I didn't buy Warner's line of argument at all, but in response to this post itself, I do wonder if some of the trouble might have been that there weren't just her own kids she was making potentially irresponsible decisions for - I thought perhaps that might have been a trigger for law enforcement in this case.
The thing is, the triggers for law enforcement are multiplying like analogies. This incident is yet another spin-off of the zero-tolerance syndrome, which is really just a way of ducking the responsibility for making decisions, which is just another fall-out from civil suit mania.
The short version? Back in the day, the mall manager would have called and said, "Get down here and take charge of your kids.
Yes to the post. Not a real bright idea, IMO, but not criminal. And Warner's take that the police and prosecutorial response was influenced by resentment of outsiders perceived as elitist isn't totally implausible. I have a harder time with the idea that it's about uppity women specifically. But mostly LB's take is about as far as I'd go.
8: With Warner's post, I had a hard time with the fact that a.) we're only hearing the accused woman's side of things (which, yes, I do trust someone to be able to know when they're being persecuted, but when the original claim strikes me as a tad implausible I like some corroboration) and b.) that there appears to be no nuance to Warner's analysis, given that she doesn't do anything at all with the fact that at least one of the people involved in the "vendetta" is also a similarly elite women.
9: Not similarly elite at all, really. Possibly at similar levels of elite in their respective professions, but neither would have any particular reason to know that about the other. I have absolutely no difficulty believing that a local prosecutor in town like Bozeman could have an anti-elitist chip on her shoulder about a professor.
7 is exactly right. I would say motherhood as legally actionable condition is an arena in which feminist advances have been surpassed by sexist backlash. Include the prosecution of pregnant women in this too.
Lots of small-town prosecutors are just assholes, there's not necessarily anything to it beyond that. But all the people in the comments (at 11D and at the Times) that are judgmental of the mother really should FOAD.
I have absolutely no difficulty believing that a local prosecutor in town like Bozeman could have an anti-elitist chip on her shoulder about a professor.
Perhaps not but I find it odd to than draw out that one instance into what Warner does. And I do think that, if anyone is more elite in this case, it's the prosecutor. If you divide it up as liberal versus conservative as opposed to elite vs. non-elite, I find the story more viable, and then it seems to me like just another skirmish in the "culture wars."
two more observations upon reading the article:
1. poor women are much more likely to be prosecuted for failing as mothers. This doesn't invalidate the accusation of anti-elite animus, however.
2. Some porn theory (I'm thinking of Hard-Core by Linda Williams--or is it something else? Constance Penley maybe?) suggests that porn, Hustler in the example I'm thinking of, is an expression of working-class anger against professional/bourgeois morés. Warner seems to be identifying a similar attitude in that backlash (though she's not validating it.)
7: And probably x-1 out of x times something more reasonable would be the response even today. And although "elitist" resentment may well have been an issue in this particular case, try this as a member of the underclass and see how that feels. (And the nostalgia for the good old days gets up my nose a bit, try this as black just about anywhere in the USA in the good old halcyon days of yore and see what the typical police/mall manager response would be.)
*Clearly the few that do get the publicity help set the tone and responses in general do tend to be more bureaucratic than in the past.
14.1 seems to me something far more worthy of discussion on Warner's blog, but I suppose it is a little too commonplace.
kth is right, FOAD-wise. Never read the comments.
Ok, and while I'm ragging on the original article, I dislike the disingenuous implication that all of a sudden, right now, elite women are being attacked when the incident at hand is from 2007. I just want more reporting, but that's unfair to expect of a blog, I suppose.
I'm certain that my own run-in with the Bozeman police, lo those many years ago, had more to do with my being a long-haired student than the actual conduct involved. My guess is that the prosecutor was identifying with the cop as a member of her tribe -- not an uncommon situation, I think -- which is what makes it easy to see that aspect of the thing.
long-haired student
Right, which is generally a sign of liberal values versus simply "elite." I guess I don't like the way elite and liberal are being conflated in the article, as that seems to indicate that the Republican brainwashing about the liberal coastal elites has sunk nearly ineradicable roots into the collective psyche.
Correction | 11:33 a.m.
An earlier version of this column misstated the date that Bridget Kevane had taken her children to the mall. It was in June 2007, not "a few weeks ago" as the column had originally stated.
The opening sentence of the account Warner is commenting on identifies the date the woman went to the mall as June 16, 2007. I wonder if Warner read the article, rather than just responses to it, before writing her own post.
15: There were plenty of semi-attended-to black kids as well as white kids wandering around the malls in Birmingham in the late Sixties and early Seventies and no one called the cops just because they were there.
Suspicion, yes. Watchfulness, yes. The stereotype of the shoplifter was certainly present. Official action by the authorities against the parents for child endangerment? No. People would have laughed at that.
It wasn't until the media discovered those hordes of child molesters, satanic cultists, and serial killers out there that people went nuts.
I would have gone to trial. The mock jury shows it would have hung, at worst, at with a little more show, and good instructions, the others might well have come around.
;
t
y
The extra bits in 23 are apparently letters which, when they found out they weren't going to be in the comment, saw a chance for freedom and took it.
Night all.
It's interesting how this has changed so much. I was taking care of my infant sister when I was 12.
