A few years ago at a baseball tournament my son’s team did phenomenally well, and ended up beating a really great team from out of state.
A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.
Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).
Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.
> they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom.
Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.
We had a complaint like this for my dad when he was near the end.
We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).
Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account.
That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.
We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.
My daughter was having a very bad day, very pouty and whiny. Around age 8 or so. My wife had put her in a timeout, and then our daughter kept “needing” to go to the bathroom over and over again (usually to play in the sink). Fed up with this, my exasperated wife force marched her to the bathroom with her hand on her back to ensure she went to the bathroom and wasn’t loitering about playing.
A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.
This is an N=1 story. There are 7-8 billion people on earth, 300 some million in the US, I forget how many in Europe (you can measure Europe, EU, NATO, and get different results and different cultures). With that many people there will always be someone doing something unbelievable stupid, and hackernews is large enough that you are likely to hear about it.
Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.
I'm glad it worked out for you. If anyone finds themselves in this situation, please do not talk to protective services without a lawyer. Treat it like you're talking to the cops who are investigating you.
They can make your life hell and take your children away. They do it for things as minor as possessing marijuana in your home, and they do it every day to people who are poor. You just don't hear about it because those stories don't make it into the news.
Hi. I'm Lenore Skenazy. I wrote that article and run Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence, which grew out of the Free-Range Kids movement. (I wrote Free-Range Kids.) At Let Grow we are working to change state neglect laws so they clarify that neglect is ONLY when you put your kid in serious, obvious and likely danger -- not ANY TIME you take your eyes off them, or anytime someone doesn't like your parenting style. Four states have passed these "Reasonable Childhood Independence" laws and five states are considering them this year. Find out more (and, if you'd like, help out) at LetGrow.org . Click on "Advocacy."
Not as bad as your story, but my wife drove to our local community center parking lot, with our infant in the back. She got out of the car and started talking to a friend about 20 feet from the car (windows down, not hot). Another woman called the police complaining that the kid was in the car unattended. They came and threatened to get CPS involved. In the end nothing happened, but it was scary how the situation escalated so quickly.
I am so sorry that this happened. People love to feel like THEY care more about your own kid than you do. And the problem is: with cell phones it is almost effortless to get the authorities involved. LS (I wrote Free-Range Kids and run the nonprofit Let Grow)
The insidious aspect of doing something like this is that there’s no way of knowing who made the report, and there seems to be no repercussion for making frivolous or false claims, otherwise you could retaliate against them
in the same way.
A few days ago, CPS had to get involved because somehow an eight year old ended up in the middle of a highway. Cops showed up first and shut down the highway to safely extract the kid. CPS got to bring the kid back to the parents.
Sorry you had to go through that. I am having a hard time thinking of a way how someone could walk their child to the bathroom wrong. Could you share some more details if you are comfortable?
The problem with trying to punish people for false complaints is that disincentives to reporting child abuse is probably not worth the annoyances. By the time it transitions from a mere annoyance (having to talk to someone from the CPS for an hour and that's it) to something much more impactful (someone producing enough fraudulent evidence that you are arrested and put on trial) they've moved away from merely abusing a reporting system and into full-blown felonious behavior that will not be ignored!
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.
Don't talk to state workers. Same as don't talk to the police. Anything you say cannot be used to help you in court, it is heresay. It can only be used against you. The interviews are to determine if the DA has enough evidence to prosecute you and if human services meets the vague requirements to steal your kids.
What's bizarre to me is how common both these sort of stories are, but also stories of American parents beating their kids as if that's a normal thing. Where are these child protection services in cases of actual child abuse?
This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips. In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society. There should be quick and immediate recourse against police officers acting like this. No police officer should feel safe or beyond swift reproach when making comments like the ones in this article, yet there is absolutely no justice available for those affected. Even in a best-case scenario where charges are dropped a few days later, this is the psychological equivalent of a home invasion, and attempted kidnapping of their children. Dropping charges is not justice. Those officers should lose their jobs (but won't, because Killingly, like all of the 'Quiet Corner' is a complete boys club), and everyone involved in the decision tree should be heavily scrutinized. The town should issue a public apology. And whoever may or may not have called 911 should be publicly berated.
