Mom Arrested For Letting Kids Play Outside

September 19, 2012 | Filed under Law,Parenting,Women | Posted by

By this standard our parents would have been felons… Anyone who grew up in the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, or 80′s probably remembers having free rein to go where ever they wanted and do whatever they wanted, the only rule being you had to be home by dinner time. Cut to this story from Houston where a busybody neighbor got a mom arrested for watching her kids play in the cul-de-sac outside their house.

LA PORTE, Texas – 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.

The charges weere eventually dropped, but Cooper had to spend the night in jail. Something tells me we’re not getting 100% of the story, but even if that’s the case this appears to be a monumental over reaction on the part of the La Porte police.

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Posted by on September 19, 2012.
Filed under Law, Parenting, Women.
Tagged with: • • .
Doug Johnson is a news junkie and long time blog reader, turned author.

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  • Digg34

    Bet they were doing doughnuts in the neighbors yard , smoking,drinking,and listening to loud music.

    • jim_m

      Yeah, my son was really into smoking and drinking when he was 9.

  • herddog505

    And here I thought that childhood obestity brought on (in part) by our kids being inactive couch potatoes was a national security crisis…

    • retired.military

      Nope. It was the carbon emissions that was the problem. Cant have kids enjoying themselves when it endangers the planet.

  • 914

    Gee? I was outside from sun up till sundown all the time. Don’t remember my parents ever being arrested.

    • retired.military

      I bet you ate JuJu toys that were shaped like guns and indians too. Now they are considered politically incorrect.
      Speedy Gonzales. – Politically incorrect.
      Frito bandito – politically incorrect
      Tarzan – politically incorrect
      Jack Benny
      - politically incorrect

      • herddog505

        The last is especially ridiculous. Quite aside from the fact that Benny’s show was good clean fun, Benny himself was pretty damned (dare I say it?) progressive for his day:

        According to Jack Benny’s posthumous autobiography, Sunday Nights at Seven, the tone of racial humor surrounding Rochester declined as a conscious decision between Benny and the writing staff during World War II, once the enormity of The Holocaust was revealed. In short, Benny did not find such humor funny anymore and he made an effort to erase it from the character of Rochester. During the immediate post-war period, The Jack Benny Program made numerous appeals to fraternity and peaceful relations between all races of the world.

        …

        Benny was often protective of [Eddie "Rochester"] Anderson, and this led to conflict. For instance, in World War II, Benny toured with his show, but Rochester did not, because discrimination in the armed forces would have required separate living quarters… Stateside, an incident was defused by Benny when, according to reporter Fredric W. Slater, Rochester was denied a room at the hotel where Benny and his staff were planning to stay in Saint Joseph, Missouri. When it was announced that Anderson could not stay there, Benny replied: “If he doesn’t stay here, neither do I.” The hotel eventually allowed Anderson to remain as a guest.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Anderson_(comedian)#Progression_of_race_relations

  • Carl

    I don’t think Mom would have one to jail unless she pissed off the officer some how.

  • Vagabond661

    According to recent reports, they were drinking 32 ounce drinks too.

  • Phil Snyder

    There is probably something going on between the neighbors before this event and now it is only going to get worse.

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