Makes me angry that removing the ability for self-sufficiency – even just walking alone for errands – only furthers dystopia.
Why most American GenXers thump their chests about being turn-key kids… yet they should be opposing such overreach.
When I was 7, I would mow a lawn for 10$ and then ride my bike to a movie rental store and rent video games. It was about 5 miles away.
When I was 8 or so, I rode the subway to the end of the line and back just for fun…
Arrest the passerby for wasting police time and resources
The onlooker called the police because they observed a child walking alone along a rural highway with no shoulder or sidewalk. There’s plenty of very reportable reasons for a child to be walking alone along the highway and plenty of perfectly normal reasons for that to happen
Honestly the police and prosecutor are the only ones who are in the wrong. The police should have simply stopped by the boy to make sure all was well, give them a ride home if possible, and notify the parents so they can take it from there. Charging the parent with Reckless Conduct for this incident is absolutely bonkers
@Trainguyrom @firewyre Better idea for people who observe a child walking where there’s no sidewalk and think it’s a problem: call the damned transportation department and demand proper infrastructure!
Then whip him on the public square.
this is from december and she has a gofundme for her legal defense apparently (might be : https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-parentsusas-fight-for-brits-parental-rights )
Of course in the US
Two things. One : that is ridiculous overreach.
Two : we shouldn’t accept a society so dangerous our kids can’t explore and have fun…
It’s not dangerous, as long as you manage to evade the police.
Your second point is really difficult for me as a parent with a new kid. Feels like we “know” so much more about serial killers / bad things that happen to kids that we’re terrified of letting them do anything.
Of course in this case it would have been trivially solved by the city just adding sidewalks, but that feels like another point here.
Of course in this case it would have been trivially solved by the city just adding sidewalks, but that feels like another point here
It sounds like the family lives just outside of city limits of a small town, so a sidewalk or trail would involve significant investment for the benefit of very few people. I think in this instance its not actually an infrastructure problem but simply a challenge of where some people choose to live.
When you choose to live outside of town you’re specifically choosing to always drive everywhere, and to receive no city services at all, and you’re subjecting your kids who lack the same freedoms that you do to the same choices. Plenty of people choose the individualism of not receiving city services in exchange for being alone in the woods
As much as I’d love a world where everyone has a sidewalk, once you’re out in the sticks it just becomes really hard to make sense to put a trail or sidewalk there. Especially because even if you imagine a world where every town is connected together by a dedicated cycle trail, said trail would ideally not run directly parallel to the noisy highway
heard someone say “these kids will never have a summer like ‘85” and that frustrates me. I remember as a kid exploring the whole town with my friends. Predators or dangerous people was not so common. We should work towards getting that high trust society back. The type where we can leave our doors unlocked at night…
Probably unrealistic in cities!
@zululove @bignate31 Not at all. Kids in cities typically have a lot more freedom than kids in suburbs and crime rates are far lower now than they were in the 80s. The only differences are the car-dominance of the urban form and the climate of fear which is constantly stoked by politicians, tv, and social media.
That’s good parenting, most definitely a good instinct to have.
When I was a kid in the 60s, during the school year, I walked a mile to and from school, starting at age 5.
On weekends or summers, I would eat breakfast, jump on my bike, and not be back until dinner at 5 (The Rule). I had no ID, no money, no phone, no watch, no water, no food, nothing. And my mom had no idea where I was, either.
If I got thirsty, I’d knock on a door, and ask for a glass of water, and always got one. If I needed to know what time it was, I’d ask someone. I got pretty good at judging the time of day by the setting sun, and could always get home before 5. I never felt unsafe, as long as I could avoid the Robolotto brothers.
I never thought rural Georgia would be so car-brained about it but I guess I’m not surprised
Was it a dangerous walk? This, too, was subjective. The prosecutor, Emma Harper, certainly thought so. Later, in a phone call to Patterson’s attorney, David DeLugas, which DeLugas legally recorded and shared with CNN, the prosecutor called it “a busy highway with no sidewalk” and said, “It’s not walkable. It’s not safe … That’s not a thing that you do here. Because you’re gonna get hit by a car.”
Instead of building sidewalks, they arrest working moms, amazing.
I wonder if children walking home from school are now a problem? That was like my main source of exercise.
It’s not. My 10 year old did it for some of last year. His teachers and principal supported it.
There’s a town near me where the school is technically on a state highway. Any student who walks to school gets instantly suspended for the day for walking on a highway. In the last few years they started building a nice big sidewalk connecting to the actual town streets so that kids can legally walk to school, but it is pretty bonkers that that school is so far from where kids should be walking or biking
My theory is that it’s paranoia born out of how the media handles crime, and how isolating suburbia is.
My mother sent me to the corner store for milk when I was 6. Should I call the cops now and stool her out?
I grew up in a small town, by the time i was 6 or 7 i did groceries with my bike. When i was 10 we went pretty much everywhere by bus, bike, inline skates or by foot. The next city was like 10km away where we would traverse all the time. My mom should be in Auschwitz i guess.
Yeah, I definitely walked further than a mile everyday to and from school from 7-14. Sketchiest thing was the old dude handing out those mini Bibles trying to indoctrinate children and shitty drivers.
America: “We will arrest you if you let a child out unsupervised”
Also America “kids sit in front of the screen at home all day.”