This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.
No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
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.
I think a lot of folks in the US don't realize that even some (some!) countries we think of as authoritarian feel freer, day to day, than the US does, let alone other liberal democracies.
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)
Fully agreed here - I grew up in ex-Yugoslavia, which while it wasn't part of the Eastern bloc, it wasn't too dissimilar. It was perfectly acceptable and expected for kids to be out and about without direct parent supervision. Neighbours knew kids from the surrounding and would take care of them as needed. At 11-12, I walked to the store by myself or with similar aged friends many times to buy beer for my dad. The store owner happily sold it to me as he knew my dad and knew if I did buy it for myself, it would take no more than a day or two to find out. Police would have never questioned any part of this behaviour, it was fully normalized. I'd say it definitely resulted in children being more independent.
You’re leaving out the part where the police got COS involved who then harassed the family for months. As others have mentioned, they’d have no ability to sue for the actions of the officers unless there was existing case law about almost the exact situation. Qualified immunity protects officers who do stupid shit like this.
Agreed. I am from ex Yugoslavia and for many... interesting things that growing up there entailed, my childhood was free. I walked to school starting grade 1! In a city of half a million I and all my classmates safely crossed intersections and walled to school every day.
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.
> 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).
Tangent here. I grew up in Greece. Policing, but the culture of government in general is don't sweat the little things, but you better get the important stuff right.
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.
>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.
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'd know what happened if you'd read the article.
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.
Throughout most of the USSR at the time, there was actually comparatively very little violent crime, including child kidnapping. Kids roamed freely.
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:
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.
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.
I don't think OP referred to authoritarianism about children, but authoritarianism in general.
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.
As a counter to your story I grew up in the US, in a largish city, my friends and I also had basically total freedom to wander around, we mostly spent time in the nearby parks/playgrounds (of which there were 3), but we had quiet a bit of autonomy.
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.
>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).
Most of our cops a no longer people who want to protect their communities. They're losers who like the feeling of power. The ability to impose their will on others is a rush.
If the cops wanted to protect their communities, they would have spent 15 minutes keeping an eye on the kids, see they're buying donuts, and go about their day.
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.
My freshman year roommate at university (who was a random assignment) ended up dropping out of his science major our first year and decided he wanted to pursue being a cop. When I asked him why he said "I just want to be able to fuck with people", sort of jokingly, but also you could tell he meant 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.
I'm no fan of cops but I blame the system as much or more. Police are designed to arrest evict and cite, and little more. Make the rewards revolve around protection rather than punishment and the people currently police would go back to a more suiting pursuit for their personality which is likely violent crime.
> No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
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.
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.
It's not justice at all, the parents now have an arrest record. Hopefully they never have to fill out an application that asks about that (e.g. pistol license).
> It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips
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.
>Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America.
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?
I was more drawing analogy between how above reproach authority was (or at least how it was portrayed to me) than about whether or not children could freely explore.
It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.
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.
> 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.
> It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.
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
I don't know which Dunkin they were going to, but the Dunkin I've been to the most in Killingly was near a major intersection. Depending on what side, they may not have had to cross one.
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.
This is not necessarily a power trip. There are people who genuinely feel that way, and are doing this for the public good.
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).
Can you elaborate on what you mean? I not certain, but I don’t think any U.S. police are legally allowed to demand well-being without a safety concern. What laws require well-being, and justify police threats?
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.
Again, to clarify, I was not saying children in Eastern bloc countries were arrested for exploring. I was saying that authority was (at least viewed as by Western countries) beyond reproach.
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.
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.
