As with lots of things: The details matter. Leaving a kid in a car shouldn't be an offense. Not returning ~soon~ might be and might be a reason to call the cops/force the car open.
Parents can damage/kill their kids in uncountable ways. Most don't and really try to avoid that. Trying to watch over their shoulder isn't 'Good citizenship', it's crazy and a witch hunt. You start to be labeled as child abuser if your kid is crying like hell (toothing maybe, or really interested in strawberries that you don't like to hand out - but the people around you don't understand that, don't have the slightest bit of clue about the situation. More often than not, OTHER parents are worse than the rest).
Give it a rest. The scenario you describe sounds terrible. But it's not relevant to the situation at hand. The person in the article describes that she checked the temperature, knew how long it'd take (even had a deadline on multiple levels, not only 'Today I do not want to choke my kid in the car' - she even planned to take a flight before the kid could have taken any damage. More seriously, a parent decided something for her kid. Something she does gazillion times a day. People might object to a number of her decisions and this particular one got her in trouble? Someone 'snitched'? Sad. The system failed.
I understand:
- someone was worried, called the cops
- cops reacted (yay!)
But:
- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent
- charges were pressed, just because?
One word: Insane.
I'm a father of two, both younger than the kid in the car.
It was worse than that. Someone wasn’t worried. Instead of acting, by, say, trying to talk to the kid in the car or perhaps just calling the cops, they “recorded the incident using a phone’s camera, and had then contacted the police”. Baffling.
- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent
The second half of your premise contains two completely unwarranted assumptions. How exactly were the police supposed to know the now-departed child was a) safe and b) with his parent? Recall that the Mom who wrote the piece was driving a vehicle that wasn't registered to her and so therefore didn't match the description on the registered owners' driving licenses. We know with hindsight that she had borrowed her parents' minivan for the trip, but the police would not have been justified in making that inference.
- (Optional) Visit owner (grandparents) in person and take an official statement
- Drop the case
And what is the danger we're protecting the child against here? People seem to like the 'baked in car' setup. You seem to fancy the 'kidnapped wholesale with car' idea? I mean - your neighbor is taking the kid to the car, and gets back in (probably forgot a thing). 30 sec later you look out of the window and the car is gone. What happend?
a) The car was stolen, kid inside
b) The owner of the car and responsible person for the kid inside moved it outside of the viable area from your position
Again, the situation with my neighbor (someone I know well enough to trust my kid with) is completely different from that of seeing a stranger leaving a kid in a car in a shopping mall parking lot. The fact that you need to change the facts of the situation to make your point should be a clue to the inherent weakness of your argument.
Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (even if the weather didn't seem to justify it, but the fact is it's very unusual for a parent to leave a kid in car in the US these days. From the police point of view, the confusion about the identity of the car owner and driver is enough to warrant further investigation. When the police hear from the grandparents that the child is inaccessible because the Mom got onto a plane and flew home, that's probably true but they don't know for sure - after all that's the sort of story people give out when they abduct children in custody battles during ugly divorces. It's the police's job to put the welfare of the child first in ambiguous situations like that.
Me, I wouldn't have prosecuted once the full facts came out, but on the other hand a statewide missing child alert uses up a bunch of police resources and that's not free, so the prosecutor may have that demanding some community service in return was justified. I can't tell what state the writer lives in or exactly when this happened, so it would be worth considering those contexts as well.
Aha! My argument is weak because your neighbor is more trusted than the general public.
Read that again.
Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person?
If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is shouted at, throws itself to the ground and needs to be carried, etc. etc..
It's not my argument that is weak (my example might be crap, if you happen to really like your neighbor. But that also means that you missed the point of my post though, inserting real persons wasn't part of the thought experiment and is entirely irrelevant).
No, your argument is weak because you changed the facts to fit your narrative.
Why? Why would a random parent
Yet again, the assumption of parental status based on hindsight. The police who answered the 911 call at the shopping center had no way of knowing that the author was the parent of the child in the car, and given that that person did not match the description of the registered vehicle owner, such an assumption would have been entirely unjustified. In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.
Downvote away, but every single argument you have posted in this thread is built upon hindsight bias.