I used to walk to my friend's house by myself by the time I was four. I mean, she just lived at the end of the block. Actually, by the time I was four, if I woke up before my parents woke up I just left the house and went over to my friend's house.
There's more to this, of course. I guess my parents were lax. Also, I was the oldest and extremely precocious and I think they sometimes forgot I was a child. But definitely by 5 every kid in my neighborhood was expected to make his or her own way to the school about 5 blocks away for kindergarten. Our moms took us the first day and then we just went together all the rest of the time. But I sometimes missed my friends and walked alone.
But the shift took place in the 80s because I was 4 in the 70s and by the time my sister was born in the 80s you just didn't do this anymore. My parents had moved to a new, richer area and she was not free to roam.
This was in a city. There's just been a HUGE shift in expectations about the supervision of children.
I wish someone would write a book about this. Someone smart. I think it is very interesting. It definitely started in the 80s, I think.
IIRC, Annette Lareau makes the point in 14.1 in Unequal Childhoods. For parents in the low-income families in her study, the fear of someone taking their kids away is a constant. Maybe low-level, but always there. I imagine that's completely alien to the very large majority of middle-class parents. (It really threw me, anyway, but n not even = 1 since I don't have kids.) Pure conjecture, but whereas the mother in Warner's story perceives her prosecution as outrageous persecution, I wonder whether parents in a more tenuous position, primed to fear official interference with their families, wouldn't be relieved to know that the worst that would happen is having to take a parenting class.
This doesn't get to the question of whether or not the prosecutor's response was reasonable, but it does make me agree with Parenthetical in wanting Warner to report more on perspectives other than the mother's.
It definitely started in the 80s, I think.
Don't people often date a lot of it to the preschool Satanic abuse cases in the 80s?
That is, the McMartin trial, during which the allegations were proven unfounded.
OT, but do any of you have experience going dry? My alcoholism has ceased to be functional, and I'm having a hard time adjusting. I don't want to turn this into "Ask The Mineshaft: Kicking It Edition", but I wouldn't mind if the more rehab-savvy amongst you would spill a little wisdom.
No wisdom here, but moral support, if that's any help. It's really brave of you to take this on.
And I do think that, if anyone is more elite in this case, it's the prosecutor.
Maybe from your perspective, but not from the prosecutor's.
Maybe from your perspective, but not from the prosecutor's.
Can you explain further?
Also noteworthy: the mother's article describes the cops as both significantly younger than she was. Young cops having trouble figuring out that there's a difference between projecting authority effectively enough to do their jobs and full-on Respect Mah Authoritay is a known issue.
32: Prosecutors are near the low end of the lawyerly pecking order. The stereotypical small town prosecutor would be someone who didn't do very well in law school, didn't have other employment options, and is basically closer in status to a cop than she is to somebody like a Biglaw partner. That's unfair, but it would be easy for a Bozeman prosecutor to have a fair bit of status anxiety around people she perceives as more highly educated (having achieved real terminal degrees rather than trade-school diplomas) and at the pinnacle of their profession (because one professor looks much like another from outside academia, just as one lawyer looks much like another from outside the legal world).
Thanks, Charlie. I looked up the statute, and that was the conclusion I came to. In fact, she made a mistake in citing the code: 46-16-130(3) (links to code) is for pretrial diversion (in Texas, the term of art is 'deferred adjudication'). The actual code she was charged under appears to be either 45-5-622 (1) or 45-5-622 (2)(b)(i) which say:
Endangering welfare of children.
(1) A parent, guardian, or other person supervising the welfare of a child less than 18 years old commits the offense of endangering the welfare of children if the parent, guardian, or other person knowingly endangers the child's welfare by violating a duty of care, protection, or support.
(2) Except as provided in 16-6-305, a parent or guardian or any person who is 18 years of age or older, whether or not the parent, guardian, or other person is supervising the welfare of the child, commits the offense of endangering the welfare of children if the parent, guardian, or other person knowingly contributes to the delinquency of a child less than: [...]
(b) 16 years old by assisting, promoting, or encouraging the child to:[...](i) abandon the child's place of residence without the consent of the child's parents or guardian;[...]
(6) On the issue of whether there has been a violation of the duty of care, protection, and support, the following, in addition to all other admissible evidence, is admissible: cruel treatment; abuse; infliction of unnecessary and cruel punishment; abandonment; neglect; lack of proper medical care, clothing, shelter, and food; and evidence of past bodily injury.
That said, I am in agreement with 6, 7, 9, 14.1, 15 & 18. My suspicion is that rather than a sudden (Sarah Palin-driven?) anti-elite drive, this is actually a case of a prosecutor deciding that the UMC lady deserves the same treatment that poor women (of all colors, but I expect, in particular, Amerindian women) get in Montana, mainly for having left two twelve-year-old girls to watch over a three-year-old in a stroller. It's an overly broad law suddenly being evenly applied that's the problem, rather than a perfectly fine law being improperly applied to upstanding elite women. In short, in most circumstances she'd would have walked; if she were brown or poor, it would have been off to the slammer.
Warner is (improperly, I think) reading this as part of a pattern of attack on elite women (read: Judith Warner). That's nice work if you can get it, I guess, but that conception misses the point.
