Zvi cited examples from people personally known to him, not just “news stories”
Reading through his post again I count one example personally known to him (“Update on that friend: They did indeed move out of New York for this reason, and then got into trouble for related issues when they were legally in the right”) one friend-of-a-friend (“Scott Alexander: I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.”) and eleven people it doesn’t sound like Zvi was connected to.
my toddler was not allowed to peacefully nap in his own stroller on our own front yard while I listened through the window so I could hear when he woke up. [link: “got the cops called on him for letting his baby sleep in their stroller in his yard by someone who actively impersonated a police officer and confessed to doing so. My friend got arrested, the confessed felon went on her way.”]
I’d be curious to hear more details on how this played out, if you’d be up for sharing—how did it start? What did the neighbor say? How did you respond? How did it escalate to arrest?
At that time often the easiest way for my toddler to take his daytime nap was to fall asleep on a stroller ride, and since we rent the second floor of a house, it was pretty difficult to transfer him from the stroller without ending the nap. So, sometimes we’d leave him in the stroller right at the front of the house, usually with one of us watching from the 2nd floor balcony, sometimes just leaving a window open to hear him when he woke up and called for us.
On this day I had the window open to listen, but instead of my child, I heard someone hollering “Hello?! Hello?!”. (I later learned her car had broken down on our block, which is why she was there.)
I went outside (initially to our 2nd floor balcony) and somewhat grumpily (I think this was an important error that escalated the problem) complained that she was yelling right next to a sleeping baby, which seemed to enrage her, so I ran down to talk with her at less distance since I was a little worried at this point about what she might do.
She told me that this wasn’t my child and demanded to see my “license,” which confused me since Connecticut doesn’t require a license to have a child, but eventually I figured out she meant my driver’s license. She also claimed to be an “officer” and said she’d take away my child and arrest me, turned to her boyfriend, and said, “babe, get your handcuffs.” I asked for her name and she refused to identify herself, then asked for a badge number and she said “152.” (I have this bit on camera, which my lawyer thought was likely helpful in getting the charges dismissed. The police report documents that she also confessed to the police when they arrived that she’d falsely told me that she and her boyfriend were police officers.)
At this point I decided to take the stroller through our gate to the backyard, and since the woman claiming not very credibly to be a police officer didn’t follow me, I called the non-emergency number of the New Haven Police Department on the assumption that, given a badge number and current location, they could likely tell me whether this was a real police officer or someone impersonating a police officer. (The police report I saw later described her explicitly as not an officer.) They told me they couldn’t check anything without the officer’s name since badge numbers are recycled.
At this point the police entered our backyard, asked me what happened (I stayed calm and told them what had happened instead of retreating into the house as soon as I saw them, which may have been my second major mistake) and then arrested me on the charge of child endangerment. I asked what the danger had been and they didn’t have a consistent story—one said “he could choke on something”, the other said he’d just come from a kidnapping call. (Since as I understood it stranger kidnappings of children are extremely rare in the US, I asked him afterwards when I saw him at the grocery store whether it had been a stranger kidnapping case, and he said no.)
Now, ok, criminal do sometimes pretend to be police officers, e.g, as part of a scam. I have once had to call the actual police when someine tried this on me — it really got th attention of the actual cops, shall we say.
The responding officer’s actions just don’t make sense here. (Whch suggests there might be something going on here we don’t know about)
The earlier Zvi post I linked to has other anecdotes, including mine, so the total count of those is higher. Since for obvious reasons anecdotes from people previously known to you are much stronger evidence than sensational anecdotes promoted by an advertising platform like most “news” publications, it makes more sense to mention the former and not the latter, than the other way around.
Incidentally while there’s an obvious bad news bias that would promote overestimating the rate of such incidences, other factors suppress reporting. When this first happened to me, the sorts of responses I got when telling friends and family about it were mostly some combination of victim-blaming, and inventing a different, less politically inconvenient situation that they could take my side in (e.g. one friend decided that the real story was that the woman whose car had broken down wanted to kidnap my child). This made the whole thing demoralizing and stressful to talk about. In addition, getting arrested on the basis of an accusation from someone who was doing and admitting to an unambiguous felony while I was not, contributed to what I think is the rational impression that in some important respects I have more to lose socially from being seen as the sort of “loser” who gets arrested, than I have to gain from establishing that I have a legitimate grievance against the authorities.
