“911? Yes, I’d like to report a man wearing a turban…”
Sorry, if it was my kid I’d rather you called the cops. Because if I came home and didn’t find him I wouldn’t be looking for a note I’d be calling the cops. And in the mean time they’d be trying to reach me.
Nothing to do with paranoia.
I guess I’m surprised that you didn’t even ask your son what he said before reporting his behavior. After all, it’s possible that what he said to your son was something like, “Be careful, my kid almost got hurt by a sharp edge where that toy has worn away.”
This also seems to suggest that you were preparing to call the police fairly early in this interaction. As far as constructive criticism goes, my suggestion would be that next time there might be room for more information-gathering before doing so.
Furthermore, if this is the only time this has ever happened, I would imagine CPS is going to ask me a few questions, but nothing terrible is going to happen. On the other hand, if I am leaving my 5 year old wandering the neighborhood on a regular basis, CPS needs to know that.
I hope you’d have noticed earlier - the actual family in question didn’t even notice poor little Levi was missing until it was time to come home. We had a nice chat on the curb. He was pretty cool about being left behind. The cops showed up about 5 minutes before the family returned. Every thing was fine.
It would have been nice if we could have taken him in and given him a snack and a drink, and a chair to sit in while waiting. But could you imagine the reaction to the note?
"WE HAVE YOUR SON!
down at our house. come on over, and next time, do a head count when you go, mkay?"
Perhaps you could explain whether you mean that calling the cops on someone because they make you feel “ooky” is something that CAN be done but shouldn’t, or are you recommending that people SHOULD call the cops on someone for doing nothing other than making you feel “ooky”?
Neither is what I’m suggesting. I was suggesting that a person who said you can’t do that was incorrect. Whether it SHOULD be done is going to depend on a lot of circumstances. Why is the person making you feel ooky?
In this particular case, it definitely didn’t meet the threshold for my calling the cops,
but I wasn’t there. Calling a non-emergency number because something seems off is an act that should be fine; overreactions of police departments can render it risky enough that I’d shy away from it.
Emphasis added
Exactly the point. Do interact with kids in the grocery line? Maybe and that’s why the dog is a non-issue. Everyone is petting the dog and chatting. But what if I go up to a kid in the cereal aisle (or drum toy)? How is that the same thing?
I admit that I feel like I’m missing something. I honestly don’t see how ignoring your own kid to go up to a stranger’s kid to say, “Hey, do ya like ice cream?” is the same as chatting with kids that happen to be around you and your kid.
I would say it’s hard to tell of you over reacted or not since I wasn’t there.
I can tell you a story from an old job a long time ago that might offer some perspective (or not.)
I had a helper when I was a fire alarm technician that was a little older (45ish) and a little slow (not sure if that is the appropriate way of saying it. Not trying to offend anyone.)
We were doing a fire alarm inspection at an apartment complex. I did the majority of the technical work, it was his job to walk around and make sure the bells were ringing and tell everyone it’s not a fire, don’t panic. He did this very well with a nice smile on his face. It was super cold for Houston that day, literally sleeting. He has a big jacket that we provided him with a logo on the front of it with our company name and “fire safety” on it. He apparently walked up to the kids at the play area and said “it’s not a fire don’t worry.” Then hung out in the area with our decibel meter to see what the levels of the bell audio was in the area, which was the dead middle of the common area. This interaction was apparently viewed as questionable by the mom that saw it from her patio. She called the law on him. The cops show up, literally park next to my clearly marked work truck, and go towards my helper. He stays where he is watching the dB meter but waves to them. I notice what’s going on by the time they rush him and knock him to the ground, rolling him over. I take off running towards the area with the apartment manager by the time they have him in cuffs with his arms jacked up high laying on his stomach crying out in pain screaming “it’s just a test there’s no fire”. They try to arrest him for an outstanding warrant he didn’t have from another county. He had a common name and they had him confused with someone that had migrated from LA after Katrina. (We were from a smaller town north of Houston where he always lived. He didn’t drive, he had a state ID and he was very well known in our town as a nice, slow man who still lived with mom and grandma. He had worked at my company because he was related somehow by marriage to the owner.) My boss, the company owner, gets there right as I get the cops to take his cuffs off.