Back to the OP: To put it another way, if the older kids were, say, fourteen, this wouldn't have been an issue at all; there's not an intermediate stage, I don't think, where people would reasonably look askance at the situation, but calling the police about it would be obviously too much.
See the statute above: I don't think the older girls being 14 would've made any difference, if they were lax with the kid in the stroller. That said, I used to bike to the mall (that's where the games were, in the late 70's) when I was 11-13 on Saturday afternoons, and I find it totally strange that my mother could've have been arrested for *that*. I find it mind-bogglingly strange to envision what it must be like growing up kept like a rat in a cage, supposedly for my own protection.
max
['It took a while to find the statute, so sorry for delayed seconding.']
I agree with LB that the intersection between parenting and law enforcement is a strange and difficult place.
A common part of defending oneself when arrested or one's client is to cite that they have not been in trouble or that they are a model citizen. "I am not THAT type of person." Unfortunately, such a statement can sound elitist and condescending ("I am not one of THEM.")
Prosecutors identify with the police, not similiarly educated women. Too often, they view their role as backing up whatever the police do, not doing justice. They get chummy with the police officers and dont exercise an independent role.
Also, prosecutor, police officers, and often judges get a jaded perspective. Thirty days in jail is NO big deal to them. A misdemeanor conviction, eh who cares? A job loss bc of the conviction -- no biggie.
Prosecutors identify with the police, not similiarly educated women.
Again, I think this seems to indicate that this is not about attacks on elite women....
I agree that it isnt an attack on elite women.
38: Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth! Just feeling argumentative for once!
I like the insider lawyer knowledge you and NPH bring to this. I was just guessing.
Prosecutors have amazing amounts of power over individual lives, with very few checks and balances. There are certainly many excellent ones, but too many abuse their power.
what it must be like growing up kept like a rat in a cage, supposedly for my own protection.
Speaking from my own anecdotal experience, sometimes, you're scared into accepting it. In my own small, seemingly safe community, when I was a preteen and teenager (the 90s, FWIW) we had a series of serial killings of young women, along with the ritualistic murder and rape of a junior high classmate of mine by three teenagers. While I was incredibly oblivious to any sense of personal danger (which I am thankful for and think was actually the correct response), I think a number of my friends were terrified by these occurrences and may have seen it as justification for the tight surveillance of contemporary childhood. I doubt that we were actually in any more danger than your average middle-class white children, but I'm sure it felt like it to any number of people within the community.
The mid-80s changed everything. I blame Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted... oh, and television news programs, generally. I fucking hate those fearmongering bastards.
Foolishmortal, my Google skills are subpar this morning, but I don't want your comment to get lost.
There are a couple of really good threads on this site about addiction, including several of Alameida's posts about rehab, and I think at least one Ask the Mineshaft. I'm posting this near-contentless-comment in the hope that someone else will have better links.
Congrats on saying it out loud and good luck in figuring out the right path for you.
fm -- good for you! From the friends I've seen succeed (and fail) openness about what you are going through seems to make a difference. Openness and just generally not going it alone. Lots of luck -- it won't be easy, but I promise it will be worth it!
43: IIRC (and my recollection of the early-to-mid 80s is that of a grade-schooler) the Adam Walsh case set off a kidnapping hysteria, which included America's Most Wanted, etc. I remember being deathly afraid of being kidnapped, for no apparent reason.
One thing about the 'persecution of elite liberal outsiders' thing -- you really can't tell, but if any of it was going on, it makes sense to me that it would be net rather than gross. If you assume that she's starting from a (very classist, but probably accurate) presumption that as a nice middle-class white woman law enforcement is going to give her the benefit of the doubt, and she didn't get the benefit of the doubt because the prosecutor didn't like ivory tower professors who aren't from around here, that's persecution from her expected baseline even if she's not getting treated any worse than a poor woman would.
And good for you, fm. I don't know anything useful about alcoholism first hand, but there are Alameida's old threads, and any time you think talking about stuff would help, advice (uselessly uninformed from me, maybe informed from other people) and sympathy are always on tap.
I admit when I first read about this, my first thought was that the presence of the 3-year-old made the difference - I think 7 and 8 year-olds are likely to be perfectly fine unsupervised at the mall - certainly "unsupervised" in the limited sense of briefly left on their own while their older sister and her friend do shopping - but I'm not happy about a 3-year-old being supervised by a 7-year-old and an 8-year-old, though I'd be just fine with the 12-year-olds looking after a 3-year-old at the mall. That said, in what sense were the two littler kids being asked to "supervise" the three-year-old? If the littlest was strapped into her pushchair and fast asleep, and the littlers were sitting in full view of the store the 12-year-olds were in, this is hardly hazardous...
...the problem is really that it's likely the littler ones were left outside the store because the store had policies about how many children could be inside at once, and five over-topped the limit. A group of five kids sticking together where the youngest is three and there are two responsible twelve-year-olds is likely to be just fine.
But arrest is absurd. If the mall management are unhappy about unsupervised groups of children, they need to call the mom and say "hey, don't do this, our mall guards are not babysitters".
Yeah, my sense is that the twelve year olds probably weren't behaving too badly in the context of what they knew about the specific eight year old and three year old, given that from the story they got busted for being kids, not for any particular event.
