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I would have thought the culture war aspect would have been obvious.
My life, over the years, has taken weird turns, and put me in contact with people are are decidedly outside the norm.
Nothing best exemplifies this by my most recent job, which has put me in close contact with law enforcement around the country, Sheriffs Office's most heavily.
What I've learned is that Sheriffs actually have a very broad range in how they can enforce the law. Complaints from constituents can result in everything from just a general wellness checkup to brushing the matter off('I know the guy, he's fine, and I know the person complaining, she does this all the time') to putting out a warrant for someone's arrest.
So when I see something like this;
That makes me raise more than a few eyebrows.
To put it bluntly, what the hell happened here to cause this reaction? Was the person filing the complaint a political bigwig who could have stirred up a massive fuss and the Sheriff wanted it taken care of properly to quiet a reaction? I've seen this happen before, so it wouldn't surprise. Or, more unfavorably, did the female Sheriff get a particular bee in her bonnet that made her bring the hammer down? I have no idea. An uncharitable part of me wants to lean in this general direction, because this entire thing is odd, no question, but who knows?
And on top of all that, this entire commotion was brought about by an 11-year old boy walking a mile in an area where a mile really isn't that big of a deal. Hell, I walked more than a mile away from my home when I was a kid, and I certainly don't live anywhere near the Blue Ridge mountains!
What an absolute mess and embarrassment for the Sheriff's Office.
Nybbler is going to shoot me as a back-the-blue conservative normie for this, but it's also the case that sheriffs know who the troublemakers are, and use stuff like this to go after them.
It's unfortunate, but there's going to a lot of free range kid incidents that do involve genuinely negligent parents or feral kids, and from our perspective 30,000ft above the media firestorm we'll never see it.
Where I live there's a group of tweens+teens who roam around breaking into empty summer houses. The sheriff can't really even arrest them, and even if he did the leftist prosecutor wouldn't do anything about it. So naturally his only leverage over the parents is going after them with CPS. So far this seems to be working, with little pushback because the local head of the ACLU isn't inclined to start a fuss due to her summer house being broken into.
But if it did blow up, I can already write the reason dot com article about "rural kids reported to child services just for riding their bikes to town!", and the resulting shitstorm would distract from any real conversation about how law enforcement got like this in the first place.
See this locally famous case for another example. Any attempt to do something about the kid before his crimes escalated to international aeroplane hijacking would have been based around a CPS investigation, because realistically there was nothing else the police could do about him. Many such cases, and a lot of them end in deadly carjacking rather than just hilarious levels of property damage.
So for the "free range kids" movement to win, it's going to need to help solve the youth crime problem that incentivizes helicopter-parenting mandates. And since a lot of the big media figures are left-libertarians like Radley Balko who also went all-in on BLM, the odds of them owning up to this are low.
The law is far too soft around young children who commit serious crimes. Deadly carjacking by under-age girls? Death penalty!
Not:
If swift use of the death penalty returns, people will be amazed at how quickly the random stabbings of 3-year-old children ends, how these violent carjackings and armed burglaries get squelched. These 'mentally deranged' people rarely try stabbing attacks or pushing-onto-the-tracks against 190 cm bodybuilders or big, tough construction workers. They go for women and children or they bring weapons. They know what would happen, even within their esoteric, legally fortuitous 'unable to understand the consequences' mental state. They do understand consequences, we just don't inflict the necessary punishment.
If all else fails, the death penalty will cull the problem people out of the population.
Technically speaking, 2A + property rights is the death penalty. It's distributed (and you'll get prosecuted if the perp fails the paper bag test and you live in a jurisdiction that conducts them), but it's still there.
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<BLAM!>
You're just-worlding this nonsense hard. You've got no evidence, aside from blind trust in authority, that this 10-year-old kid was up to anything troublesome.
That's the thing: you're right in general, and I don't have any evidence about specific cases other than the ones in my local community. But CPS is still a tool to "do something about those damn kids" that normies find a lot easier to stomach than caning the little shits, so unless you can deal with the underlying problem your CPS-reform movement is going to be resisted by people who are sick and tired of having all their shit stolen by 17yr 364day & 23hr old minors who get away scot free.
And it was used to exactly that end in this case.
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I don’t think @SteveKirk was claiming, nor even implying, that the specific kid from OP’s story was up to no good. I think the actual point he made is that it would be very dangerous to dismantle law enforcement’s ability to deal effectively with actual cases of child abuse, just because sometimes those powers will be overfitted to apply to benign cases. It’s no different from the general discussion about tradeoffs regarding how much power to give law enforcement and how much risk of overapplication of that power you’re willing to stomach.
Not so much "dangerous" because a) the benefits of cps-elimination for good kids might outweigh the harm done by yobbos anyway, and b) taking away that specific tool would encourage people to support real solutions to youth crime.
It's mostly that a lot of people are going to see cps-elimination as taking away the one thing they see actually being used against ferals in their community. And people are so sick to death of unpunished crime right now that you don't want to become an acceptable target for their anger. (It's a lot safer to attack white libertarian free-range kid activists than it is to give a physical description of the Youth who stole your bike.)
It's "you can't take my broken stapler; what else will I use to pound nails?" You need to at least hand the guy a rock if you want him to give up his stapler without a fight.
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Iterate that sort of advice for several generations and you end up right where we are now. You can't improve things by being afraid to dismantle harmful institutions.
In any case, he's not talking about these laws being used to deal with child abuse; he's talking about using these laws to punish parents for crimes of their children which somehow the cops can't do anything about otherwise.
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