was it really a valid use of police resources and good for the family for Lawson to spend the night in jail?
In August 2011, Richard Masoner reported on the Cyclelicious blog that police in Elizabethton, Tennessee, threatened to make an arrest and even bring in child services when a 10-year-old girl was observed biking home from Harold McCormick Elementary School. “A driver complained about a girl biking from school on a narrow residential road. The officer ‘observed that vehicles had to slow and negotiate around the cyclist’ on Cedar Avenue south of the school.”
Masoner explained, “To me, this seems like normal and expected traffic movement. The unnamed officer, however, [said that] ‘this section of the roadway is not a safe place for a child of her [age] to be riding unsupervised,’ so he loaded her and her bike up in the police cruiser, drove her home, and had a chat with the child’s mother, Teresa Tryon.”
When Tryon disagreed with the officer’s assessment, he informed her that he was going to report the incident and that it would be filed with the Department of Child Services. He also lectured Tryon that her daughter would have been safer riding on a sidewalk, given the heavy school traffic on Cedar Avenue, even though there was no sidewalk available.
For Lori Levar Pierce, sidewalks have become her main focus as a Captain Mommy, after her son got in trouble with the police for walking alone.
Pierce lives in a Mississippi town of 25,000. She’s a high-school teacher, and she admits that before the incident, she was your average, nervous, overprotective mom. One day her 10-year-old son was ready for soccer practice an hour early, while she was in the middle of cooking dinner. He asked if he could just walk the mile to the field on his own, and even though she was worried about it, she allowed him to go by himself. When Lori got to the practice a little later, she was accosted by a police officer who had picked up her son halfway to the field because (as he absurdly claimed) the station had received “over 100 calls” about a boy walking alone. The officer had stopped Pierce’s son, driven him to practice, then circled back to look for Pierce at her home, and, not finding her there, gone back to the field to berate and threaten to arrest her for “reckless endangerment.”9
Pierce was indignant. There aren’t 100 homes between her house and the field, so she remembers wondering to herself what the officer was talking about. She ended up complaining to the police chief, who apologized for his overzealous officer. Meanwhile Pierce became an activist citizen, and another newly minted Captain Mommy, advocating for safer streets and better sidewalks so that kids can walk or bike without fear of being hit by cars—or being hassled by police.
It isn’t only mothers who are harassed by police and CPS, either. Fathers feel the weight of the overbearing nanny state as well. A dad in suburban Pittsburgh was charged with two counts of reckless endangerment for leaving his kids playing at the playground while he ran errands. In this case, he had been at the park with them, and it was another “concerned” parent, who actually knew one of the children, who called the police.10
In Connecticut, Charles Eisenstein took to his blog, which otherwise concerns his activism on behalf of what he calls “degrowth,” to discuss a run-in with police when he was actually with his children. “Last weekend I decided I would get the kids outdoors for a little time in nature. The Susquehanna River was frozen over, with the most remarkable ice formations,” he wrote on his blog.11 Innocent enough, until four police cars and two fire trucks showed up. Eisenstein was yelled at by the police in front of his teenagers, threatened with arrest and cited for disorderly conduct. “This small incident reveals a lot about our society. First is the presumption that legally constituted authority should decide what an acceptable level of safety is for oneself and one’s family. I suppose going out onto the ice was more dangerous than staying indoors or on the sidewalk, but I deemed it in my children’s best interest to be outdoors in this amazing ice world.” Eisenstein writes that what bothered the officers was that he and his sons were engaged in behavior that was a violation of normality. But his point about who should decide the acceptable level of safety or risk in any behavior—the state or the family—is an important one.
It has become standard procedure to apply laws that were once used in child-custody disputes and abandonment cases to parents who want to let their kids do the same things they were allowed to do when they were kids. Is this really the proper use of the penal code? According to one Connecticut law firm, the charges of child endangerment, child neglect, or risk of injury to a minor are usually applied when a child has been put in harm’s way by adults. Lawyers explain that examples include outright child abuse, domestic disputes when a child is present in the room, and a drunk-driving accident when a minor is in the vehicle. Apparently, we’ve all silently and nearly completely acquiesced to fear in the wake of sensational child-abduction and murder cases like those of Etan Patz, Adam Walsh, and Noah Pozner. But the norm, not the shocking exception, should be the basis for governing our lives. When statistics clearly show that our country is safer than it used to be, should parents need to fear the trouble they might reap for letting their kids do things by themselves?
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were bucking the trend of helicoptering and mindfully allowing their kids some freedom, while the state mindlessly accused them of neglect and put them through the child protective services ringer.12 “I was kind of horrified,” Danielle Meitiv told the Washington Post. “You try as a parent to do what’s right. Parents try so hard. Even though I know [the State is] wrong, it’s a painful judgment.”13
Meitiv was referring to a finding of “unsubstantiated” child neglect stemming from their decision to allow their 10-year-old son, Rafi, and six-year-old daughter, Dvora, to walk home alone. Someone called 911, and police responded to seeing the children unaccompanied. And even after the kids explained that nothing was wrong, they were still hauled home, where police and child protective services confronted the parents for allowing their kids some freedom of movement.
Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who has written about the problems with overprotective parenting, like many others who commented on the case, was upset with the decision by Maryland’s Child Protective Services. Rosin has become something of an advocate for letting kids gain experience and deal with risk, and she argues these decisions should be up to parents. Here, the child-welfare authorities had a different idea.
“What they learned from the latest CPS decision,” Rosin writes of her discussion with Meitiv, “is that ‘teaching independence clearly IS a crime.’” As Meitiv explained it, “the charge means ‘something happened but kids were not at substantial risk.’ Why then, she reasonably asks, ‘find us responsible for neglect?’” Rosin correctly points out that “a charge of ‘unsubstantiated’ is not quite as definitively closed as ‘ruled out.’ (The third option is ‘indicated,’ the equivalent of guilty.)” And leaving that door open is going to put the Meitivs in a difficult position. Rosin rightly demands,
CPS officials did not say they would keep an eye on the Meitivs. But now they have a charge of child neglect in their file. . . . They believe strongly that children should be able to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. But they no doubt believe even more strongly that they don’t want to be at any risk of having their children taken away from them for a second charge of neglect. Why on earth should the state have any right to put them in that predicament?14
Rosin was clearly reading the tea leaves, because there was a second incident in April 2015, when the Meitivs’ two children were lured into a police cruiser just a third of a mile from home with promises of returning them to their parents. Instead, the kids were kept in the police car for hours and delivered to CPS while they were denied all requests to call their mother and father. When the Meitivs were finally notified that CPS had their kids and they went to pick them up, officials offered no explanation for why they’d been picked up or why the parents hadn’t been informed for five hours. Seems the nanny state doesn’t like dissent or challenges to its authority.