Of course, that's the other fallout from the overzealous prosecution -- the twelve-year-olds get to live with "We messed up and didn't follow instructions and they arrested Mom for it." Which does have to suck for them.
22, 25, 43: There have been a number of threads here discussing various aspects of the trend towards increasing "nanny statism" specifically with regards to parenting and child safety. And yes clearly that is the trend, a very long one at that, starting well before the the 80s and the 60s. It has good and bad aspects and is inextricably intertwined with a number of deep trends in society. The '80s shows are a symptom not a cause. It is a mixed story, it includes seat belts, significant reductions in drunk driving, reductions in accidental childhood deaths and injuries of all kinds as well as the undue fears and hyper-bureaucratic responses . Certainly some of us treasure our earlier memories of running around as kids like big little swinging dicks while ignoring the bad. Those Mumbai slum kids have it great, riding on the tops of trains? Fun!!
And I'll point out that this story is a story at all because it is not the "norm"; extreme cases make for bad pop-sociologizing.
And I'll point out that this story is a story at all because it is not the "norm"; extreme cases make for bad pop-sociologizing.
Well, the norm is to not do stuff like this for fear of law enforcement, isn't it? I'm really nervous about sending my nine-year-old out to the park alone, not for her safety but for fear of rescue.
51: And I'll point out that this story is a story at all because it is not the "norm"; extreme cases make for bad pop-sociologizing.
I agree. It isn't the norm. UMC professor types don't typically get popped like this, especially since she's behaving fairly strictly by the standards of a slightly earlier era.
52: Well, the norm is to not do stuff like this for fear of law enforcement, isn't it?
Ayup. That's the practical effect, although the intended effect is to put bad people in jail.
max
['We make you safer by scaring the shit out of you. All in a day's work.']
52: ou are right and I do in general decry that where that line falls these days. However it is well to remember that there always was a grey area where those parental decisions had to be made, even if it occupied a different place. I'm more just feeling the need to push back at the way too easy "back in the day kids could go on whatever lawn they wanted" reactions.
Now off to stimulate the economy, although my seemingly perfectly set up clunker law strategy fell 1 MPH short. Adding to my grumpiness.
42: In my own small, seemingly safe community, when I was a preteen and teenager (the 90s, FWIW) we had a series of serial killings of young women, along with the ritualistic murder and rape of a junior high classmate of mine by three teenagers. While I was incredibly oblivious to any sense of personal danger (which I am thankful for and think was actually the correct response), I think a number of my friends were terrified by these occurrences and may have seen it as justification for the tight surveillance of contemporary childhood. I doubt that we were actually in any more danger than your average middle-class white children, but I'm sure it felt like it to any number of people within the community.
The ritualistic murder is problematic. I'd think that might be worth a little freaking out over, since that was someone close to you. OTOH, it's a one off. Serial killers were all the rage awhile back, and now they're off the radar and on my TV as standard props. ('Oh, look, hon, there's a serial killer in town. I wonder if they'll work him into Criminal Minds.' 'Brrr. Serial killers. Yuck.' 'At least he's not a Muslim!')
max
['Something about the Blitz goes here.']
Well, no kidding, JP, there has always been some kind of line--however it's more and more a line in the penal code and less and less a phone call from an irritated private or public citizen.
That it remains unusual is a blessing, not reason to say it isn't a problem.
seat belts
OK, this is the thing that makes me crazy. At one point when I was probably 12 or 13, there was a panic where people were absolutely terrified of kidnapping. There was some guy in a red car who had supposedly tried to grab a kid, and so my younger sisters were absolutely petrified of red cars for at least a year or two, and so were a lot of other kids we knew.
And yet many of these same people did not wear seatbelts. (My parents were extremely hard-nosed about this, so we actually did.) As as twelve-year-old I could not fathom this unbelievably irrational decision, and had to fight to hide my contempt. Even granted that kidnapping is a visceral scary thing like being afraid of snakes or plane crashes, if you were freaking out all the time about possible kidnappings, how could you NOT wear a seatbelt? Something that is free, painless, nuisance-less, and protects you significantly in most* types of accidents.
*I am not going to get derailed into the argument about whether people get "more" injured in certain types of accidents because of belts. On an aggregate level, it's absolutely indisputable that seatbelts are worth it.
I did sometimes wonder if it was one of those things that I would figure out when I was an adult. But the only understanding I've gotten to is the one I sensed as a kid -- that people do not react proportionately to fear. I still haven't figured out why you can't be busy panicking over red cars and *also* follow the low-cost safety measures. The other day, I was -- as far as I could tell -- the lone occupant on the Bolt Bus wearing my seatbelt. Bah.
I don't know. According to the article, "The prosecutor pursued her child endangerment case ultra-zealously because she "said she believed professors are incapable of seeing the real world around them because their 'heads are always in a book,'"
Perhaps this is not so much anti-educated women, as simply anti-academic bias. The prosecutor seems to hold some kind of absentminded-professor stereotype about the mom. But still, I would say that there is definitely something anti-intellectual going on here.
I'm just not so sure it's personal for the prosecutor like that. Wasn't she trying to manipulate the opinion of the court? It's a rhetorical strategy, not necessarily a vendetta against educated women.
