See, the USA has 350 million people, and fifty states with materially different local norms. With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time. But, being freak incidents, they get amplified and thus seem to represent the entire country in the eyes of distant observers, foreigners, or just people from far enough away within the US.
Ironically, this is the same mechanism that magnifies every freak incident in daily life and gives it disproportionate news coverage. It's sometimes useful to draw attention to a rare problem, but more often it's just to pump up the audience's emotions and thus drive up "engagement" (views, coincident ad impressions, contextual ad clicks). This magnification, if not dampened by some rational thought, leads to people, including officials, mortally afraid that "anything could happen" with an unattended child on the street, and over-reacting; jail time for a parent is definitely worse for a kid that walking alone on the streets for some time.
But again, talking about "the USA lifestyle" is about as productive as speaking about "the European cuisine". The lifestyle is highly varied; I myself is not a fan of transactional suburban SUV lifestyle, hence mine, and that of my neighbors, is vastly different.
> With this scale and amount of variety, "one in a million" freak incidents ought to be registered all the time.
I’m not sure “one in a million” and “freak incident” is the right mental model with this case.
What is noteworthy that a whole series of people, most of them professionals, thought an unatended child walking is noteworthy and they should do something about it. The busybody who thought they should report it, then the sherif who thought they should respond to that report then further thought they should do something about it and then further thought to go back and arrest the parrent, then the other officer who didn’t say “hey what are you doing, are you ok?”, then the child protection services who recommended the tracking app, and then the prosecutor who provides the legal muscle to back this insanity.
Yes it might be a one in a million freak event that all these people assembled themselves into a conga line of crazyness. But they had these beliefs even before the boy started walking. How many others have similar ideas to them? You think these 5 are the only ones?
I agree that the idea that streets are dangerous for kids before 12 is not very sane, and much more widespread than I would like it to be. It depends though; now the police in NYC is efficient, and the crime level reasonably low, but 20 years ago the situation was different. IDK how things are in Georgia.
What I refer to as a "freak accident" is the jail time. I would expect issuing an official warning at most.
The problem is that this state of mind is that of the voters. It's not imposed by some oppressive authoritarian ruler, it's self-inflicted. Democracy, sadly, makes the unwholesome traits in people as visible as the most virtuous traits. E.g. Switzerland, the poster child of the most real democracy on this planet, only gave women voting rights in 1950s-70s, completely democratically.
Ironically, this is the same mechanism that magnifies every freak incident in daily life and gives it disproportionate news coverage. It's sometimes useful to draw attention to a rare problem, but more often it's just to pump up the audience's emotions and thus drive up "engagement" (views, coincident ad impressions, contextual ad clicks). This magnification, if not dampened by some rational thought, leads to people, including officials, mortally afraid that "anything could happen" with an unattended child on the street, and over-reacting; jail time for a parent is definitely worse for a kid that walking alone on the streets for some time.
But again, talking about "the USA lifestyle" is about as productive as speaking about "the European cuisine". The lifestyle is highly varied; I myself is not a fan of transactional suburban SUV lifestyle, hence mine, and that of my neighbors, is vastly different.