But I know of no blanket law making the failure to report a crime a crime in and of itself.

Thanks for outing yourself as being both authoritarian and amoral. Read up on the Nuremberg Trials.

And like everyone else, they have their bad days.

No one ends up in jail or injured or dead when most of us have a bad day. That’s a despicable excuse.

But I know of no blanket law making the failure to report a crime a crime in and of itself.

The officers are governed by the same laws as you are.  If you don’t report someone you know for breaking a law, have you broken it?  (HINT: have you ever been in a car where the driver was speeding, ran a stop sign or red light?)

Not reporting a crime may be unethical and immoral, but not necessarily illegal.  In many jurisdictions, it may violate department regulations.  But that does not make it a crime.

Police departments are social organizations like any other.  Sometimes getting too rigid about the rules has more negative consequences than it is worth.  If I saw another officer take a candy bar when we investigated a burglary at a store, I didn’t report him to the Sgt.  I left money on the counter to pay for the candy bar, and I dealt with the officer personally.  Turning him in to Internal Affairs over a candy bar would have gotten me ostracized.  Because it would have been considered an over-reaction.

It seems as if many people expect law enforcement officers to act as infallible robots.  Which they are not.  And like everyone else, they have their bad days.

I know it’s said and said again, but this mindset that children can’t take care of themselves is profoundly dangerous and damaging to a society.

Sit around playing Crysis 3 all day, it’s safe, right?

I have a 3 year old, and since she was 2 I’ve given her a lot of leeway in many ways. I mean, I don’t assume she’s going to go walk off a cliff, I know her and she is cautious as hell. People can’t believe I let her walk around shops or train cars on her own, and assume she doesn’t have any brain. I was at a mountain lookout the other day, and a six year old kid climbed up 8″, putting his feet on the lowest cable of the fence and hoisting himself up for a better view. Four adults shrieked in terror and jumped over to pull him off. It’s just madness.

I expect the Police Dept. will tell you the child was detained for investigation of child neglect / endangerment.  That would cover the authority of law.

How could walking in a public place be considered dangerous?  The totality of the circumstances have to be considered for that, and the article sure didn’t tell us enough.  Age of the child, traffic conditions and speed, time of day/night, crime rates and types in that area.

You make a lot of assumptions in your argument.  Please prove that the officer knew no crime was being committed.  You can’t from the article, the officer was never interviewed.

Plus you might want to look up the term “in loco parentis”.

You’d think some local media would have a story.

And the vast majority of them do, almost all the time.

If they fail to report when other officers break the law, then they’ve broken the law.

I had to walk to school uphill both ways.

And that is a good thing, because if there IS questionable action happening, it needs to be documented.  Sometimes you can’t get CPS to act unless you can bury them in paper showing a pattern.  Part of what the Catholic Church is getting torched for is burying the reporting that would have resulted in patterns being seen.

There are usually statutes prohibiting “child endangerment”.  But they are broadly written, and are subject to interpretation. Documenting this allows review by others with more experience and training on the specific matter.

Frankly, I wish the article had been longer and contained more data.  The fact that it was on a site called “Free Range Children” is probably a clue to their bias.

You should run for office, give everyone the benefit of your “wisdom”.

I would be happier if it was closer to 100%, but I also know that officers are drawn from the fallible ranks of human beings.  100% is unrealistic.

Without the prior stop and knowledge of the child and parent, this would smell less.  The claim that he “got a call from a citizen” in this case leads me to want proof of that statement.  It sounds convenient and made up.

It is weird that in all these recollections from people who were kids before the 1990s we have yet to hear from one of the ones with overprotective (for the time) parents.

That is weird.  You don’t suppose… something might have happened to those poor kids?  You know who else had an overprotective parent in the 70s?