No, it's completely personal. She wrote a letter to the defendant's lawyer saying "I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education."
kth in 12 is right: the comment threads at 11D and the Times are horrifying.
60: That could still be posturing. I don't know much of anything about criminal practice, but in civil litigation you write letters to the other side about stuff partially because if you can't resolve whatever you write about between the sides, eventually they go to the judge.
As for the charge that the prosecutor resents "elite" women, I wish I knew more about Bozeman. It's a small-ish town with a large-ish state university; you probably can't throw a rock there without hitting a professor, right? But depending on the town/gown dynamic that could either make it more likely or less likely that this sort of resentment was present.
What difference does it make? When did "I don't really mean the prejudice that I am publicly espousing, I'm just exploiting it for my own purposes" become exculpatory?
When did "I don't really mean the prejudice that I am publicly espousing, I'm just exploiting it for my own purposes" become exculpatory?
Isn't that the entire idea behind the adversarial system of justice?
64: Not exculpatory, but relevant to whether Kevane's account of why she was prosecuted instead of just getting a stern warning is true.
OT: If you got to work and noticed on your call log that someone had made an outgoing call from your phone to your ex's cell (the number for which was stored on your work phone), how paranoid would you be about it? What if this was the second time?
68. Fairly paranoid. Is there a plausible explanation?
68: Is there a reason that someone else would be using your work phone at all?
You mean, someone used your work phone to call him while you were out of the office? That would freak me out, and I wouldn't call it being paranoid.
Drunk dialing your ex from work is a bad idea.
I usually write off odd behaviour by people at work as one of those damn things, but I would be inclined to escalate this one quietly, especially if there's anybody senior you feel you can talk to informally (and start the conversation with "I don't suppose that for some obscure reason you were using my phone yesterday?")
This isn't to be more or less paranoid, but what's the redial potential? Was the last call from your work phone that you made to your ex, so that the new call could have been a redial?
But that's definitely weird as all get-out.
73: Yes, this is precisely what I mean. Called him about an hour after he dropped Rory off at my house Thursday night, so it's not like he'd think I was calling. Yeah, a little freaked. Who???? The Alcoholic ex-friend? The Libertarian? The Evil Mentor? Who the fuck with access to the office even gives a fuck about my personal life????
None that I can think of.
In that case I would report it to your boss. I would think the fact that someone is using your phone without an explanation would be a problem regardless of who they are calling.
This is highly, but highly, personal relationship dependent, so I don't know if it's plausible, but can you ask the ex about it? In a 'This is so weird, my call log at work shows a call to you from my office at a time I wasn't there. Is this some sort of bizarre telephonic malfunction I need to address, or should I be telling one of my co-workers to use their own phone?' kind of tone?
76: Nope -- no other calls to him at all in the last 100. And anyway, who hits redial on someone else's phone at 8:30 on a Thursday night?
75: Sounds sensible, except that I wouldn't have any clue how or to whom such a thing would be escalated.
79: Yeah, that's the only option I could come up with, too.
I guess someone could have used your phone and accidentally hit redial, but that seems unlikely. Plus, you mentioned that this was the second time.
I would ask the ex, plus ask your colleagues.
I would definitely look into it.
As important as client confidences are, any sort of breach like this is serious.
Okay, for a slightly non-weird explanation. Someone in your office who was 'entitled' to be looking for you after you left Thursday came to your office, found out you weren't there, wanted to talk to you ASAP, and for some reason thought that calling your ex would be a productive way of locating you.
That'd still be weird of them (why your ex? why would they have that number?) but it would explain what they were doing calling from your office. Is there a particular partner who might have been trying to locate you that night? Because if there is, I'd start by asking him.
79: Yeah, that's the only option I could come up with, too.
Or set up a recording device. Or change the number stored in the phone under his name to go to your phone instead.
Can you determine the length of the call? Or ask security who was still in the office then?
83: I appreciate the effort to find non-weird explanations -- keep trying!!! That one really is unlikely, though. The call was made using speed dial, and anyone who knows "Ugly Cell" refers to my ex would know that my ex would not be the person to ask about my whereabouts. Also, no time-sensitive projects in the past few days, and anyone urgently trying to reach me would (a) surely have left a message, and (b) surely have sent me an email.
84: Yeah, mine too. If I can get UNG to corroborate that, I have no qualms at all about getting her ass fired.
Yeah, I didn't think it had a lot of potential.
More floundering -- is [UGLY] a possibly ambiguous designator to someone who works in your firm? Like, your ex is Larry, and there's a Larry who works there? I'm just picturing a partner with no boundaries wandering the halls of the office after you'd left, and rummaging through your stuff for a phone number he didn't have on him.
As important as client confidences are, any sort of breach like this is serious.
I'm not seeing any client confidences implicated, though -- or do you just mean more generally that the sort of person who would do a thing like that is the sort of person who should not be entrusted with client confidences?
Hey, "Larry" is my default name for an unlikeable and ugly middle-aged man too!
I meant it in the more general way. Someone who would call up an ex isnt up to much good and cannot be trusted.
Although......maybe they are planning a SURPRISE BIRTHDAY party for you!!!!
