Girl, 7, brought into pepper-spray fight

Stephanie Farr, at Philly.com:

A woman who had been banned from an Upper Darby dollar store doused store employees with pepper spray as they tried to escort her out on Monday, and when they tackled her to the ground, she gave the spray can to her 7-year-old daughter and told her to finish the fight, police said. "You know what to do, baby. Spray it!", Delaina Garling allegedly told her daughter.

• [eldritch]

  Wow, someone get in touch with CPS! All the nightmare false positive stories I’ve heard of parents being investigated for crap like letting a kid walk to the store and back unsupervised, and here’s a bona fide actual case in which a child legitimately needs to be separated from their parent!

  • [SedanChair]

    Don’t complain about CPS, they have to follow up on every report they get. Complain about your nosy neighbors

    • [IronEdithKidd]

      Why not both?  States need to develop better guidelines for when CPS investigates.  Curtain twitchers need to be shamed into minding their own damned business.  

      [edit] I can’t spell :(

      • [SedanChair]

        Why not both?

        If you like. But if you place restrictions on CPS’ investigative powers, know that a few more kids will die as a result.

        • [dragonfrog]

          As distressing as it is to contemplate, there is a balance of harms to consider.

          The less CPS investigates, the more false negatives there will be, and the more child abuse will be missed.

          But the more CPS investigates, the more false positives there will be, and the more child abuse will be perpetrated by or at the behest CPS – specifically, ripping happy children from healthy supportive households (already an abuse), and putting them into foster homes with non-negligible risks of further abuse there.

          Not to mention that just being subject to an investigation by CPS, even if the end result is that everything is fine, must be immensely stressful for the whole family, and I can imagine it would leave long-term distress even after the investigation is concluded.

        • [Snig]

           I dunno, I’ve met more adults who were victimized while no one did anything, then people who told me about the problems of too many social agencies being worried about them.  Your experience may vary. Child abuse is still a pretty damn common societal problem, I’d err on the side of authorities being told. 

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Horror stories about CPS make the news. The thousands and thousands of benign interventions don’t. As an almost victim of parental murder-suicide (after innumerable other incidents), I don’t think that CPS overreacting is evenly vaguely in the same league as parental abuse.

        • [IronEdithKidd]

          This is what I was getting at.  The requirement that CPS investigate every reported spanking means that they are often too busy to investigate the clear cases of abuse. 

          Mission creep has an opportunity cost.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          If parents are beating their children, I want it investigated.

• [sdfhs]

  If she can get over her timidity and become more of a self-starter, that girl has a promising career in law enforcement in her future!

  • [Hanglyman]

     By the time she’s an adult, I think guns will be the standard rather than pepper spray.

• [Stepan Riha]

  They say that families that spray together stay together.

• [flappy]

  Deep in the bowels of Police Headquarters: “Hmmm… if we train and equip toddler-bots, Occupy will be no more!”

  • [EH]

    Award this woman Officer of the Year!

• [remainzz]

  Maybe she’d been watching too much terminator and was trainer her youngster for the coming age

• [franko]

  “You know what to do, baby. Spray it!” — oh yes, this has the makings of a good meme.

  • [Matt Popke]

    Makes you wish there was surveillance footage. 

    Then again, for the sake of the child it’s probably better there wasn’t.

  • [rvernon]

    What’s weird is my brain modeled the exact sound the mother made as she said that, accent, inflection, every part.  I even imagined the clothes she was wearing.  Who needs surveillance footage?

• [The Ethnic Hipster]

  “You know what to do, baby. Spray it!” HAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

  • [spejic]

    Yeah, there is a bit of Kick Ass (the movie) quality to this.

• [Raymond Torres]

  That is one crazy women

• [jimkirk]

  And the award for Mother of the Year goes to…

• [exile]

  This new John Waters film is a welcome return to form.

• [secretdoubleagent]

  Ahh retail…reminds me of the good old days when my store was still in a neighborhood that was a little rough around the edges.  The best strategy always seemed to be to empathize with the person you wanted to leave and then evoke a higher power that was out of your control: “I know, crazy-crucifix-tattoo-face guy who recently threatened me with a brick, it totally sucks, but you know how the owner gets…”  That, or just assume a posture of exhausted resignation and say “oh come on, man.”  It, of course, never helped to get angry, but if you really wanted to escalate the situation, nothing worked better than the cold, pseudo-reasonable “sir, I’m going to have to ask to you to leave”.  Wow, that just pisses people off.

• [teapot]

  I don’t mean to make this a big junk competition, but your mother/child combination’s got NOTHING on ours:

  http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2013/03/22/08/20/mum-and-sons-charged-over-sydney-stabbing

  A 16-year-old boy was stabbed during a fight on the front lawn of a house in south Penrith about 4.15pm (AEDT) on Thursday, leaving him with wounds in the chest, face and abdomen, police say.

  A police spokeswoman told AAP the mother allegedly drove the boys to the fight and gave them a lift after the attack.

• [LE]

  Ah, my home town.  Always making me proud.

  *headdesk*