Oh please. They publish a lot of journalism and have been covering police abuse for decades including work by Radley Balko back in 2017 when no one cared. Senior editor Jacob Sullum has won awards for his journalism on drug policy. Elizabeth Nolan Brown does great investigative work around sex workers. It isn’t a click bait farm, even if YOU disagree with their politics.
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.
> In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society.
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?
France has "federalized" police in most of the country and they don't have this problem. I'm with you, that doesn't seem to be the causal factor.
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.
> It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips.
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.
This is a very good point. Our society is more dangerous (giving them the premise, this might not be the case in actuality) because of their ineptitude and corruption.
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.
I think that centralization of power is a spurious correlation. It may be part of the equation, but there is more to it.
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?
They should hang in the public square on the very next Sunday, it’s the only thing that will truly change anything at this point. You might think this is extreme but I welcome you to come back in 5-10 years and read it again and see what you think.
The police were just overreacting bro. They still had good intent and I applaud them for taking the initiative to combat rampant child sex trafficking that is almost never fought against these drays. From the judge's point of view, since a cop was feeding them info, of course the judge will side closer to the cop.
Christ, calm down a bit. Stupid shit happens, but the article not about that - they stimulus'd and you response'd exactly as intended. Get some insight into them and yourself or you're going to be easily manipulable forever.
> This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism.
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.
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.
> This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips.
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.
Bullshit. Police in america are able to exercise discretion, which means they could (and should) have laughed at the order to arrest these parents and not carried it out, or at least just went and talked to them instead. They decided to arrest them instead, in all likelihood because it makes them feel powerful.
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.
Sorry, but no. Common sense is enough to realize that this is a ridiculous situation, no matter what the law says. You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the door of legislators and voters. And if their concerns were real rather than just a pretext for a powertrip they'd keep an eye out instead of making it impossible for children to lead a normal life.
The police (executive branch) are the ones who decide what and how to enforce as evidence by the fact they dropped the charges. We live in a very vague world and have to use our own judgement on things as laws cannot contain the full context necessary to make those judgements. Do you truly expect an elected official from a city across the state or across the country to understand the relationship between you and your neighbors or the structure of your town? If there is truly so much crime that it is unsafe for children to walk to a store unsupervised than that points more at a failing of the police but we know that police do not prevent crime[1].
You’re getting downvoted but what you’re saying is kinda true. What typically spurned these laws was an actual tragedy: a parent had their child run to the store to buy something, child was abducted, family was devastated, and then worked to pass some law that makes it illegal for children under a certain age to be unaccompanied by an adult. Well-meaning but ultimately way too restrictive: what happened to their child was a freak tragedy, not a common occurrence.
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.
Rivers tried to explain to the caseworker that the police had overreacted, but the caseworker maintained that the parents had somehow jeopardized their kids safety. When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information—and insisted she return to therapy.
Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?
And people wonder why there is a stigma and general reluctance to get help like therapy. Even if it were completely free, it can still have a cost and be used against you.
Exactly. I think that for some folks out there who are struggling, they're not necessarily hesitating to get help they need out of shame or wounded sense of pride. But because they've correctly assessed the risks of it being weaponized against them.
I can imagine a world where culture gets better in 20, 30 years and we look back at the 2020s and say "yikes, good thing it's not like that anymore."
Unfortunately the social workers are just police without guns. They have the same law enforcement problem: the people who apply for the jobs are the ones who want to abuse people. They aren't servants of the law, they want to use the law as a weapon. The good social workers are in private clinics and schools.
Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.
The problem is that making the government responsible (and liable) creates an incentive for government employees and departments to overreact and treat every situation as harshly as possible, because if they were ever to be reasonable and lenient, and a child were to be abused later, they would then be blamed.
The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges.
The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.
Also, most of what they do is under threat of authority, not actual authority. For the most part, they need a court order to enter your home, question your children without your permission, etc. Hopefully if more people realize they have the right to say no, then the worker will be a little more reasonable. Right now they know that everyone they meet bends to their threats and nobody challenges them, so they are emboldened.