I don't think that darklajid can be the one downvoting -- at least not your post replying to him. I suspect you're being downvoted (and not by me) for suggesting that a statewide missing child alert is warranted in response to a kid being spotted alone in a parking lot for a few minutes, which is the kind of thing that people are mad about in this thread.
> In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.
Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?
I'm not suggesting that, and you're being disingenuous for ignoring the fact of the person driving the car not matching the id of the vehicle owner, which I have repeatedly pointed out as the suspicious circumstance.
Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?
Population of CA is ~38 million, of which ~24% are minors, or approximately 10 million children. 10m/~2000 abductions a year in the state = 5000.
The police would have been completely justified in assuming that a parent had taken the child, and that the child was safe. Abductions (especially unreported ones,) by strangers are so uncommon that the officers would have to be suffering from acute paranoia to believe that a stranger had abducted the child.
No they wouldn't. The police are paid to check those things out, not to make facile assumptions. When they are the license plate they would have noticed that the person they saw in the video was not the registered owner of the car. That was absolutely something worth following up, which was why the author's mother found a police car waiting for her when she returned from dropping her daughter off at the airport.
The probability of a crime occurring is not the only factor that has to be taken into account here. There's also the severity of the possible criminal outcome. Kidnapping is actually relatively common in the US by international standards, and it is among the most aggressively prosecuted crimes. Until 1972, kidnapping was a capital crime, ie you could get the death sentence for it.
The article appears to indicate that the person capturing video saw the lady leave and return. It is not clear if the video was rolling the entire time but certainly as the video-taker was giving the video to the police, they may have mentioned that the same person who left the car also returned. I don't see why the police would be more worried about an abduction in this situation than in any other "person with child" situation.
I've thought long and hard about it... Still makes no difference.
For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves.
I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids and only 1 in 10 of those steal cars. So there's only a 2% chance of that happening at once!
Wow... because I know like at least 30 moms and none of them have snatched any kids. To cover the odds, there must be people out there that know a lot of baby snatchers. Those people should be calling the police. :)
Considering the possibility isn't the same thing as leaping to the conclusion. It's not like the woman was pursued, arrested, and thrown in jail before she ever got near the airport. Rather, the police did the sensible thing and followed the matter up by checking with the owner of the vehicle that was seen in the parking lot.
Are you saying that if there's only a 2% chance of something odd being a criminal incident, they should just blow it off?
I think you have it backwards. I would like to be able to call the police to report an ACTUAL crime...but unfortunately, they would be too busy investigating reports by paranoid folks who think they've seen a possible crime.
«Because the person in the video doesn't match the description of the registered owner of the car as recorded on their driving license. Think about it.»
First, you have to arrive to the cops checking for that. Before that, you must imagine the "good" samaritan, who hasn't seen any driving license and knows nothing about the minivan, speculating about who was that woman leaving and then coming back to the minivan.
But it's not the reason he or she has called the police and the police, at the moment they reached the house of the parents of the woman, they knew the latter was none but the daughter of the owner of the minivan.
Case closed... Except for the charge of having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. By the way, the good samaritan can be charged of the same crime since the video proved that, since even if he could have "caught" the criminal mom in the instant he was starting her criminal act and thus he could have "saved" the child, he preferred keep filming... so, if there was an actual crime, it would have been too late.
Parents can damage/kill their kids in uncountable ways. Most don't and really try to avoid that. Trying to watch over their shoulder isn't 'Good citizenship', it's crazy and a witch hunt. You start to be labeled as child abuser if your kid is crying like hell (toothing maybe, or really interested in strawberries that you don't like to hand out - but the people around you don't understand that, don't have the slightest bit of clue about the situation. More often than not, OTHER parents are worse than the rest).
Give it a rest. The scenario you describe sounds terrible. But it's not relevant to the situation at hand. The person in the article describes that she checked the temperature, knew how long it'd take (even had a deadline on multiple levels, not only 'Today I do not want to choke my kid in the car' - she even planned to take a flight before the kid could have taken any damage. More seriously, a parent decided something for her kid. Something she does gazillion times a day. People might object to a number of her decisions and this particular one got her in trouble? Someone 'snitched'? Sad. The system failed.
I understand:
- someone was worried, called the cops
- cops reacted (yay!)
But:
- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent
- charges were pressed, just because?
One word: Insane.
I'm a father of two, both younger than the kid in the car.
edit: One of the worst typos I made so far.