Or maybe they’re fine, and simply happily well-adjusted and successful to be posting comments on Boing Boing.  Guess we’ll never know! ;^)

As to the question on where one draws the line, that’s arguable to a degree.  Obviously there’s a certain degree of arbitrariness in declaring someone fit to vote and screw and smoke and die in an overseas war on one’s eighteenth birthday and not one hour earlier, but if you don’t draw a line that affects everyone more-or-less equally, then you have to spend a lot of time evaluating relative maturity levels in individuals to determine when certain privileges of age can be granted. But we as a society have acknowledged and legislated age requirements for military service, drug and alcohol use, voting, and legal sexual activity, since we’ve come to some wide consensus that those things are not suitable privileges for minors to possess.  And we’ve also (in the USA at least) legislated ages for compulsory education.  But are we willing to legislate age requirements for strolling down a sidewalk?  Should kids be unable to walk unaccompanied to their school before, say, fourth grade?  There are certain limited examples of this already in force in some places.  At my daughter’s public elementary school, kids can walk unattended to the school, except for kindergarteners, whose guardians must walk them into the classroom itself… no dropping them off curbside at that age!  That strikes me as faintly ridiculous (partly since yeah, I walked my ass to kindergarten and home again since the second day), but I don’t squawk about it since it’s only the kindergarteners who “suffer” this particular “indignity.”  (They, of course, don’t mind it a bit.)

But whenever we feel the urge to “draw a line,” it turns out that that line is unfair to one individual or another.  Some five-year-olds are pretty competent agents when it comes to navigating their environments on their own, while some thirty-year-olds can’t get out of their parents’ basements (and not just because the job market sucks).  I don’t think anyone’s going to look at a nine-month-old infant crawling down the sidewalk toward the intersection and think, “Well, looks like that li’l dude knows where he’s headed.”  At the same time, treating all school-age and younger minors exactly like that intrepid little infant is doing them a genuine disservice, as well as being an act of wasteful busybodiness.  Cop sees a smallish unattended person walking around, cop can ask questions regarding destination or who and where the responsible guardian is.  If the kid needs help, usually the cop can provide it without taking the kid “downtown” in a cruiser.  Treating the kid like a potential criminal just because the kid’s too young to pay taxes or too short to beep the cop in the nose is just lazy policing, and is not going to improve the department’s standing in the public’s eyes, precisely at a moment when that standing needs all the positive burnishing it can get.

Last night I saw a Public Service Announcement disguised as a 1-minute commercial during The Daily Show.  It showed some 12ish-year-old kid with a skateboard sitting next to an elderly woman on a bus stop bench.  The bus arrives, the woman boards, the kid doesn’t.  And then he notices that she left her purse behind.  He picks up the purse, glances inside, then dashes down an alley.  A police cruiser happens by and the cops notice this kid hauling ass down the alley carrying a purse.  They follow discreetly, lights and sirens off.  After a few blocks, the kid emerges, panting, at another street, just ahead of the bus.  The woman emerges, and the kid runs up: “Ma’am, you left your purse.”  She thanks him heartily and turns to go.  The cop in the cruiser yells, “Hey kid!  Nice going.  Want a donut?”  And the kid shares a donut with the cop.

It was a PSA for honesty and doing the right thing.  As hackneyed as it was, it brought a tear to my eye, not so much because the kid did the right thing, but because in that fictional big city environment, the TV cop gave the kid the opportunity to do the right thing.

I want to live in a world where we encourage our kids to be strong, independent, generous, and honest.  And I want to live in a world wherein they’re given a chance to do that.

Damned nanny-state school district policies…

People willing to back up their claims is the price they pay if they want to be believed.

To prevail under a false imprisonment claim, a plaintiff must prove: 
(1) willful detention;
The police officer willfully kept the child from the parent
(2) without consent;
The parent did not agree (minors cannot give consent)
(3) without authority of law
The officer knew that no law being violated

Further, under US law, the right of the police to detain only exists if they have probable cause to beleive a crime has been committed or if there is reasonable suspicion that the person has or is about to engage in criminal activity. Again, the officer knew no crime was or was going to be commited (other than the one the cop commited)

This meets all criteria for false imprisonment