Maybe she meant their service was terminated.
A few years ago one of our cats got out. My wife was very upset, so I spent an hour or so making a flyer out with a reward notice and our telephone number. I placed a few on some telephone poles around the neighborhood. While I was doing that I noticed that a bunch of middle school kids were waiting for the bus. I handed out a few of the flyers and asked the kids to call if they found out cat.
Later than night I recieved a call from the local police asking why I had been approaching young girls on the street. I explained the situation to the officer who then told me that I should stick to the telephone poles and not ever hand out stuff like that again. Now this was a sub-division…so while it was a "leave it to beaver’ type neighborhood, it was still a fairly close community.
So, take of that what you will when considering going into someone else’s house and talking to a teenager with nobody else present. It doesn’t matter what your intent is, or even what you do, what matters is “Can someone take your actions the wrong way”?
In all fairness, the ‘Help me find my lost pet’ is a pretty common cover for kiddie diddlers.
The OP did the right thing, but my god, those poor fucking kids. And the cop – he must see that, and worse, all the time, knowing that it’s ‘best’ to keep kids with their parents whenever possible.
Unfortunately, the “help me find my lost pet” ploy is a popular child molester trick. I don’t think the situations are the same though, but I still think that it might have been possible to rouse the teenager without entering her room.
Although since she didn’t seem intimidated by the police I doubt she would have given much thought to a couple soon-to-be-ex neighbors telling her she was doing a crappy job babysitting. So calling the police was probably the best solution in this situation. If there hadn’t been a history of bad parenting with these neighbors though I might have tried a little harder to get the teenagers attention without actually entering the house.
Minneapolis isn’t generally regarded as a smaller town. They just do all their calls requiring dispatch through 911 or did at that time, regardless of hour of the day. You can call the precinct if all you need is a case number for insurance on a lost cell phone.
Well, on the one hand, I’m evil, so I try to avoid doing things for the greater good simply on principle.
On the other hand, while there are evil reasons to sneak in a teenage girl’s bedroom at 2 am, I don’t do THAT kind of evil. (Yes, we in the Evil Community do classify our evil. I’m only into conquest, social oppression, and rape of the EARTH, thank you very much.
On the other other hand, calling the police would lead to an amusing situation that would compensate me for being annoyed by the urchins.
So all three hands agree. No, I wouldn’t.
Same with Philly; I got my purse snatched a couple years ago, called the precinct, and got (gently) chewed out for not calling 911 instead. The cops who showed up said there were enough cruisers in the area that they might have caught the thieves as they ran off and that 911 is appropriate for anything like that, even if I don’t think it’s an emergency.
I am usually very hesitant to call 911 since I don’t want to keep them away from a worse emergency. But if it involved unsupervised young children on the street at night I would definitely have called also. I wouldn’t ever go into a neighbor’s house myself, being the wuss that I am, unless I was sure that there was someone actually in the house needing help. FWIW, it looks like if you had gone into the house without calling, the girl would not have been much help anyway. She was pretty surly to the policemen, so I doubt she would have been very helpful to you.
(hijack)My sister has TWICE found the same little boy wandering the street in her neighborhood, once maybe a year ago and then again maybe six or seven months ago. The first time she just happened to look out the window and saw him toddling down the road. She went out and watched him to see if an adult would come looking for him. No one came so she approached the child and asked him his name and where he lived. He was either scared or didn’t know so she ended up calling the police. She thinks he was probably about two years old!! (Didn’t speak well, still wearing a diaper, small and still baby fat) The police came but after a while no one showed up so they ended up taking him with Social Services people. I have no idea how they ended up returning him, but imagine my sister’s shock when she found the same little boy. The police came again, but were able to return him to his home, which was apparently on the next street over. I can’t believe there are people out there that are this irresponsible with their children! (end hijack)
Arnold, you definitely did the right thing. The cops (I’m one) really don’t have better things to do than make sure that children are safe.