Funny enough part of the Defund the police push essentially was implying social workers were the answer (granted more about mental health than child protection services). Still, the point is it seems every agency has their knee to the neck of americans so to speak.
Kinda reminds me of the song Dystopia Now by Mental Minority[1] which quotes George Orwell's 1984 "If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever"
I felt like I learned something when I saw a list of average GRE scores by fields of study and social workers were at the absolute bottom, well below others.
While I'm sure that many have genuine compassion for others, this doesn't change the fact that many are literal morons who have been given incredible authority to interfere with the lives of others. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you please at least find and link to this list before you call hundreds of thousands of low-paid highly educated essential workers "literal morons"?
I’ll note this every time this kind of story comes up: it’s good and correct to direct ire at the police here, but it’s also not the end of the story. The story also continues through America’s isolationist and atavistic car culture: you simply don’t see this kind of bloodthirst for “protecting children” in countries (or even areas within the US) with sensible urban design and correspondingly shifted expectations about the public.
This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.
It's not just a matter of car-dependent living. Suburbs have been around since the 50s and yet, 20-30 years ago, we didn't live in this constant fear of danger lurking on every suburb sidewalk. Media (regular media and social media) amplification of every single tragedy that ever happens to anyone anywhere has created this culture of fear. When I was a kid, we walked or rode our bike to school, or to the ice cream shop, without everyone being up in arms about it. It's no more dangerous now than it was then -- in fact, it's probably safer -- but our perception of society as a dangerous place has grown tremendously. It's a horrible way to live. I want my kids to be smart street and not naive, but I don't want them to live in fear.
I'd go a step further, which technologists will fail to accept, since it's essentially an animistic argument. Cars, very specifically, the actual physical _thing_ are evil technology. In absolute terms, in absence of their application.
Americans don't recognize it as such. We see it just as a tool. It is not. Cars have their own force field and it has changed our minds, our bodies, our relationships to other, our dispositions.
Once americans recognize it as such, we can see change. It's not impossible. From my visits to Europe, the difference is already night and day in so many places compared to just 10-15 years ago. If they can, we can. But it will be such a hard slog.
I've been reading a collection of Tom Wolfe's journalism from the 1960s[1], and it's fascinating to see how the car has warped from a liberating force (in the sense of propelling countercultures and shrinking the rural divide) to a domineering one (in terms of suburban fear culture and dependence).
These phenomena could be seen as incompatible on face value, but they're really just two phases in the same arc: the children of these articles' subjects grew up in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself, and built systems to enshrine it.
While we’re on the topic, I would add TVs to the list of evil objects. With a book, if you don’t like the content, you can stop reading at any time. But with a TV, anyone in the vicinity is coerced into keep listening and turning the TV off, even when the content is extremely disturbing, while others are watching is considered faux pas.
kind of agree, but there are ways to improve it. Public transit can be an example where it (in some places and countries) mixes socio economic classes, maybe save for the highest wealth...
Additionally things like Cruise's driverless car can make driving more social again. Imagine being able to play a game or have a casual cup of coffee with a friend over a commute.
I think you missed the point: the claim was that the obsession over safety (partially the kind that manifests in cases like this) is the culmination of a robust car culture. Things like this obviously don't happen overnight; they require decades of normalization (and, for car culture in particular, alienation).
This was my first thought. Didn't even think about the cops, they do what they do, but they're operating in a culture, not that they're not wrong, but it's stupid all the way down. If I lived in Berlin and my kid wanted to ride their bike to the Dunkin Doughnuts in fucking Amsterdam, I'd tell them to update me every so often over the next couple days, and let me know if you quit and need to get the train home, but I'd wish them well and send them on their way.
That's also not to say that there's no car dependency there, but it's not as ruthless and overbearing.
