It is a reference to this thread also in GQ.
But telling the cop you have an explosive case of diarrhea coming on ANDITSGOINGTOBLOWOUTANYMOMENTNOW!!! works every time!
You guys made me laugh out loud, and now I think I will have children just in case my license and credit card don’t do the trick.
Thanks.
On the other side of it, if I were a child arriving home from school and my parent wasn’t there, rather a CAS worker telling me that my parent had been arrested and I need to go with them… Oh hell no. Stranger Danger!!
I guess that isn’t as plausible a scenario now that kids don’t seem to walk home from school alone anymore.
(When I was little and learning “stranger danger” my dad told me the one where someone approaches you and says your parents have been in a bad accident and they’ll take you to the hospital to see them. My dad said “Seriously. Do you think we’d send a complete stranger to pick you up?”)
One way to help keep kids safe in the above situation is to have a secret password between you. If the person allegedly picking you up doesn’t say the magic word, then they have not been sent by your parents.
“Stranger Danger” (at best) is a waste of time or (at worst) instills paranoia and unreasonable fear which makes it harder for society to function.
It makes no sense to be worried about Ebola while ignoring Influenza. It makes no sense to be terrified of sharks while ignoring drowning. It makes no sense to have nightmares about plane crashes while ignoring car accidents. It makes no sense to feel reassured by the tamper-resistant seal on your Tylenol bottle when you’re much more likely to die from overdosing on the Tylenol itself. 95% of all murders are committed close friends or family members; over half are spouses. 99.9% of kidnappings are by close friends or family members.
You’re much better off teaching children about good touch vs bad touch and tell them that this applies to everyone they know, including parents and relatives and teachers, not just strangers. They also need to learn that sometimes people lie in order to get what they want, and yeah it’s probably true that strangers might lie a bit more often because they think they’ll get away with the lie if you never see them again, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people are trustworthy most of the time.
If you ever get arrested and the police send a social worker to your house to pick up your kids, it probably won’t help the situation if you’ve taught your children to be paranoid.
Warning: My answer could be inaccurate. I think it really depends on the situation. If the child is in danger, there is something called Witness Protection Program. The Witness Protection Program could extend to the said child. If the child has a father the child would go back into the custody of the father. The father could request for police protection if he feels his child is in danger. If the child has no legal custody he/she could be placed in an orphanage/foster care, or even under the care of a distant relative. These circumstances are usually complicated and there are several factors as to who would care for the child.
I’d be curious to hear the justification for the escalation to guns. I was trained early on that if a cop signals to pull me over, I should decrease my speed, signal to pull over, turn on my hazards and continue to a safe pull over location. As such in my three pullovers, I once continued a mile to an exit with a truck stop where I proceeded close to the building where it was well lit and stopped and most recently went at least a mile to find a good pull out where I could get farther away from the road (partially up an exit ramp). In both cases, the officers THANKED me for also thinking about their safety. In the first case he suspected me of a DUI and then being a stolen car (including frisking me over the trunk), but he still complemented my decision to get somewhere public and safe.
All of these stops ended up just giving me a warning (I was simply driving down the middle of the two lanes to maximize any reaction time necessary as I was driving alone pre-cellphone and had to read a map to figure out where the next gas would be), but I have a hard time understanding why the cops would escalate without some provocation by the driving pattern. It seems to me that cops like drivers who are wary and safe.
There was a big blew in my area recently where four young women were arrested for being at a coke party. All four were given the option of plea bargaining to a lessor, but still felony charge and going out of custody straight off.
One of them had kids and did this. Even though none of them had been using coke, they were merely at the party. The three that didn’t agree to the plea bargain, remained in jail but eventually the case was throw out.
The problem was the one who did, could not get her plea bargain thrown out so she now has a felony conviction against her and had to pay all sorts of associate court costs and parole costs and risks losing her children as a convicted felon.
Four women, same charges but two outcomes. Fair? No, but legal.
I don’t know. I asked my daughter for her recollection and she also said they had guns drawn. They first ordered her to throw her car keys out the window, then to get out of the car facing backwards, then to get down on her knees. (At that point the daughter, seeing her mother go down, thought she had been shot.)
I believe this woman may have fit the profile of someone suspected of something. (I’m not sure how much this is based on. My kids say their friends say that the next day there was a newspaper article about a woman being arrested for something or other on this same road, so they’re speculating the police were on the lookout for this woman and their mother fit that profile.)
This is one reason why you should teach your children, as early as they can remember, the full name, address and phone number of the nearest relative or neighbor who can take care of them in an emergency. Not necessarily you being arrested, but any emergency where you can’t be there for them. Not that the police would always listen to the kids but hey, they might.
Without disagreeing about ‘kidnapping’, or anything else you wrote, – a common and off repeated misconception –
The original research about ‘stranger danger’, which I have read, classed as “strangers”, only people you had never seen before. Odd men hanging about the school the day before were not ‘strangers’. By this definition 95-99% something percent of kidnappings and kids-lured-into-cars-for-sexual-assault etc were not “strangers”.
But that did not /does not mean that 90-something % were close friends of family members. That number was much smaller, like 30-60%
Besides for that, most of these family “kidnappings” are just part of custody battles, where the kids are not in any sort of danger.
While I agree that custody battles are a different category of kidnapping than stranger danger, it’s a real stretch to say that kids trapped in custody fights are in no danger.
Lots of people are getting divorced to get away from wackos. Or drug abusers. Or spouses who want to take the kids back to their home country. All of which can constitute real and present danger to the kids.
I don’t recall “stranger” being defined so that the odd man hanging around the schoolyard the day before didn’t qualify, but it also wasn’t the case that 90% were close friends and family members. There’s a whole lot of room between the guy you saw once the day before coincidence and the school janitor who a child sees every day but isn’t a “close friend or family member”