I almost put my eye out. It was the intersection of the three planes on the corner of the hearth - kind of like falling right on the point of a pyramid.
I didn’t just have a black eye - I had what would have been Oscar-winning makeup fx had it been fake.
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The car has a failure mode where it’s possible to accidentally lock the keys inside?
I think about the only way I could do that with my car would be to exit the car, lock the doors, unlock the hatchback, toss the key in, and slam the hatch closed to engage that lock.
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Here’s from the article (bad link on BoingBoing):
Tierney said the police department thinks the child was actually in the car longer than 15 minutes, partly based on the temperature inside the car.
Firefighters measured the temperature inside the vehicle at 97 degrees a few minutes after the window was broken and the child was removed. The outside temperature was 93 degrees, according to a reading from a police cruiser.
So, I dunno, maybe stop all this about a ticket (not the more justified felony charge for child endangerment) making parents afraid to call 9-11, and consider whether they were reluctant to break a car window.
This also throws me:
“When she exited from the car and opened the rear door, the wind pushed the doors closed and locked them,” an officer wrote of the account from the girl’s mother in the report.
SUV with an open rear door and they couldn’t get to the cabin? Or didn’t notice the other doors and closed and then closed the rear door?
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My Toyotas will automatically lock the doors after a period of time. Though that time is measured in minutes, and if the keys are still in the ignition it won’t do it. But I have locked a set in the car when I left them on the seat.
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This used to be true of practically all cars. I remember being delighted with my first foreign car (a Renault) around 1980 in part because it was impossible to lock the keys inside.
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Curious… how did that work on the Renault?
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[quote=“aacmckay, post:26, topic:103030, full:true”]
Curious… how did that work on the Renault?[/quote]
If you locked an open door then closed it, it would unlock. You could only lock the last open door from the outside with a key. (I still have an 80s car - an Alfa - that works the same way.)
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That’s cool, and so simple! Would have saved me the time I locked keys in a running car. Went to drop something in someone’s mail box when I was 17 or so. Muscle memory had me slam my hand on the lock as I shut the door, and I think it was still swinging shut when I thought… oh crap… Thank-goodness I had my parents cellphone on me. Called them to bring the spare keys…
Word. I’m a white upper middle class guy in a very white upper middle class suburb on Chicago’s North Shore.
The would never ticket me in the same situation. They’d give my son a lollipop and make sure I’m emotionally OK before we go on with our day.
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Read Free Range Kids for a million stories about how parenting culture has changed over the years—and how the law and general societal attitudes have changed along with it. (She talks about this wind-blowing-the-car-door-shut story, too.)
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Are these the same cops who speed, make questionable maneuvers, double-park, etc., but never ticket each other?
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[quote=“Carla_Sinclair, post:1, topic:103030”]
ticketed the mother for suspicion of child abuse
[/quote]Due process is dead.
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Fishing around with coat hangers seems a pretty clear instance of dicking around. Panic would include such actions as smashing a window with a rock or calling 911 and screaming at the dispatcher that your child was locked in a hot car.
I like some good outrage porn as much as the next guy but this article trumps up a routine misdemeanor citation as if a jack-booted SWAT team ripped the crying baby from its mother’s arms. Philando Castile deserves your outrage. This incident deserves a public service announcement.
That is still far more commonly the case than not. In most American communities - certainly in most of Nebraska - the median age of private vehicles is ~11 years. If these were fairly poor or “working class” women, the car was most likely at least 12-15 years old. I’ve locked my keys inside a 2007 RAV4 without recourse, but I still drive the old pig and I hope to keep it to 200K.
I have a strong sense that these women were not ‘decent enough’ in the eyes of the responding officer to get off without a ticket. The assumptions in a couple of the posts here about quality & capability of vehicles seem to come from the oblivion of an even higher class level within our society.
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Actually the original article only says that the police think that the kid was in there for over 15 minutes.
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They probably used a police tricorder for that. The function is right next to the drug bust value calculator.
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So what? The child was in no immediate danger of dying or injury, and there were responsible adults present, trying to do the right thing without jumping to the most drastic solution right out of the gate. As a parent myself, I would have done the same. To say that they were “too cheap to break a window” and “counts as child abuse” is nothing more than a hyped-up emotional reaction and is completely unfair and unwarranted. And “sweltering hot car” is a poor assumption on your part. For all you know, the car was a cool air conditioned 52 degrees inside and was parked in the shade when the door slammed shut.
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Never attribute only to a cop’s stupidity what can be explained by both a cop’s stupidity and malice.
Damn straight they do. I’d use the titanium emergency glass breaking point on my pocket knife’s handle to safely break the window furthest from the kid if I couldn’t find my spare key. Better that than the kid be left motherless and possibly shuffled off into slavery in the prison-industrial complex via it’s feeder trade the foster care system.
Choice quotes from the source article…
Lt. Darci Tierney, a police spokeswoman, said the ticket was not an overreaction by the officer who responded to the 911 call.
Moronic blue scum protect moronic blue scum.
The case will be referred to the Omaha City Prosecutor’s Office, which will review it and decide whether charges will be filed.
Unfortunately they’re not talking about charging the callous idiot cop.
Note, not opposed to law enforcement. It’s precisely because civilized society needs good law enforcement that I’ve lost patience with the bad law enforcement we’re routinely blighted with instead.
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I could see trying to open the door with as little damage to the car as possible if I had no idea where I was going to scrape together the money to replace the window. Was it 15 minutes before they called the police, or was it 15 minutes until the police arrived? Also, many times police have a slim jim or other tool that will let them pop a car lock easily. Did the police go directly to smashing a window before trying any alternatives?
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My guess would be that they smashed it straight away. And frankly, that’d be the one thing they did right. I agree with their reasoning that getting in the car was priority numero uno. Blaming the mother for the wind is absolute bullshit.
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