, at that age I would just tell mom I was going to go play in the woods and she would just say "be home by dark".
WTF!!!
A Texas mother was thrown in jail after a neighbor called police to say her children were playing outside unsupervised.
Tammy Cooper of La Porte, Texas said earlier this month she let her children, ages 6 and 9 years old, play with their scooters outside on their home on a cul-de-sac.
"So we were outside. I took my lawn chair and put it on the sidewalk where I always sit and watch them outside when they're playing. They were out maybe an hour and a half, two hours and got tired. We came inside, started getting their pajamas on them and getting ready for the end of our day, and about 30 minutes after that I looked out my window and see a La Porte police officer at the end of my driveway," she said.
Police said a neighbor had complained that the children were unsupervised. Cooper was arrested for child endangerment.
She spent 18 hours in jail overnight only to have the charges against her dropped.
Moms on the internet quickly rallied around Cooper saying she didn't deserve to be arrested.
North Texas moms Shannon Hanna and Janet Coffman agree. They don't think the arrest was warranted.
Coffman said she lets her daughters ride their scooters on the sidewalk even if they aren't right next to her.
"I can't keep up with them. I mean, there's a point where they go faster than you do and you've got to just be where you can to see them," she said.
Hanna watches her kids and if they slip out of her sight she trusts they'll be safe.
In fact, she puts some of the blame on the neighbor.
"Some neighbors I think just think they're doing the right thing or whatever, but some of them just over react or get too nosey," she said.
Cooper is now suing the La Porte Police Department, the officer who arrested her and the neighbor who made the call.
She said the ordeal has been stressful, time consuming and costly. Her family has already s ed out $7,000 in legal fees, she said.
Read more: http://www.myfoxdfw.com/story/196006...#ixzz277Psxgis
, at that age I would just tell mom I was going to go play in the woods and she would just say "be home by dark".
She should get a damn award that they weren't sitting inside watching TV and playing video games.
, I was hunting by myself with high powered rifles at 9.
THIS.
your kids are playing outside for two hours? Congratulations
I rode my bike and took off at 5 years old, exploring in the woods, catching crawdads with our bare hands in the creek with bacon or ham.
This lady gets arrested because her kids are at the end of the street? that.
The (US) world has really changed these last few decades.
Everybody scared as of something that's nearly always one of the smallest risks in their daily lives.
Combined with the epidemic of lifestyle diseases, it's really hard to see how American civilization can stop declining and start advancing.
Then there's this:
Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country's least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.
Researchers have long do ented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.
The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a e in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.
"We're used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven't improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling," said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Ins ute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.
The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Ins ute of Health Equity in London.
The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The latest estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma was 73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women with a college degree or more. For white men, the gap was even bigger: 67.5 years for the least educated white men compared with 80.4 for those with a college degree or better.
The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.
The slump is so vexing that it became the subject of an inquiry by the National Academy of Sciences, which published a report on it last year.
"There's this enormous issue of why," said David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. "It's very puzzling and we don't have a great explanation."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/21...nking.xml?f=19
Yeah...I agree it's messed up if this is the whole story.
But I find it hard to believe that's all there is. My guess is that the kids have been ing up other peoples' property on an ongoing basis and the mom has done nothing about it. When the police came, she probably was over the top belligerent to them. Remember, this is LaPorte.
Thank you boutons. That's very relevant information to the subject.
Definitely a case of bitter neighbor.
CGGFY
never try to see how getting arrested like that is part of the Total Information Surveillance authooritaian police state as a key part of the decline in American civilization.
The snooping, snitching "self-appointed police" neighbors and those cops are huge indicators of the that's all around us.
Think there must be more to it than this.
Got it. Nosey neighbors are part of a government conspiracy to lower life expectancies. Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep an eye out.
^at the cat's expression
"Jesus Christ, my owner is a dumbass"
welcome to the control freak police state. you were all warned.
Also on the 1st page of my interweb search........
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I doubt it. They dropped the charges. Cops are dumb.
lol boutons
thanks to Obama, my kids cain't even go outside to play without it being a fed'ral offense
Can't even play pin the tail on the birth certificate anymore!![]()
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