You don’t have to have probable cause to detain someone, only to arrest someone.
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Nuh-uh. If somebody’s creeped out, it means the dad was a creep, it’s solely his responsibility, and it’s on him to fix that.
Nevermind that it could just be that he “looks weird” to the person, and the child doesn’t look like him…
This is the same sort of thinking that leads people to call the police because Sikhs are in public. “Better safe than sorry” is one of the lamest excuses racists lean on.
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It could be that women just don’t do it in the kinds of numbers as men, or it could be that traditional gender roles have taught us that women are nurturing, motherly types by default and can therefore be trusted; from experience, I know that to not always be true.
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To be fair, a lot of that applies to much of the discrimination against women nowadays too, it’s just that the social pressures against men getting involved in child rearing often act to lessen their desire to, whereas there’s lots of outreach programs that encourage women to pursue careers in male dominated fields. And to further add to how complex the social issues are here, I think that these social attitudes are no small part of why women are discriminated against in the workforce and socially with respect to their expectations - people still assume that women are going to go home and raise their kids and/or perform the housekeeping role and so can’t dedicate as much of their lives to careers whereas men are expected to work full time with the only exceptions being paid leave and severe illness. And it’s not because women are seen as incapable of careers, it seems to be a mix including the attitude that men are unfit in a primary parenting role (in addition to the assumption that all women want children and men don’t care as much).
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No, but when I had to call the police about a potentially serious crime I had to identify myself - and I had to give my phone number and be rung back. That’s because it is an offence to make a false or malicious call to the police in England. In this case the police didn’t do that, so they have no chance of establishing whether it was a malicious call.
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His civil rights were not trampled upon. If he had been arrested and held without due process…then his rights would be effected.
There is no where within any civil rights code that you cannot be questioned by law enforcement or even detained for a short time for questioning. The officer on the scene clearly wanted to descalate the situation by removing the father and son off the bus and speak to them privately. He also as stated by the father was apologetic and comforting throughout the ordeal and also ensured he did his civic duty to the father and son and escorted them to where they were going.
I find it amazing that people on this forum after reading this are jumping to the “OMG RACISM” flag pole. If this had been you and you said or did nothing and found out later that “a very pale man had abducted and murdered a dark skin child”…wouldn’t you be horrified that you may have ben able to prevent it?
The issue here is all we know of the “woman who called the police” is that she saw a man and a child on the bus that didn’t match and it was suspicious to her. Sure…its racism. Its ableism. Its stupidity. It’s nosiness. It’s she hates the song row row row your boat. We don’t really know her motivations, and while we can guess and surmise; it doesn’t change a damn thing.
In the end, father and son went merry along. In the end the police officer did his job: He de-escalated a situation and made it manageable. He used very simple reasoning and questioning to surmise the truth. AND…he was respectful and contrite to the accused and clearly INNOCENT party.
Let’s focus on the positive ending, and the excellent behavior of the many involved. Let’s focus on the fact that the one paranoid fool was wrong, and no harm came of their foolishness.
[edit for typos]
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Thanks! And interesting. The only bar that really surprised me were the alcohol and substance abuse ones. I figured men and women would be equally susceptible to addictive behavior, but those look closer to a 3/4 split.
If that FBI data is nationally representative, then instructing your child to seek out a mommy if lost should statistically improve his or her odds of not meeting a predator. Specifically, while it is probably low in either case, the danger of seeking out a woman should be about 75% to 80% lower than the also small danger of seeking out a man. A non-trivial difference. I guess the question one would have to ask is whether the small but significant safety gain outweighs the risk of teaching your child sexist biases. I’m really not sure what the answer is, and as someone with a child on the way, the question isn’t academic to me, as I’m sure it isn’t to any parent with young children.
Of course there’s always the possibility that more men are arrested for certain crimes not due or not only due to being more likely to commit them but because of law enforcement investigating them more due to the expectation existing arrest trends create. Granted that seems unlikely, but not impossible.
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Yeah, you originally said [quote=“quorihunter, post:86, topic:75248”]
this dude and his son were inconvenienced.
[/quote], (emphasis mine) and that’s what I was responding to. Then you say, [quote=“quorihunter, post:86, topic:75248”]
His civil rights were not trampled upon.
[/quote] (emphasis mine)
So, that’s a little straw-pokemon you managed to evolve all by yourself.
As far as Civil Rights, the man and his family have a right to assembly and to movement, and those rights were inconvenienced, clearly. Sometimes this happens in order to weigh out the greater good, but here it appears to have happened because someone was an uninformed, nosy busybody.
No crime had been committed, no child “had been abducted and murdered”, so you (again) escalating the rhetoric does not apply here.
You focus on the positive ending all you want, but don’t pretend others’ concerns are aren’t valid.
Also, “affected”, not “effected”.
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I’m white, and my wife is of Japanese descent, so naturally enough my children look Asian which occasionally caused confusion among the other children at elementary school. “Are you sure you’re his Dad?” was an occasional question from 7 year olds.
However, to add to the confusion, my son’s Godfather is half-Japanese would also occasionally pick up my son, so obviously he had to be the father (not helped my my son’s occasional mix-up and calling him ‘Dad’).
And lastly of all, my son’s Godfather married a white woman, and his son was blond. You can guess the rest.