I live in rural/small town area in Japan that is not designed well and most adults have a car, but children go elementary school by walking. This is standard here. Sensible urban design isn't minimum requirement.
uhh no the blatant problem here is american mentality where everything is illegal by default including breathing and walking. breathing is only legal because it's necessary to survive. walking is legal but only on certain areas of land. you HNers display this mentality every single day with your latest "oh cookies should be illegal" and "oh AI should be illegal" nonsense. your narrative about car culture (the first time i heard this one) is insane and probably some left wing talking point or something, i don't read the news. normies have that pathetic mentality you describe regardless of cars. call it american mentality, not car mentality, although it's actually the same in all countries (including whatever "well designed" city like oslo or whatever you have in mind), but america invented it. tl;dr the disease is statism, not car culture.
Leaving aside the parts of this argument not worth dealing with (that is, most of them), you make the fundamental carbrain error. How do you think interstates, suburban development, and countless square miles of public roads and public parking came to be? The answer (and it's an extremely easy one to find because it's less than a hundred years old) is massive amounts of public investment. There's no universe in which virtuously libertarian (TM) private money would have done the same thing. So while the midwit impulse is to bifurcate "statism" and "car culture" and call one a "left wing talking point", they are at the very least not exclusive. There's mutual causation, of course, but I have no desire to open that chapter under this comment.
When I was a kid, I spent 3 hours outside with the neighbors kids every weekday after finishing my homework. On weekends it was more like 8 at the park. I consider it a forming experience for me as a person. I was safe but also was able to explore and get exercise.
Society’s urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is detrimental. It has negative health effects. It also removes any idea of community when you can’t go out and explore what is around you. That’s even before you think about freedom of movement.
This specter of unlimited liability must make the idea of becoming a parent quite daunting.
You need to secure not only housing, food, and energy, but also 24/7 supervision, in the form of daycare, after daycare activities, after school activities, or one parent being with the kids at all times. Which means you are especially screwed if there is a divorce, so you probably want backup grandparents and aunts/uncles, if they can afford to be available and near you.
I often tell people that a child takes up an infinite amount of time and resources.
But one counterpoint on divorce. If you can manage to do it well, split custody, and continue to co-parent effectively, then you get to be a devoted parent spending every waking moment and spare penny taking care of your kids… for half of the time. And then you get to spend the other half of your time as a single adult.
It’s not a sales pitch, and I think in most cases it doesn’t work out so well, but getting divorced and equally sharing the children has been world-changing for me in terms of balance and getting time to focus on myself and fulfill my own dreams in terms of travel, hobbies, bucket list, etc.
In our case there was never any extended family who would ever take the kids, which is another thing that’s becoming more common. So basically from Day 1 until off to college you are providing full-time child rearing, which can be quite the crucible.
I don't know how old you are, but I did much the same quite often and want to add: For me at least, it was without a cellphone.
I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.
I used to take the train to another town and then a bus, just to get to school every day, as a kid (i.e. 10-12). This was before cellphones, and I doubt I even had money for a payphone on me. I was fine and it was perfectly normal. Of course this was in France, not the U.S. so quite different in terms of cultural acceptance. It was before the concept of sex offenders (and a host of other dangers) really exploded in the media, which I believe was the big shift in everyone's minds (this idea of a pervert or kidnapper lurking behind every corner).
> I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.
How so? they would have grown up that way themselves? -- I don't think it was common for children to have cell phones until after 2000, no? Median age for first time mothers in the US is 30.
The insane part is that those police officers and neighbours likely grew up in a community where they were able to have the freedom to go outside unsupervised. They all survived to adulthood and are now trying to snatch away those freedoms from the young. Disgraceful.
"Because it's not like it used to be," is the excuse I hear. Meanwhile crime is lower than it was 30+ years ago, or whatever generation these cops grew up in.
The common perception of "stranger danger" is a load of nonsense thanks to 90s infotainment, as well as John Walsh (of America's Most Wanted) for making up bullshit about tens of thousands of children being abducted by strangers (hint: it's not even in the thousands); the vast majority of child abuse and abductions are committed by familial connections, by far.