90, 92: And generally, someone's messing around your desk in a weird way. There are going to be confidential papers there, so weirdness is a concern.
89: Not likely. I mean, people do use the phones in other people's offices all the time, but the speed dial entries here would have been "Ugly cell" followed immediately by "Ugly work," which I would think would have tipped off anyone looking for an ugly colleague that the ugly on my speed dial is someone who doesn't work here.
They thought "ugly" referred to your go-to hooker, and they're planning a batchelorette party for this weekend.
Though the "go-to hooker" story is compatible with Will's suggestion in 92.2.
Di - could it be something as simple as the late night cleaning crew accidentally hitting 'redial' as they dust the phone?
I'd ask UNG who called if it happens again. That assumes he'd be likely to cooperate, of course.
Also having a hard time coming up with a non-weird explanation, but also having a hard time seeing the firing offense in using someone else's phone if that's commonly done. The boundary violation is real, but from what you've said about your firm I wonder how willing they'd be to police that.
If you assume that she's starting from a (very classist, but probably accurate) presumption that as a nice middle-class white woman law enforcement is going to give her the benefit of the doubt, and she didn't get the benefit of the doubt because the prosecutor didn't like ivory tower professors who aren't from around here, that's persecution from her expected baseline even if she's not getting treated any worse than a poor woman would.
This argument bothers me a bit because it suggests that the UMC expectation of decent treatment from law enforcement is wrong. The point isn't that UMC folks ought to be treated as badly as the poor are, it's that the poor ought to be treated as well as the UMC. There's classism in objecting to treatment directed at oneself while justifying similar treatment directed at "those people," but it's easy and not necessarily pernicious for UMC types to go through life without ever thinking much about law enforcement at all.
I'd sure follow it up. What are the odds of it being someone with your best interests in mind? Close to zero, right?
Phones are very easy to lift fingerprints from. You can play CSI with just a little fine powder and brush.
Re 85: Be careful to check the laws in your state regarding recordings before getting into that.
98: Okay, maybe not. Though it's not just "using someone else's phone" but "using someone else's speed dial list to obtain her ex-husband's phone number to make phone calls to him."
99.3: Illegal in my state for at least two decades. And also maybe just a little more effort than I'd be willing to put in.
100.1: Understood completely. But that's the sort of interpersonal stuff that has been known to make management committees and human resources directors get very "la la la I can't hear you."
94
... people do use the phones in other people's offices all the time ...
You don't lock your offices when you aren't in them?
102 -- my office door does not lock.
UNG says he was in/on his way to a meeting at that time and didn't see any record of a call from me. Curious.
When it comes to the quotes taken about the prosecutor, they all come from the accused mother, as far as I can see. I want some corroboration beyond that. It's an adversarial justice system, as noted above, and both are trying to manipulate the way they are perceived.
And frankly, this: ""I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education,"' in a different context would sound like an admirable attempt to prosecute the law equally. Knowing what we do about the "crime," it seems ridiculous, yes. But I'd like to know more about the prosecutor. Does she regularly go after people for child neglect? Perhaps it is her issue? We've no idea from the article; all we have is Kevane's opinions.
Also, do we even know who brought up the issue of her profession first? What if her own lawyer trotted it out as a reason she couldn't possibly have done anything wrong? Like I said earlier, I want real reporting, especially before I come to the conclusions Warner does.
(I googled Kevane and am intrigued to learn that she grew up in Puerto Rico, though. Perhaps this case was just a harbinger for Sotomayor.)
And good lord, Di, that sucks!
There seemed to be a class component to reactions to this local story.
99.last, 100.last: my "set up a recording device" should be taken not so much as a suggestion, but as evidence that rewatching Veronica Mars has corrupted my better judgment.
From Shearer's article:
"Every parent has been there. You're in the car. The kids are arguing like magpies. You stop the car and bark something like: "That's it. One more sound from either of you and I'm going to put you out of the car."
But almost no one does it, and if they do, it's not exactly global news.
My mom did that. But in the middle of nowhere, and came back immediately, so we didn't make national news.
And yes, there are class issues at work in that article, though I think it's also an exaggeration of the common trend that it is perfectly ok to judge mothers.
107: But enhanced your joy, I am sure!
I should rewatch the first season...
107: A relative did that to his son. In the middle of Sydney, Australia. I think the kid found his way back to the hotel himself.
Um, 110 to 108, not 107. I don't know what programs this relative watched in Sydney.
The point isn't that UMC folks ought to be treated as badly as the poor are, it's that the poor ought to be treated as well as the UMC. There's classism in objecting to treatment directed at oneself while justifying similar treatment directed at "those people," but it's easy and not necessarily pernicious for UMC types to go through life without ever thinking much about law enforcement at all.
This is precisely right -- the way UMC types get treated by law enforcement is the way everyone should be treated by the police, and it's fair of the professor to complain about not getting that treatment. The only classism is in not remembering or noticing that people who aren't UMC don't start from that baseline.
Man, the Times commenters are morons. There are not packs of slavering child molesters waiting to kidnap unattended children. Getting hit by a car might be a risk if the kid had to cross a street to get home, but not getting molested by perverts.