I agree that you probably wouldn’t have to worry about being charged with anything if you went in the house, but why risk that or a violent response? That’s why you pay taxes to employ cops - to do stuff like this.
In addition, this has now been documented in case something else happens with these kids in their new how.
Good job!
Oh, about 911. Yeah, it can be better to use the non-emergency number, but it really isn’t that big a deal to use 911 if you’re in a hurry. Most dispatch centers can switch a call over to a non-emergency line if it’s appropriate.
The police response isn’t based on what number you call - after the dispatcher gets the details they assign a priority to the call and the officers know which ones to handle first. They aren’t going to skip an armed robbery for this call, but they will divert from something less important.
It really bothers me when people don’t call when they should, because they don’t want to bother us or think we have better things to do. Call!! If we do have something else that’s more important, we will take longer to get to your call. But we’ll never get there if you don’t report the problem.
(OK, I’m a small town cop who really believes in public service. Cops from large, super-busy jurisdictions may not agree, but this is how it should work).
No comment on how best to proceed, but I’m not sure I’d have been able to resist adding a little something to the dialogue…
Beautifully phrased.
The more I think about it the more I think the police should have taken the kids away at that point. It was obvious from the conversation with the teenager that she was a complete cunt and entrusting her with the kids after the confrontation was a newspaper headline waiting to happen.
On the devil’s advocate side, what was the girl supposed to do? I mean, it seems like the kids have gotten used to wandering around at night from the mother–so if she’s watching them and it’s past midnight and she is sleeping, how is she supposed to stop them from getting out if they’ve already learned that it’s cool to wander around?
Calling the police was your only choice.
The way things are these days when minor children are involved .
A police officer or a CPS person are trained and authorized to deal with any thing that may come up when minor children are involved.
Also the officer’s and CPS reports will stand up in court ,if it were to go that far ,where a non family members word just becomes part of the whole issue needing to be sorted out .
That 17 year old sister could have said any number of thins to try and ‘cover’ her own lack of responsibility and attention to those little kids in her care. And the teenager would have been believed just because it would have been her word against your word.
Lock the door. Sleep in front of it, if she has to. And if she can’t keep them safe, refuse to babysit or call the police herself.
Well, yeah, locking the door is probably the most obvious solution, but I was assuming that the kids were just unlocking it (since it would be unlocked from the inside).
Not to mention at least acting like she has some concern for them when the police bring them home in the middle of the night.
My kid’s best friend was one of those toddler wanderers. They’d lock the deadbolt, he’d unlock it. They’d use the chain lock, he’d figure out how to open it. The put a hook and eye up about 7 feet up, kid dragged over a stack of boxes to stand on. He never met a lock he couldn’t figure out - until they installed a dead bolt backwards so you needed a key to get out.
Kids are ingenious, no doubt. But we have power tools. 
And then there’s a fire and your kid burns to death because he can’t get out…
I agree that Arnold did the right thing by calling the cops on this situation, but the children were at no imminent risk of dying. Sometimes kids will wander off and I’m not sure there’s too much to reasonably be done about it. They could probably hope for a better babysitter than their 17 year old sister, but kids can wander out of a house with most any babysitter if they want to. Depending on their predilection for doing this in prior circumstances, perhaps the 17 year old should have done more to anticipate the possibility, but we really don’t know enough from this thread to schedule her burning at the steak just yet.
Removal from the home by CPS? Because being carted off in the middle of the night to stay with strangers for a week is a fun, non-disruptive activity for children as evidenced by the shining emotional health of the graduates of our foster care system. :rolleyes:
I don’t know, The Dope can be a funny place. Suggest that kids ought to wear bike helmets because a lot of them get head injuries or worse every year and people stare at you as if you’ve grown a third eye or they regard you with contemp; “back in my day, we would jump off five-foot ledges on our mountain bikes with no helmets on and intentionally land face-down just because we liked the sound it made on the asphalt and we turned out just fine.” But kids outside at night? “That isn’t a home! Better to have them living with strangers!”