Sorry, but no. Common sense is enough to realize that this is a ridiculous situation, no matter what the law says. You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the door of legislators and voters. And if their concerns were real rather than just a pretext for a powertrip they'd keep an eye out instead of making it impossible for children to lead a normal life.
> You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the door of legislators and voters.
I'm not. In this situation, there were (at least) two necessary conditions for the arrest to happen:
(1) The law was written in a way that led the police to believe a crime had occurred.
(2) The police chose to perform the arrest.
If either of those conditions weren't true, then I don't think this incident would have happened.
It's entirely possible that the police exercised lousy judgment in this case. I'm simply reserving judgment until I hear their side of the story.
I brought up (2) for several reasons. First, I think it's BS to create politically sticky situations for police, and then skapegoat them things turn out badly. (Imagine the news coverage if they didn't arrest the parents in a situation like this, and then the kids were abducted.)
Second, I don't see how, in a democratic form of government, citizens can avoid responsibility for the state of their laws. If the laws are outside their control, it's not a democracy.
Again. No. Police officers have their own brains and make their own decisions on a case-by-case basis, not every weird interpretation of a law needs to lead to an arrest.
'Imagine' is a nice pre-amble to a strawman: that didn't happen.
What did happen is ridiculous, and regardless of the citizens having a very indirect say in the laws that get made to make them first cause rather than the police officers (and their immediate superiors) is - frankly - ridiculous.
I really wonder why you would bend over backwards to find excuses for something like this, it doesn't pass the beginnings of a common sense test. Having your parents arrested because you're walking on the streets as a child makes zero sense, no matter what the law says and no police officer with half a brain should make that arrest. Arrests are for criminals, worst case if they really wanted to test the law they could have simply cited the parents and then they'd have their day in court, this is simply a power play of the very worst kind.
> (1) The law was written in a way that led the police to believe a crime had occurred.
The fact that charges were never brought means that the law very likely wasn't written in a way that a reasonable person would believe a crime had occurred. Certainly the DA's office did not believe a crime worth indicting had occurred.