Right!? I went out, by myself, walking through suburban and semiurban (Houston) as a young child in the 80s and 90s — easily far more dangerous in a practical sense: more crime, less ubiquitous cell phones, ...
This helicoptering is nuts. It's something my family does, which is especially weird from my parents: humans I wouldn't see for days due to their long work schedules and my boredom in the summer.
People used to talk about "The Popsicle Index"[1] which is the percentage of families in an area comfortable with letting an elementary school aged child walk to the nearest store and buy a popsicle on their own. These days parents don't get to make that decision, the entire community makes it for them. Any dissenting opinion can result in losing your kids.
My kids are 7 and 9 and walk to the corner store together (Somerville MA). They also walk to and from school, the park, and to friends' houses. The more kids do this the more normal it will seem to others, and we can slowly get society's sense of how old you need to be to walk places back to somewhere reasonable.
Unfortunately, city design alters people's perceptions of where it is acceptable to walk. I moved from walkable Vancouver to car-centric Mississippi, and I already look at people with suspicion when they are walking on the road in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where their car is and why they are walking there.
> This was in Killingly, Connecticut, a suburban town in the northeast part of the state. The Rivers' lived near an elementary school, library, state police barracks, sidewalks, crosswalks, many Victorian-style homes, and the aforementioned donut shop. The kids gathered $7, and off they went.
Street View shows that the town looks quite walkable especially for suburban America. It just boggles my mind that people would consider calling the police on a 7 and 9 year old for walking on those streets.
> I already look at people with suspicion when they are walking on the road in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where their car is and why they are walking there.
Somerville is basically as perfect a city as I've seen in the US for walking, for anyone! And thus the perfect beachhead to take back childhood independence.
Readit News
A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.
Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).
Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.
Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.
We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).
Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account. That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.
We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.
A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.
You're defending yourself without knowing the charge, with the investigator/judge/jury CPS agent presuming you are at least somewhat guilty.
Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.
They can make your life hell and take your children away. They do it for things as minor as possessing marijuana in your home, and they do it every day to people who are poor. You just don't hear about it because those stories don't make it into the news.
but having no consequences means they CAN retaliate the same way
Are they? Seems that they do more harm than good.
A few days ago, CPS had to get involved because somehow an eight year old ended up in the middle of a highway. Cops showed up first and shut down the highway to safely extract the kid. CPS got to bring the kid back to the parents.
People abuse kids all the time.
Do you have any evidence to back this statement?
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.
Cue Will Ferrell yelling at kids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=junIx1T8A5I
This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.
No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
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/
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)
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Maybe in Boston. They're not THAT common in CT and other states.
They could file a FOIA for 911 call recordings during that timeframe. It's likely no calls were made.
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).
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.
Instead, the cops left the children who were supposedly in mortal peril to go harass the parents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
(*) when not matched by appropriate safe guards.
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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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heien_v._North_Carolina
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when...
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.
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Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?
I can imagine a world where culture gets better in 20, 30 years and we look back at the 2020s and say "yikes, good thing it's not like that anymore."
Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.
Why stop there? Do that for all law enforcement jobs.
The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges.
The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.
Kinda reminds me of the song Dystopia Now by Mental Minority[1] which quotes George Orwell's 1984 "If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever"
[1]: https://open.spotify.com/track/5stJEL2X1WkqAFz4kTq8hV
While I'm sure that many have genuine compassion for others, this doesn't change the fact that many are literal morons who have been given incredible authority to interfere with the lives of others. What could possibly go wrong?
I'm asking because I don't believe you. Here's a list I found, see page 28 for Social and Behavioral Sciences' above average scores: https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-data-2016.p...
Haha nice one dude, very edgy.
This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.
Our hyper-focus on fear these days is pretty apparent. I do think the media and the scale of information that abounds is a likely culprit.
