doesn’t matter, as was evident with the arrest of 33-year-old Nicole Gainey. She was charged with child neglect in July 2014 after letting her seven-year-old son walk 800 meters from home to the local park. “I’m totally dumbfounded by this whole situation,” Gainey told a local TV station.4 “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was letting him go play.” Gainey added that she planned to fight the felony charge. And fight she should, given that, at the time he was approached by police, Gainey’s son had a cell phone to call his mother, and he was playing with other kids whom he knew and who knew him.
Even when a parent is right on top of her kids, the law sees something out of the ordinary. A 2011 news item out of Houston, Texas, reported that one Tammy Cooper “was arrested and charged with child endangerment and child abandonment after her neighbor told police Cooper’s children, ages 6 and 9, had been abandoned.”5 In reality, the children were playing on the front lawn.
“After police arrived, Cooper told authorities that she had been sitting outside in a lawn chair watching her children the entire time.” No matter. She was handcuffed in front of her kids, even as the children pleaded with the police officer not to take their mom away. Cooper’s husband was away serving in the military at the time. Cooper was charged with “abandoning a child” even though she was with her children the whole time.
Cooper was reborn a Captain Mommy as she sued the LaPorte police department. According to her complaint, she “spent 18 hours in custody” and spent “over $7,000 in court and legal fees” before the unsubstantiated felony charges against her were dismissed. “The incident also led to an investigation by Child Protective Services, requiring Cooper to take her children to the CPS office in Houston,” where her children “were separated from her and interrogated by child abuse investigators. CPS found no cause for concern regarding the well-being of Cooper’s children and dropped the investigation.”6 As of December 2014, Cooper was still waiting for her case to go to trial so she could get her day in court. “I was hoping for some good news for Christmas but no!” she wrote on her Facebook page. “So I continue to be strong and pray for trial!! It must be nice to be all powerful and above the law to continue to keep this case from going to trial.”
A mom in Connecticut was charged with “risk of injury to a minor” and “failure to appear” after, according to Manchester’s police blotter, “she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza unsupervised.”
From the Johnson City, Tennessee, police blotter of June 7, 2012: “April L Lawson . . . 27 . . . was arrested by officers of the Johnson City Police Department and charged with child neglect. The arrest stems from a 911 call in reference to a missing child. During the investigation, officers discovered that Lawson had allowed her two children, ages 8 and 5, to walk to the playground.”7 Lawson had allowed her kids to walk to a nearby playground, but she became worried when she couldn’t find them later on (it appears they had gone to a neighbor’s house without telling her). When she called the police to help her find them, she became the focus of the investigation. Lawson was furious. “So I walked them across the street, watched them walk up the block to the park and went back inside. When the kids didn’t come home I sent somebody up here to bring them home,” Lawson explained. “I had no idea that I could get in this much trouble for just walking them up to a playground and play.”8 But how could she have known that she wasn’t allowed to let her kids be unsupervised, ever, at all, even for a minute? And was it really a valid use of police resources and good for the family for Lawson to spend the night in jail?
In August 2011, Richard Masoner reported on the Cyclelicious blog that police in Elizabethton, Tennessee, threatened to make an arrest and even bring in child services when a 10-year-old girl was observed biking home from Harold McCormick Elementary School. “A driver complained about a girl biking from school on a narrow residential road. The officer ‘observed that vehicles had to slow and negotiate around the cyclist’ on Cedar Avenue south of the school.”
Masoner explained, “To me, this seems like normal and expected traffic movement. The unnamed officer, however, [said that] ‘this section of the roadway is not a safe place for a child of her [age] to be riding unsupervised,’ so he loaded her and her bike up in the police cruiser, drove her home, and had a chat with the child’s mother, Teresa Tryon.”
When Tryon disagreed with the officer’s assessment, he informed her that he was going to report the incident and that it would be filed with the Department of Child Services. He also lectured Tryon that her daughter would have been safer riding on a sidewalk, given the heavy school traffic on Cedar Avenue, even though there was no sidewalk available.
For Lori Levar Pierce, sidewalks have become her main focus as a Captain Mommy, after her son got in trouble with the police for walking alone.
Pierce lives in a Mississippi town of 25,000. She’s a high-school teacher, and she admits that before the incident, she was your average, nervous, overprotective mom. One day her 10-year-old son was ready for soccer practice an hour early, while she was in the middle of cooking dinner. He asked if he could just walk the mile to the field on his own, and even though she was worried about it, she allowed him to go by himself. When Lori got to the practice a little later, she was accosted by a police officer who had picked up her son halfway to the field because (as he absurdly claimed) the station had received “over 100 calls” about a boy walking alone. The officer had stopped Pierce’s son, driven him to practice, then circled back to look for Pierce at her home, and, not finding her there, gone back to the field to berate and threaten to arrest her for “reckless endangerment.”9
Pierce was indignant. There aren’t 100 homes between her house and the field, so she remembers wondering to herself what the officer was talking about. She ended up complaining to the police chief, who apologized for his overzealous officer. Meanwhile Pierce became an activist citizen, and another newly minted Captain Mommy, advocating for safer streets and better sidewalks so that kids can walk or bike without fear of being hit by cars—or being hassled by police.
It isn’t only mothers who are harassed by police and CPS, either. Fathers feel the weight of the overbearing nanny state as well. A dad in suburban Pittsburgh was charged with two counts of reckless endangerment for leaving his kids playing at the playground while he ran errands. In this case, he had been at the park with them, and it was another “concerned” parent, who actually knew one of the children, who called the police.10
In Connecticut, Charles Eisenstein took to his blog, which otherwise concerns his activism on behalf of what he calls “degrowth,” to discuss a run-in with police when he was actually with his children. “Last weekend I decided I would get the kids outdoors for a little time in nature. The Susquehanna River was frozen over, with the most remarkable ice formations,” he wrote on his blog.11 Innocent enough, until four police cars and two fire trucks showed up. Eisenstein was yelled at by the police in front of his teenagers, threatened with arrest and cited for disorderly conduct. “This small incident reveals a lot about our society. First is the presumption that legally constituted authority should decide what an acceptable level of safety is for oneself and one’s family. I suppose going out onto the ice was more dangerous than staying indoors or on the sidewalk, but I deemed it in my children’s best interest to be outdoors in this amazing ice world.” Eisenstein writes that what bothered the officers was that he and his sons were engaged in behavior that was a violation of normality. But his point about who should decide the acceptable level of safety or risk in any behavior—the state or the family—is an important one.
It has become standard procedure to apply laws that were once used in child-custody disputes and abandonment cases to parents who want to let their kids do the same things they were allowed to do when they were kids. Is this really the proper use of the penal code? According to one Connecticut law firm, the charges of child endangerment, child neglect, or risk of injury to a minor are usually applied when a child has been put in harm’s way by adults. Lawyers explain that examples include outright child abuse, domestic disputes when a child is present in the room, and a drunk-driving accident when a minor is in the vehicle. Apparently, we’ve all silently and nearly completely acquiesced to fear in the wake of sensational child-abduction