106: The asshole dad of one of my son's friends got pissed at the kid and left him to walk home from the park where he'd been playing tennis to his mom's house, which is 10+ miles along busy roads, at age 12. Nobody thought well of him for it, but prosecution would have been ludicrous.
Ten miles is pretty harsh. At that point, it seems unenterprising of the kid not to have figured out a way to call his mom and get picked up.
113: But what would people do with their time if they couldn't compete over who's the best parent?
112
This is precisely right -- the way UMC types get treated by law enforcement is the way everyone should be treated by the police, and it's fair of the professor to complain about not getting that treatment. ...
You don't think UMC types sometimes get undue leniency?
Anyway I don't agree, police should be able to exercise judgement about how likely something is to cause a serious problem and class does affect the odds.
115: Indeed. He didn't have his cell phone, but there are other phones available along that route (including ours). His mom did find him eventually, plodding along the highway toward home, after he'd made it six or seven miles. But this is the same kid who got separated from the pack with one other friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood while trick-or-treating and decided that they really ought to finish their trick-or-treating before borrowing a cell phone to call their parents (this as they, and we, madly searched the neighborhood). Nice kid, but judgment isn't necessarily his strong suit.
As I mentioned previously, there can be very fine lines to walk:
if your client has a good job and the conviction would have a big impact on their job, then the response can be "oh, so your client is too important to pay the price???"
If your client is poor,then who cares if they spend 30 days in jail.
With regard to clients, it is not uncommon to hear from them that they "arent a criminal!" or "I am not the type of person to commit crimes." Well, yes, actually, you are.
I'm in favor of a fair amount of law enforcement leniency. Sure, 'sometimes' people get away with things they shouldn't, and those people are more likely to be UMC, but fairly relaxed law enforcement is a good thing, IMO.
Parenthetical is making a good point about the source of this info, but I'd go farther than she is. I wouldn't give Judith Warner a free pass just because the medium she's publishing in is a blog. AFAIK she's a paid journalist with biggest and best-funded (? maybe the WSJ?) newspaper in America. She's SUPPOSED to investigate before she publishes.
LB and NPH are right that in many cases the best thing would be if the flexibility and discretion applied to UMC people by police and prosecutors were extended to poor and working-class people too. But that's mostly with regard to laws that I think are wrong and should be repealed, or social situations that aren't properly or easily resolved by law.
With regard to laws I do agree with, I generally think that UMC people don't appropriately feel the brunt of them, and that's wrong, both for society and the individual. You're not doing a rich alcoholic any favors if you keep detouring them into lame community-service DUI diversion programs.*
*They're not all lame.
You don't think UMC types sometimes get undue leniency?
But isn't it only "undue" when compared to the treatment non-UMC types get? If everyone got the same lenient treatment, it wouldn't be lenient, just standard.
I think that most DUI programs in this area are mostly useless. (ASAP - Alcohol Safety and Awareness Program) They are nothing but money makers. Further, I dont really care for MADD.
However, Drug Court programs (in this area) are generally fantastic and worth every dime.
My dad ordered me and one of my sisters out of the car 2 miles from home; I was 12 and she 13. I'm not sure if it was an effective punishment, but it was memorable, partly because we were on our way to see Star Wars, which I was pretty excited about, and have yet to see on a big screen. It wasn't unreasonable or child-endangering, in any case. A couple of years later, my parents let/made me walk home from downtown Burlington (10-12 miles) when I failed to show up at the appointed time to get a ride home. That seemed excessive, especially given that it was after dusk and half of the way I was on a road with heavy traffic and no sidewalk.
122
But isn't it only "undue" when compared to the treatment non-UMC types get? If everyone got the same lenient treatment, it wouldn't be lenient, just standard.
I think a standard can be unduly lenient.
Further, I dont really care for MADD.
Yeah, MADD to me is the perfect example of an organization taht should have quit while it was ahead. They helped to accomplish an outstanding sea change in social behavior, and then they basically got taken over by extremists. Or at least that's my outsider perception.
My experience with DUI diversion programs in in supervising participants doing their community service. Suffice to say I was wildly unimpressed.
I think a standard can be unduly lenient.
A lot of people feel that criminal justice standards are too lenient. Until someone they love has to go through it. Then, it is unfair to their loved one.
I endorse 120, largely because social situations that aren't properly or easily resolved by law are a big part of what we're talking about. Where UMC people get undue leniency is on stuff like drunk driving, as Witt point out, and financial fraud. Law enforcement is a very blunt instrument and should be handled as such. And when it does need to be deployed, there should be a lot more are a big part of what we're talking about. Where UMC people get undue leniency is on stuff like drunk driving, as Witt points out, and financial fraud. Law enforcement is a very blunt instrument and should be handled as such. And when it does need to be deployed, there should be a lot more less than 30 day jail sentences, just enough to say "there, the system has followed through with consequences," and those need to be backstopped with rules and norms to ensure that a minor conviction and short jail sentence don't ruin someone's life. As it stands now, any criminal conviction is enough to sentence most people to a marginal life forever.
Also, this kind of thing really brings home the realization that most people don't buy this relativist nonsense about there being an acceptable range of judgment on which reasonable people can differ. It's Right or it's Wrong, and Wrong must be Punished.