I cynically think that the media advertising complex which is fueled by attention is to blame. Danger grabs eyeballs for advertisers.
I'd go a step further, which technologists will fail to accept, since it's essentially an animistic argument. Cars, very specifically, the actual physical _thing_ are evil technology. In absolute terms, in absence of their application.
Americans don't recognize it as such. We see it just as a tool. It is not. Cars have their own force field and it has changed our minds, our bodies, our relationships to other, our dispositions.
Once americans recognize it as such, we can see change. It's not impossible. From my visits to Europe, the difference is already night and day in so many places compared to just 10-15 years ago. If they can, we can. But it will be such a hard slog.
I've been reading a collection of Tom Wolfe's journalism from the 1960s[1], and it's fascinating to see how the car has warped from a liberating force (in the sense of propelling countercultures and shrinking the rural divide) to a domineering one (in terms of suburban fear culture and dependence).
These phenomena could be seen as incompatible on face value, but they're really just two phases in the same arc: the children of these articles' subjects grew up in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself, and built systems to enshrine it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kandy-Kolored_Tangerine-Fl...
Additionally things like Cruise's driverless car can make driving more social again. Imagine being able to play a game or have a casual cup of coffee with a friend over a commute.
I'm European and basically everyone I know sees them like that, and great tools as well.
I won't even comment on the woo stuff.
That's also not to say that there's no car dependency there, but it's not as ruthless and overbearing.
Society’s urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is detrimental. It has negative health effects. It also removes any idea of community when you can’t go out and explore what is around you. That’s even before you think about freedom of movement.
You need to secure not only housing, food, and energy, but also 24/7 supervision, in the form of daycare, after daycare activities, after school activities, or one parent being with the kids at all times. Which means you are especially screwed if there is a divorce, so you probably want backup grandparents and aunts/uncles, if they can afford to be available and near you.
I often tell people that a child takes up an infinite amount of time and resources.
But one counterpoint on divorce. If you can manage to do it well, split custody, and continue to co-parent effectively, then you get to be a devoted parent spending every waking moment and spare penny taking care of your kids… for half of the time. And then you get to spend the other half of your time as a single adult.
It’s not a sales pitch, and I think in most cases it doesn’t work out so well, but getting divorced and equally sharing the children has been world-changing for me in terms of balance and getting time to focus on myself and fulfill my own dreams in terms of travel, hobbies, bucket list, etc.
In our case there was never any extended family who would ever take the kids, which is another thing that’s becoming more common. So basically from Day 1 until off to college you are providing full-time child rearing, which can be quite the crucible.
Also stupid (my opinion).
I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.
How so? they would have grown up that way themselves? -- I don't think it was common for children to have cell phones until after 2000, no? Median age for first time mothers in the US is 30.
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Indoor, sedentary and with a price in general.
Well, they're right.
We used to treat concern trolls like laughingstock, now they set national policy.
Karenism is an existential threat, and it should have been treated as such before it got this bad.
This helicoptering is nuts. It's something my family does, which is especially weird from my parents: humans I wouldn't see for days due to their long work schedules and my boredom in the summer.
People used to talk about "The Popsicle Index"[1] which is the percentage of families in an area comfortable with letting an elementary school aged child walk to the nearest store and buy a popsicle on their own. These days parents don't get to make that decision, the entire community makes it for them. Any dissenting opinion can result in losing your kids.
[1] https://home.solari.com/the-popsicle-index/
> This was in Killingly, Connecticut, a suburban town in the northeast part of the state. The Rivers' lived near an elementary school, library, state police barracks, sidewalks, crosswalks, many Victorian-style homes, and the aforementioned donut shop. The kids gathered $7, and off they went.
Street View shows that the town looks quite walkable especially for suburban America. It just boggles my mind that people would consider calling the police on a 7 and 9 year old for walking on those streets.
... but why? How does it possibly matter?
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