Posted on 09/17/2012 9:51:58 AM PDT by lowbridge
A stay-at-home mom from La Porte has filed a lawsuit against the city’s police department, an unknown officer and one of her neighbors.
Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside.
She said her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away.
“I was out there the entire time,” Cooper said. “I never left that lawn chair the entire time.”
Cooper said a little while later, a La Porte police car pulled up in front of her home.
“I went out there to see what he was here for and he said, ‘Ma’am, we’re here for you.’ I said, ‘Oh really? Why?’ He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbors that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised.
(Excerpt) Read more at libertynews.com ...
from other articles I have read “Cooper told the officer that she’d been watching her children from inside her house”..
so maybe that was the opportunity the neighbor had to call police?
I ran afoul of this when I lived in Virginia and commuted to work on a 49cc scooter, AKA in VA law as a moped. One day I was pulled over by a Barney and he began to arrest me for driving a "motorized cycle" on a public street. I was aware of Virginia law pertaining to mopeds and was utterly perplexed until I realized he thought that my bike was a child's toy. Trying to explain the situation to the Barney was a non-starter. ("It don't got no pedals it ain't a moped" saith the ignorant Barney.) Very fortunately for me another officer pulled up who was more knowledgeable. After a brief pow-wow between the officers (which involved printouts of a PowerPoint slide deck about the difference between toy cycles and mopeds) I was allowed to leave.
Why the law is concerned with motorized toy scooters and yet permits toy bikes and toy skateboards is opaque to me.
Apparently some here are envisioning Motocross bikes. Or something.
One neighbor fires off a Thompson submachine gun every 4th, people kill Bambi every fall, people target practice in the woods across from my house and kill animals in season, birds and other tasty creatures and no one cares.
Sounds like a little patch of heaven...
8^)
It sounds an awfult lot as if the kids were playing in the street while momma was inside watching the soaps
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depends on the interpretation ... she could have meant “gone out to the street where the police car was”
We used to leave the house in the morning, eat lunch at whomever’s house we were playing at when lunch time occurred (as long as our mothers phoned each other), and show up (grimy) for dinner. Ah, the 50s. We didn’t know it was a cultural high point.
If this is accurate, The cops are gonna pay.....and pay....and pay
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IF ONLY THAT WERE TRUE... Cops should pay but in the end it’s just a paid vacation and the taxpayer pays.. nowhere in the article does it note that the cops actually observed anything or verified anything.. OUTRAGEOUS.
This was on a Cul-de-Sac so any traffic entering it is approaching a house/driveway and going slowly and there is by definition no “through traffic” ,, just about the safest place to ride those scooters...
Either way, who gives a crap! I spent my entire playing childhood withouth the supervision of adults! Ok there were times the folks were there, but come on!
” I hope the lady breaks their bank and then some...”
So do I.
” You’re an utter moron if you think this is true. The police won’t pay a dime. Any award she may be given will be taken from the taxpayers, not the police.”
That all depends on how a suit is structured. If the woman sues the city(police), AND the officers are named individually in the suit, it can at least force the cops to file bankruptcy. By the way, municipalities have liability insurance too.
” Not only going after the administration that hired this bozo, but she should go after the arresting officer personally. Sue him over his insurance policy limit. Then find the neighbor and end up with their house for being a lying busybody.”
Correct.
” See, that’s the problem... these enforcers never experience any individual personal consequences.
Any lawsuit comes out of the city’s coffers, not their own.”
A good suit would name the police officer as well as the city. Cities have errors and omissions insurance, as well as standard liability insurance.
Back in the ‘70’s, we had a next-door neighbor who liked calling the cops whenever my brother or I would ride our minibikes on the street (we were a rural community). My brother and I started calling the Sheriff on ourselves, claiming to be the neighbor (no caller ID back then, easy voice to imitate), and they would come over to find our bikes as cold as stone. My brother called them once when I was on a band trip.
Eventually the Sheriff Deputies stopped coming because they chalked him us as an A-hole causing trouble, using them. That’s when we went back to riding when we wanted. Drove that clown nutz. He didn’t much like our firecrackers, either. He couldn’t do a thing when we graduated to large-caliber rifles because it was legal for us to shoot them. :^)
We have a wacko nut job in our neighborhood who calls the cops on moms watching their children ride around their cul-de-sac. The dads on the street took her to court — not sure what happened with that.
I guess every neighborhood has their whack job!
Different way of speaking here in TX. She could have been out there the entire time; however, I do think there is more to the story. It’s not uncommon for a neighborhood with kids to play supervised in the street with each other riding bikes or whatever. Wonder what the motivation of the neighbor good or bad was to call the police rather than talk directly to her.
I remember those days. And the only days we weren’t out was due to illness than our Mom let us watch everyone play through the window. If it snowed here, ice in TX; we slid our ways to everyones houses.
My parents would have been behind bars several times!
I said that there was no indication that the neighbor had a reason to lie. I also said I was speaking about the perception of a police officer doing interviews. I also said that we don’t have any idea what the actual facts are, because we didn’t do the interviews.
It is funny that my entire post was based on the premise that we didn’t have enough information to know anything, and your response was that my post was invalid because we didn’t know something.
But at least you agreed with me, even though you didn’t apparently understand what my post was saying. SO communication happened.
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