There were one or two occasions when all four of us went to the park and you could a parent trying to figure out if were playing “exchange a son” day.
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I agree with everything you said except this. Just thought I should mention it since I liked your comment. That’s one of my issues with likes, often I want to like part of a comment.
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its not a straw man argument at all. there’s a crying foul of this man and his son’s liberty and freedom being taken away. It wasn’t. Does he have the right to movement, yes. But in a democratic society we also can be detained for questioning by the law under reasonable cause. He was detained. The cop sussed out the issue was in fact a bothersome and nosy person. He got the man and his son moving along.
As a father to 3 multi-racial children. This could have ben me. And while I would have been justifibaly annoyed…I would have appreciated the officer doing his due diligence and duty and also respecting me and my child and treating us with compassion and respect.
Also…pointing out the affect vs effect is just dickish grammar correction. I ever so apologize for my quick typing and autocorrecting to the wrong adverb.
YOU said “inconvenienced”. I responded to that, and used that term.
You then tried to characterize my position as “trampled on”, and attacked that, when that was never my position.
Classic strawman.
You may be right about the grammar dickery.
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It’s like spam. One person doing it to one other person isn’t a problem. The problem is when you are hassled regularly, and it becomes a tax on your existence.
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I don’t think his civil rights were infringed, or if they were it was to a very slight degree. But I do think the person who called the police was being a racist. That’s not reasonable suspicion, that’s prejudice. They had no reason to suspect this man (or you or I) over any other man traveling with a child. The only difference is that they couldn’t imagine miscegenation, which is pretty much the definition of racial bias.
I agree everyone else, police included, acted correctly. The caller did not. IMO, we should not be encouraging people to profile others based on skin color by saying this sort of behavior is acceptable. Not only does it target mixed-race children and their parents, it provides a shield to same-race kidnappers by teaching people to look for irrelevant criteria when being on the lookout for possible abductions.
I agree, BTW, no one likes a grammar Nazi. It’s petty and it distracts from the point. The only person I ever grammar Nazi is myself 
@thekaz was making a joking hip-hop reference…
Trust me, even in the 21st century, a lot of people cannot imagine or sometimes even tolerate mixed-marriages…and not just old people, racism is sadly still very much rooted into our culture at all age demographics.
And is it any wonder why? Just look at the dearth of portrayals of mixed-race couples in popular culture. We may actually have more LGTB couples portrayed than mixed-race couples, though it’s definitely progress to increase positive LGTB portrayals. Even there, though, most such couples portrayed are gay, rarely lesbian and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a transgender couple in pop culture (though my knowledge is hardly exhaustive). I think if I saw a mixed-race transgender couple on prime-time TV, I would wonder when I fell through a wormhole to a better world. For all the wonders of the world we live in, the 21st century is still racist and homophobic/transphobic as fuck. Hell, even transphobic shows up with a little red spelling error line underneath it. Thanks for literally underlining my point, spell-checker!
My wife is a mix of Hispanic on her dad’s side and Greek-Japanese immigrants on her mom’s side. I’m descended from Prussian-American and English-American immigrants, so pasty pink. My wife jokes that in her dad’s home country of Mexico, she’s white, in Texas she’s Hispanic and in Japan she’s gaijin. I’m glad she’s had experience dealing with racism toward miscegenation because she can provide guidance to our children who are bound to deal with the same prejudice, especially in Texas.
It will be a cold day in hell before I allow the racists of the world to teach our children that skin tone is a reasonable cause for suspicion of anything.
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Questionable Content has a very well-done trans character, BTW. Trans issues explored when relevant, but not focussed on when not.
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At first I thought “America, again”. But nobody got shot by a cop, so…
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I’m slightly more likely to be injured while biking than walking, but it doesn’t mean I completely avoid one mode of transport over the other.
“Stranger Danger” is a myth propped up by a paranoid and sensationalist media that preys on people’s inability to distinguish tragedies that befall people they don’t know from those that happen to people they do.
Worse yet, stats like relative risk often don’t mean anything at all. For example:
Given the tiny sample size of actual kidnappings, the difference between asking for help from a man or a woman makes no difference. Hell, men could literally be doing all the kidnapping, and it still wouldn’t change my opinion that it’s okay to talk to strangers.
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I don’t actually disagree that stranger danger is blown out of all proportion. But (and to some extent I’m playing devil’s advocate here to test the question) at first you seem to be saying it’s a minuscule difference and then to be saying it’s no difference at all. Drawing from your analogy, you’re slightly more likely to be injured while cycling than walking, but there isn’t zero difference between the two risk factors. Now obviously there are compelling reasons to ignore that tiny difference and ride a bike because of the gains in exercise, speed, convenience, ect. But what are the gains in telling a child to, if lost, seek out any adult and ask for help over telling them to seek out a woman if possible or a man if no woman is around? Should not a reduction in risk that costs nothing be preferred anyway?
Mind you I can think of a cost and that is teaching sexism to children, but as I said, I’m playing Devli’s advocate and would like to know why you went from tiny risk to no risk.
Ah. OK. It travels maybe a bit less well than one would think - more a generational thing, probably, as my tastes were formed in the '60s and '70s. I avoid making zeuhl references (except when teasing @japhroaig) for similar reasons. 
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It would have been a Toronto Police Service officer.
