LogGrad98
Well-Known Member
Contributor
20-21 Award Winner
2022 Award Winner
2023 Award Winner
2024 Award Winner
They are accountable to the citizens. Because they're accountable, you see them doing everything they can to appease both sides in this case. Did you even look at what "Unsubstantiated child neglect" actually means?
So they looked into it, found nothing, and kept on trucking. But because they've got to save face in the public eye, they made a file for them.
As this continues to happen, that psuedo blank file will continue to grow, and nothing will continue to happen.
Now, it's a damn shame DCS hasn't just up and told these neighbors to eff off. But if they did that at the first sign of neglect, they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
The community they live in is either dumb as ****, or has a vendetta against these two adults and are playing hardball. As stated above, it's quite the shame they haven't started telling these people to shut up.
What I'd really like to know is who made the reports, and their rationale behind them. not what's on paper.. but why these two are singled out. That would be a piece of investigative journalism I'd read. It's the community that doesn't have accountability in this story, Not the DCS.
As seen in the reports, unsubstantiated neglect. Which doesn't go on your criminal record at all, and is admittedly just an empty file. No family is broken up over unsubstantiated neglect.
It is not an isolated case. In Utah I heard a bunch of similar examples from the guy in our ward that worked with kids from CPS. In Reno there was a big to-do at my daughter's school because someone's kid walking home from school wasn't paying attention and almost walked into traffic about 4 blocks from his house. He wasn't hurt, but a neighbor out on their lawn who saw the thing, and admitted later to being sick of kids walking past his house every day after school, called CPS who promptly picked up the kid because he was 8 and walking home from school without any adult supervision, again 6 or 8 blocks total walking distance with tons of other kids on the street. And there are plenty of others that make the news. They more often than not act first and ask questions later.
I think one problem may lie in definitions. What is the definition of neglect? A paranoid grandmother sees a kid who is "obviously too young to be walking anywhere alone" calls CPS, and it turns out the kid is 13 and just small for her age, and was walking 3 blocks to a friends house which she does regularly. But CPS believes the grandmother's definition of neglect and then, as in the case in this story, forces the kids to be under constant adult supervision at all time. But even then the definitions are vague and unclear. Exactly how far can my child walk alone? At what age can they walk any distance alone? If something happens to my child while they are alone am I criminally responsible? If my child is seen walking alone and someone calls CPS am I instantly guilty of neglect? When they cannot even define neglect clearly how can they ever determine unsubstantiated neglect? The answer to most of these tends toward ridiculousness in the extreme and are anything but consistent.