Why don’t kids go outside anymore?
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if children walking home from school are now a problem? That was like my main source of exercise.
My theory is that it’s paranoia born out of how the media handles crime, and how isolating suburbia is.
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
Was there a light to cross at least?
The town is too small to have any traffic lights at all. The new sidewalk in front of the school directly connects to the sidewalks of the nearest streets that intersection with the state highway that the school is on, but ideally the houses on the other side of the state highway would have a walking path to reach the school as well (they don’t)
The school is also the school, it’s shared between two neighboring towns and contains all of the elementary, middle and highschool classes. My wife graduated in a class of about a dozen from this school
It’s not. My 10 year old did it for some of last year. His teachers and principal supported it.
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.
Instead of building sidewalks, they arrest working moms, amazing.
Of course in the US
“I stopped to ask him if he was okay and he needed help, and he lied, and said that his mother works here at the post office,” the caller said. “And then he just took off away from me.”
Which is exactly that id want my kids to do, if some random person pulled up next to them in a vehicle. When in doubt get the fuck out of there
Yeah. Literally a smart kid. Quick thinking.
Sounds like he was taught about stranger danger. Good parenting.
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.
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!
You lot really hate walking don’t you
I used to walk to my elementary school (roughly ages 5-10) which was a mile away. Lots of kids in my town walked to school.
I drive by a school to go to the gym in the morning. There are tons of kids that STILL walk to school. I think these Karen cases are few and far between.
The elementary and high schools in my neighborhood pay the students if they walk rather than take the bus, as both a costsaving and environmental measure. It’s a pittance sure, but in a country of 350 million people its extremely easy to find singular examples of any behavior to further any narrative. This article would have a point were it an examination of broad trends, but one example of the cops being the cops does hardly a well-founded narrative weave…
Different kid who was killed walking across a difficult-to-cross street resulted in the parents, not the driver, being charged with manslaughter for letting their kid walk outside.
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Crime is at a 50 year low across the entire country.
Crime is now institutionalized.
Source: White House, Congress, Supreme Court, SEC, FTC, Red States, Police, Prisons etc…
Hysteria about crime is at a historical high.
It’s pretty much a nothing burger that before the internet and instant world wide access few karens would know about.
When it comes to “news” these days, the more outrageous and rare the story the better. Got to keep the readership outraged for those eyeballs…
It still has a chilling effect, though. I’m in Georgia and I restrict what my kids would do more than I otherwise would for fear of some Karen cop persecuting me for no fucking reason.
Brit here. It was .5 miles to my primary school and .8 miles to my secondary school, and I walked it every day from age 5 to age 16.
Uphill both ways
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Etan_Patz
This was the case that really changed the way kids were treated in the US.
Before this, it was normal for kids to travel great distances on their own.
Laws are waayy to often based on single cases of something. Same with the whole “dont microwave your cat” stuff. So many have to suffer because some idiots or a random case of crazy or bad luck.
Yeah, I’m still angry that I’m not allowed to microwave my cat, just because some idiot back in the days used the Popcorn program for that instead of the Feline & Furry program.
Any law named after a victim is a shit law.
Any law named after a victim is a shit law.
Ah yes, how dare Kari demand we check notes call 911 without pressing remembering which number is required to dial out.
https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law-and-ray-baum-s-act/
That bitch…
That’s funny.
1 kid goes missing, all of America changes how they act.
100s of kids die in school shootings, America does nothing.
And may have helped launch it, but no one did more to further it than the father of kidnapped child Adam Walsh.
Adam’s father, John Walsh, became an advocate for victims of violent crimes and is the host of the television program America’s Most Wanted. He has also hosted The Hunt with John Walsh and In Pursuit with John Walsh.[3] Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam’s murder, but was never convicted of the crime because evidence was reportedly lost and Toole later recanted his confession. Toole died in prison of liver failure on September 15, 1996.[4] No new evidence has come to light since then, and police announced in December 2008 that the Walsh case was closed and that they were satisfied that Toole was the killer.
This is very odd for US to not return to normalcy.
Just read this as never heard the name, the guys conviction was overturned, I mean is America turning in the land of the free pedo? Wtf?
A federal appeals court on Monday ordered that a man convicted in the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 should receive a new trial or be released.
That’s not what overturned means. He’s not been released, there was apparently conduct in the trail that a superior court ruled merits revisiting it - if the lower court decides to be snitty about it then he potentially could be released, but that’s extremely rare.
This is the way the court system should work (though it should be a whole lot faster…), reviewing previous convictions repeatedly to ensure that the results were fair and correct.
It’s the technicalities of the legal process. Cops knew he did it, but fucked up and bungled the case by losing the evidence that would have seen him have the judge throw the book at him. It didn’t happen because courts are lenient on murdering chomos, it happened because the PD involved in the case were fucking halfwits. Also, it’s not “turning into” anything, John Walsh started hosting America’s Most Wanted in the early 90’s - his son Adam was murdered before then, these events are decades old.
Dumbest country on earth. You cannot change my mind.
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.”
Cars are dangerous - I know, let’s arrest people who don’t use them!
Everything about this is insane. Making it illegal to walk, calling cops on kids, arresting people for any fucking reason. People created a hell hole they have to live in now.
Why is this kid walking, he should have a car. This is the USA, we don’t walk here.
By walking, that kid was stealing money from oil and car corporations
I want to laugh at this but it sounds like something US leadership would say with a completely straight face.
Don’t forget about the tricycle industrial complex.
Only if the kid gets a gun too
This is America after all, they’ve got to open carry and drive everywhere otherwise it’s un-American activity. And we can’t have that.
It’s all nuts, but I’m okay with the idea of, hey, there’s a young kid, can we check on him. Cop rolls up, you okay kid? Yes. Cool, have a day. The idea that this would escalate beyond there is insanity.
Suburban trash culture
This isn’t even suburban; it’s rural small-town bullshit. Atlanta has a lot of sprawl, but nobody’s commuting there from Blue Ridge (yet).
They got some over lap but I do stand corrected
When did country folk become infected by karen police calling lol
Yeah, this sounds a LOT like “cops didn’t have anything better to do and decided to create some excitement for themselves to make them feel like heroes.”