Reading through his post again I count one example personally known to him (“Update on that friend: They did indeed move out of New York for this reason, and then got into trouble for related issues when they were legally in the right”) one friend-of-a-friend (“Scott Alexander: I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.”) and eleven people it doesn’t sound like Zvi was connected to.
I’d be curious to hear more details on how this played out, if you’d be up for sharing—how did it start? What did the neighbor say? How did you respond? How did it escalate to arrest?
At that time often the easiest way for my toddler to take his daytime nap was to fall asleep on a stroller ride, and since we rent the second floor of a house, it was pretty difficult to transfer him from the stroller without ending the nap. So, sometimes we’d leave him in the stroller right at the front of the house, usually with one of us watching from the 2nd floor balcony, sometimes just leaving a window open to hear him when he woke up and called for us.
On this day I had the window open to listen, but instead of my child, I heard someone hollering “Hello?! Hello?!”. (I later learned her car had broken down on our block, which is why she was there.)
I went outside (initially to our 2nd floor balcony) and somewhat grumpily (I think this was an important error that escalated the problem) complained that she was yelling right next to a sleeping baby, which seemed to enrage her, so I ran down to talk with her at less distance since I was a little worried at this point about what she might do.
She told me that this wasn’t my child and demanded to see my “license,” which confused me since Connecticut doesn’t require a license to have a child, but eventually I figured out she meant my driver’s license. She also claimed to be an “officer” and said she’d take away my child and arrest me, turned to her boyfriend, and said, “babe, get your handcuffs.” I asked for her name and she refused to identify herself, then asked for a badge number and she said “152.” (I have this bit on camera, which my lawyer thought was likely helpful in getting the charges dismissed. The police report documents that she also confessed to the police when they arrived that she’d falsely told me that she and her boyfriend were police officers.)
At this point I decided to take the stroller through our gate to the backyard, and since the woman claiming not very credibly to be a police officer didn’t follow me, I called the non-emergency number of the New Haven Police Department on the assumption that, given a badge number and current location, they could likely tell me whether this was a real police officer or someone impersonating a police officer. (The police report I saw later described her explicitly as not an officer.) They told me they couldn’t check anything without the officer’s name since badge numbers are recycled.
At this point the police entered our backyard, asked me what happened (I stayed calm and told them what had happened instead of retreating into the house as soon as I saw them, which may have been my second major mistake) and then arrested me on the charge of child endangerment. I asked what the danger had been and they didn’t have a consistent story—one said “he could choke on something”, the other said he’d just come from a kidnapping call. (Since as I understood it stranger kidnappings of children are extremely rare in the US, I asked him afterwards when I saw him at the grocery store whether it had been a stranger kidnapping case, and he said no.)
That is really, really weird.
Now, ok, criminal do sometimes pretend to be police officers, e.g, as part of a scam.
I have once had to call the actual police when someine tried this on me — it really got th attention of the actual cops, shall we say.
The responding officer’s actions just don’t make sense here. (Whch suggests there might be something going on here we don’t know about)
The earlier Zvi post I linked to has other anecdotes, including mine, so the total count of those is higher. Since for obvious reasons anecdotes from people previously known to you are much stronger evidence than sensational anecdotes promoted by an advertising platform like most “news” publications, it makes more sense to mention the former and not the latter, than the other way around.
Incidentally while there’s an obvious bad news bias that would promote overestimating the rate of such incidences, other factors suppress reporting. When this first happened to me, the sorts of responses I got when telling friends and family about it were mostly some combination of victim-blaming, and inventing a different, less politically inconvenient situation that they could take my side in (e.g. one friend decided that the real story was that the woman whose car had broken down wanted to kidnap my child). This made the whole thing demoralizing and stressful to talk about. In addition, getting arrested on the basis of an accusation from someone who was doing and admitting to an unambiguous felony while I was not, contributed to what I think is the rational impression that in some important respects I have more to lose socially from being seen as the sort of “loser” who gets arrested, than I have to gain from establishing that I have a legitimate grievance against the authorities.