Also also America " if somebody accidentally runs over your child with a car they will get a 6 month license suspension"
Also also also America “We think crime is way up even though its at record lows and a leading cause of death here is automobile accidents”
Also also also America “We think crime is way up even though its at record lows and a leading cause of death here is automobile accidents”
Shhh don’t tell them, they need to cling to the notion that guns are the leading cause of death for kids age 0-19 even though that covid era study took place only in 5 cities known for their HUGE gang problems while less people were driving because of lockdowns. Their way they can scream about guns online for easy virtual treats, if they knew the truth they’d have to scream about cars which (outside of here) is a harder sell and they’ll get less internet treats, nobody will even call them a good boy for having the correct opinion!
Lol, I was literally discussing this in another thread.
The child death rate from guns has gone down since the 90s but the death rate of kids to cars has gone way way down since the 90s to the point its dropped below gun deaths. Probably due to anything from increased work from home to increased traffic safety project funding since the late 2000s. Increased biking may even play a role.
Well all violent crime in the US has been getting lower since '93, except a small uptick around 2016-2023ish (going back down now), and of course that does include children, and yes safety has helped there as well, but the specific study that I was referencing took place during covid in NYC, Philidelphia, LA, Chicago, and iirc Baltimore, and it included 18-19 yo “kids” who are legally adults, and actual kids that are sadly involved in gang activity surprisingly young but gets more violent around 13-16 (know/knew a good number of them, but never got involved myself.) It was never actually true that guns killed more kids than cars, if you take out the 18-19yos and do that same study in the same cities now without the lockdowns (which still gives guns the advantage because many of those cities actually have good public transportation thus decreasing car use in general, and those cities still have the aforementioned gang problems) you’d likely find that cars are in fact still the leading cause of death amongst actual kids.
Tbh if the opioid epidemic couldn’t unseat cars, nothing will without statistical manipulation.
Dumbest country on earth. You cannot change my mind.
They do. This story is just because backward ass red state. In my neighborhood there are kids playing around all the time.
Holy smokes, that was 10 years ago. I need to look up the outcome of that case. Absolutely ridiculous. No one under 18 unsupervised? We have lost our goddamn minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitiv_incidents
Tldr: Officials clarified that it’s fine and they shouldn’t have been bothered beyond police asking the kids if they were okay in response to a call.
The police and CPS responded because someone called the cops, who are required to respond in some way and then to document the case. The reporting code for “report of unsupervised child” is intended to be “neighbors haven’t seen the parents in several days, but they noticed the kid moving around the house and were concerned”. Sometimes it’s not okay for kids to be alone.
So the police responded because someone called, and then gave them a ride home and filled their report. CPS got the report because the only category it fit in was one they are supposed to investigate. They did their investigation because the law says if you’re under eight you must be supervised by someone at least 13, and because they were in violation they had to do their follow-ups, which are invasive because they’re geared towards actual issues and there’s no way to delicately inspect someone’s home and interview their children.
When it happened again at the park, there was now a report on file for a CPS investigation that was still in progress, so now it’s “parents being investigated for neglect getting another report of the same behavior”, which means that now the presumption is that the parents aren’t capable of following a directive to not do the behavior that started the investigation , so instead of sending them home and then sending an officer to see what’s up they’re going to hold them until they can determine safety. Which they were, but all the people see is “they were instructed and agreed to not leave them unsupervised until we finished and we got a concerned report about them being left unsupervised”.
Eventually officials clarified that CPS was incorrect, and that the laws wording and intent was to prevent young children from being unsupervised in vehicles and structures, not parks, sidewalks or in public. No leaving your 7 year old home alone or in the car.First incident is on the busybody who called the cops and the CPS people who didn’t just leave and drop it when they learned they weren’t left behind at home or in a car, and that the sidewalk and park weren’t like, a highway median and an industrial park.
Second incident is a little more on them. Preposterous or not, they were explicitly and legally informed they needed to not do that until CPS got back to them, and they agreed to do so. It was still more of an ordeal than it should have been, but you should generally not be surprised when they respond poorly to you doing what they just told you not to do.
You can be entirely in the right and end up in more trouble for not following instructions during the process of figuring that out.Thank you sooo much for writing that out and citing the source!
The really weird thing is that back before the 1990s, when it was common for kids to be free range, there was far more stranger abductions and violent crime than there is today. We just hear about everything so quickly and so much that people think they are now living in a more dangerous time. But then that was the plan since 9/11 - have Americans live in constant fear so the government could take over.
so by that logic, less free range children, the more safe children will be? hence the police were correct to arrest this mother?
No, unless it’s your argument that the kids were the source of the violent crime.
I think the argument would be that “alone children” aren’t the source but simply create an opportunity for abduction, in that they remove a barrier of “parent catching you.” Which, sure, that’s for sure true (easier to kidnap alone child than with parents around, pretty non-debatable.)
BUT of course that ignores that there could be external reasons for the reduction in crime like anything from “more cameras” to “DNA exists now” to “literal FBI bug in your pocket 24/7” and anything else. Add to that it’s more likely to be a confluence of different and often unrelated factors that all contribute to the reduction in both abduction and violent crime as a whole than “one reason.” Pretty standard tbh, it’s rarely one reason for shit like that.