The story continues, but he was finally set free and we just left the inspection unfinished so I could take him home… but the whole situation could have been avoided if the mom had just read the notice taped to her front door, or if she had actually walked her ass over the 30 yards and asked him what’s up. That guy was deathly afraid of the police after that, it really fucked him up. Holding his face in a muddy frozen fire ant pile didn’t help either.
What the cops did to my helper wasn’t the lady’s fault, but she set the chain of events in motion, for sure.
I’m not sure that you did anything wrong, I wasn’t there. Don’t feel bad, the guy didn’t seem to be punished if I read your OP correctly. In the age of stranger danger, there are cops that go overboard trying to be the hero.
Fair enough. I thought playing the “Of course, you CAN do that” game wasn’t played on this board, but whatever.
Still troubling that simply talking to a child in a playground makes people feel “ooky”
I agree and if you read my previous post, I’m pretty sure we’re coming from the same place.
Waxwing asked:
This is an overgeneralization and my response was that there are plenty of occurrences where an adult may engage in an appropriate conversation with young kids that they are not directly responsible over. Period.
No offense, but it may have something to do with your username. 
my username at the playground is notmanson1972 
Bill, Joann and Laird Hamilton might disagree with you.
I’d be livid if that happened to me and I think the OP overreacted.
I’m a vaguely-ethnic looking black guy with a incredibly white (looking) daughter. Kids also like to go up to me and talk to me for some reason when I’m playing with her.
But yeah, I honestly avoid talking to the police as much as possible. Nothing good happens because you interact with them. They aren’t your friends.
Which is different in at least two ways from how the ooky guy in the park acted.
I have found this to be very true growing up poor in a poor area. If there are no minorities in the area, the focus of police goes to the poor trailer folk.
As I read the OP, the guy was not “simply talking to a child in a playground”; he was seeking out other people’s kids while ignoring his own, to the point that multiple observers did not realize he even had a kid there. While certainly not illegal, it is atypical behavior.
This reminds me of an incident where I called the cops on somebody. I was out walking the dog one night and found a guy wandering out in the middle of the street. He wasn’t somebody I recognized, and from his behavior my first guess was that he was drunk (or high). That’s not typical in my neighborhood either, and I wasn’t sure whether he had something else going on–mental illness, even Alzheimer’s, presented as possibilities. He didn’t respond when I said something from across the street. I’m female, middle-aged, neither particularly strong nor particularly fast, and the four-legged fiend is not likely to be of much help (he acted spooked by the guy too), so there’s no way I’m going to get close enough to investigate some largish man in the dark behaving oddly. I called dispatch, gave description and location, and went on my way. Dispatch said they’d send a car, but I have no idea how it turned out or whether they ever even located him–it certainly never made the newspaper. I don’t feel uncomfortable with that decision. How would you feel?
On the one hand, if he really was just drunk and enjoying himself, getting hassled by the cops for public intoxication probably thoroughly spoiled his evening. If he was a dementia patient who’d wandered away from the nursing home down the road, though, I would feel pretty awful to have ignored him. I belong to the “if you see something, say something” school of thought, and calling a non-emergency number to let somebody with more experience decide how to handle the situation seems a reasonable choice when confronted with something out of the ordinary.
Yep.
And it is the behavior of the police that has led to this.
Plenty of bigotry or profiling takes place under the guise of “Better safe than sorry.”
A few months ago I was at a store here in Austin and a white woman began talking to the clerk, saying that a large Indian or Pakistani-looking man in the store was making her nervous, maybe we’d better alert someone etc. Mind you, this Indian or Pakistani man was simply walking through the store minding his own business. She began talking about how she felt he might carry out a shooting spree or something, better safe than sorry, etc. AFAIK the man was totally harmless.
People who are paranoid like that, are often a bigger threat to society than the people that they are afraid of.