit it's significantly safer there than in other parts of the world. Still though, I think people in America have gone off the deep end.
I've offended a lot of suburban friends and family though, because they don't understand how we could raise a child in NYC let alone give them any kind of independence. I've been told that it's irresponsible, that I'll be endangering him, and that I'm crazy to think the city is a safe place for a child, among other things.
These problems are not unique to suburbia, but they're definitely amplified.
There's packs of them that transit their way to local skate parks near me.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
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> In our culture today, parents and other adults overprotect children from possible dangers in play. We seriously underestimate children’s ability to take care of themselves and make good judgments [...] Our underestimation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—by depriving children of freedom, we deprive them of the opportunities they need to learn how to take control of their own behavior and emotions.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, this comment isn't a judgment on anyone or promoting any type of child-rearing philosophy. It's just an obvious truth. Nobody wants to be that parent, and that obviously influences behavior.
I agreed with you ... because I misread your comment as being concerned that the cops would come pick up your kid (like happened here in TFA). My (semi-legitimate) fear is that I'll be harassed as a parent for letting my kids do normal things like walk around the neighborhood. That'd be the only reason I might not encourage it.
Your kid is much more likely to be picked up by the cops over handwringing like this than to be kidnapped.
It took me quite some effort to overcome that but I made it easier by reading the statistics on child deaths and other crimes.
PS. I'm a father of three girls and live in Europe. Kids here navigate on their own with public transport if needed between home/school/etc since the age of 6.
And yeah, of course nobody wants that, but you can't take away a healthy part of growing up because of that.
Would not be surprised to learn that school districts in area even require children to walk to school if they are within that distance to their schools.
Anyone involved in this should at very least should lose their jobs and family should be awarded significant compensation for the harm done to the family.