The kind of people who think it's reasonable to call the cops over a nothing-burger like this are simply a part the extremist long tail that is a product of middle/upper middle class culture that condones and encourages bucking everything to some external party whenever possible. When you exist in a bubble where everyone is patting each other on the back for calling the city over disputes that should at least be initially handled between neighbors, reporting petty business disputes to the state AG, calling a plumber to replace a toilet flapper, getting engineered drawings for a garden shed, etc, etc, it should come as no surprise that some people take this sort of responsibility to think for yourself outsourcing too far and call the cops on some kids walking down the street.
Of course dispatch and the police were behaving like idiots here too but they are clearly serving a community where responding to frivolous calls like this is the norm because if this one case was so outside of their normal purview it wouldn't have been handled the way it was.
And the DCF part, well that fact pattern just looks like a boring old case of bureaucratic incentives and ass covering. They were fishing for something to make the rest of the fact pattern look less unreasonable. And then when they found it they jumped right to some sort of remediable action so they could say "there, we did something, case closed".
The kind of people who think it's reasonable to call the cops over a nothing-burger like this are simply a part the extremist long tail that is a product of middle/upper middle class culture that condones and encourages bucking everything to some external party whenever possible. When you exist in a bubble where everyone is patting each other on the back for calling the city over disputes that should at least be initially handled between neighbors, reporting petty business disputes to the state AG, calling a plumber to replace a toilet flapper, getting engineered drawings for a garden shed, etc, etc, it should come as no surprise that some people take this sort of responsibility to think for yourself outsourcing too far and call the cops on some kids walking down the street.
Of course dispatch and the police were behaving like idiots here too but they are clearly serving a community where responding to frivolous calls like this is the norm because if this one case was so outside of their normal purview it wouldn't have been handled the way it was.
And the DCF part, well that fact pattern just looks like a boring old case of bureaucratic incentives and ass covering. They were fishing for something to make the rest of the fact pattern look less unreasonable. And then when they found it they jumped right to some sort of remediable action so they could say "there, we did something, case closed".