Yikes, I thought I'd cleaned 128 up after the symbol that had originally been where that "less than" is proved problematic on preview. It was supposed to read like this:
I endorse 120, largely because social situations that aren't properly or easily resolved by law are a big part of what we're talking about. Where UMC people get undue leniency is on stuff like drunk driving, as Witt points out, and financial fraud. Law enforcement is a very blunt instrument and should be handled as such. And when it does need to be deployed, there should be a lot more less than 30 day jail sentences, just enough to say "there, the system has followed through with consequences," and those need to be backstopped with rules and norms to ensure that a minor conviction and short jail sentence don't ruin someone's life. As it stands now, any criminal conviction is enough to sentence most people to a marginal life forever.
As it stands now, any criminal conviction is enough to sentence most people to a marginal life forever.
This seems to be at the heart of the problem, and perhaps at the heart of why already-marginalized populations tend to garner less sympathy from the Law and Order crowd.
Having killed the blog, off to get some coffee and a light switch and help put my s-i-l's ashes in the columbarium niche.
130 was a desperate ploy to trick us into reading the same argument three times, since everyone knows that you have to believe any argument you read three times. Fortunately, I averted my eyes in time.
I suspect that the "elite" angle comes in because there's a perception on the part of Warner and the mom in the story that one advantage that "elite" women (i.e., upper-middle-class, highly-educated women) have is a sense of entitlement. Which means that, among other things, that the drop in status associated with being a mom *really* gets up our noses.
Most parents get their backs up about being second-guessed. But I do think that there's an attitude that women of my social class have about how we parent and our absolute entitlement to defy cultural norms about how women *should* parent that is coming into play here, and is part of why Warner and professor-mom are perceiving the prosecution as anti-elite.
IOW, they're not just being weird.
I spent tons of time alone in public areas startng, around eight - biking to nearby towns and hanging out. And that's not including home and the general neighbourhood, which I was allowed to wander unsupervised from around four. I started commuting through an urban downtown on public transport at eleven, and of course I wandered. I also used to routinely get left in mall bookstores as a little child. People have gotten way too uptight about this sort of stuff over the past two decades.
29 - FM, good luck! No advice to give (except to second LB's about Alameida's old threads) but I'll be rooting for you!
The 3 year-old is the problem, even though I agree that therenever shouldhave been a prosecution, When I was 8,I walked to school on my own and plenty of other kids did too. People also made plans to go over to friends' houses and just called home to let someone know.
126: I think MADD is a perfect example of the fact that after a while the point of an organization is to continue in existence, with the nominal objective taking second place. It's particularly clear in the case of MADD, which got pretty much everything they wanted in their initial goals, and now has to cast about for a new purpose, which inevitably means descending into ever more extreme demands.
As it stands now, any criminal conviction is enough to sentence most people to a marginal life forever.
As someone with a minor misdemeanor half-conviction (deferred adjudication), I worry about this a lot. Also a lot of sympathy for people with drug possession/selling of small amounts convictions.
Hasn't there just been an incredibly similar case this week in the UK? A woman who left her two kids in the park while she went shopping convicted of something absurd like 30 days in jail or something?
From the Times comments:
My daughter is 18 and I still worry about her going to the mall alone. Malls are not day-care centers. Have we forgotten of the young children abducted from malls and later found dead....to take the kids to the mall and drive away - if I was the judge this woman (or man if it was a man) would be doing some serious time.
The authoritarian personality in action!
The combination of a culturally authoritarian country (conservatism) and a big emphasis on formal legalistic solutions (liberalism) is a mess. Part of this issue is that cops are trained as authoritarian rule enforcers, not problem solvers.
Also, I think FM should maybe get an Ask the Mineshaft and his own thread. Assuming he wants it, of course.
FM, if you want a supportive or advisory post, say the word.
Also echoing 142, 144. FM's inquiry seemed to get lost during the weekend lull. There are so many smart people here with wisdom and insight who I don't think ever wandered into this thread.
Assuming the description of the incident is accurate, arrest seems like overkill. I go on this kind of stuff all the time. There's a huge difference between "kid wandered away from siblings while playing" and "kid wandered away after mom left him in the hotel pool area so she could go smoke meth in her room."
Best of luck, FM.
My Bozeman crime, mentioned above, was 'dog at large.' Soon after I moved to Bozeman, my dog had puppies, and a couple of them were playing in the front yard. One stepped onto the sidewalk, and that was enough.
The city judge was short on empathy.
Fifteen years later, long after he'd retired from the bench, we had a case together. I came to appreciate his dry humor in a way I didn't way back when.
"A professor in Montana was having a bad day..."
No, she's a fucking idiot to leave five kids, 12 year old or younger, in a public place, unattended. It's an open invitation to pedophiles and other weirdos. There may not be 'packs' of them (most being antisocial misfits) but they do exist and even the remotest possibility of delivering children into their hands is abhorrent.
I hope the judge whacked her upside the head with a skillet.
even the remotest possibility of delivering children into their hands is abhorrent.
This is why all children should be shackled to their beds and/or desks at all times.
What was that PGD was saying about the authoritarian personality?
148 is trolling of the poorest quality. Maybe ToS could give waldo a lesson.
148 is trolling of the poorest quality.
Seriously. Not one fucking baked good.