Stop. This is the exact argument the police used at a city board meeting I went to to protest FLOCK. This is basically saying "Flock is ok as long as used responsibly". It has not and cannot be used responsibly.
So give me absolute power, I promise to use it responsibility so there shouldn't be any worries, right? One of our biggest strategic errors is constantly acting like we need them to agree with us before we act like we're right.
The trump-epstein child sex trafficking ring is still running to this day as we speak and nobody gives a shit. Everyone wants to release the files but everyone is assuming it all stopped when only epstein and maxwell were arrested. There are thousands of johns and victims, it isn't going to stop because two people arrested.
It counts one parent taking a child without the permission of the other, usually during nasty divorces and custody battles. Those get resolved easily but the kid is still counted as missing.
If they went to their friend's house and didn't tell their mom, they're counted as missing.
If they went into the woods to get high, they're counted as missing.
All that needs to happen is a parent freaks out and reports them as missing, and that happens really often because kids want their freedom. Or they just plain forgot to tell you, because forgetting stuff is something that kids do a lot, too.
Yeah, this is actually an argument that QAnon uses. All of those missing children must have been kidnapped by Satanists trying to get their adrenochrome or something.
What actually happens is the kid goes missing, the parent panics and calls the police...and then the kid shows up later, because they were off doing something that they forgot to tell their parents about (or didn't want to tell their parents about).
And the ones who stay missing are often ones who were being abused by the parent and/or had a LGBT identity their parent refused to accept. They weren't kidnapped. They fled.
It's because a missing child is not the same as an abducted child.
If you don't know where your child is, you tell the police. They radio the miscellaneous patrol cars and they inevitably find the six year old trying to walk somewhere silly within a few hours.
That's a missing person report.
Divorce going poorly. One parent thinks the other shouldn't get any custody. So they pick the kid up from school when it's not their turn and go to their parents house. That's a missing person and child abduction.
Basically, it's a category error. We're All tracking the same things, but our huge category has the same name as their narrow one.
Apparently 90% of missing children are runaways. Maybe that is more common in the US or maybe it's just differences in counting (for example some countries might count 16 or 17 year olds as adults for these purposes).
It's cataloging differences. The EU number is by outcome, and the US is by how the report started.
The US is saying there were 400k times someone was concerned about not knowing where a kid was for any reason. For the same "stereotyped kidnapping" category the US is roughly the same, with 50-400 per year depending on how you count them.
Presumably, a lot of the 0.2% are with a parent or family member who isn't supposed to have custody. I would imagine that in many cases the kids are being treated well. Just because a parent didn't get full custody in a divorce doesn't mean they're a bad parent, just that in court they couldn't prove that they deserved 100% custody. Kidnapping a kid is a radical step, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid is worse off than if they'd remained with the parent who was supposed to have custody at that time.
Others are probably running away from a bad situation at home. It would be good to get them the help they need. But, it's likely that if you just spent more on looking for missing children, they'd simply be brought back home and have to live through whatever made them run away. Sometimes I'm sure the kids are better off at home, but other times they're running away from severe abuse.
There's probably a tiny fraction that are kidnapped by strangers. Say it's only 1% of those that go missing and aren't returned. That's about 12 per year in a country of 350 million. How much extra tax would you be willing to pay (and force everyone else to pay) to reduce that by 1?
Your math is off. You're starting with the number that already excludes things like non-custodial parents and runaways, wandered from care and so on.
The 200-400 number represents the final total of lost or stranger abducted children children, not young adults.
And that number is pretty good for a population of 350 million! It's also 300 children who have been kidnapped and likely face an unpleasant and grim fate.
I would happily charge everyone in the country $0.05/child a year in additional funding to lower that number.
We can keep it budget neutral by canceling a few fighter jets.
Keeping people alive is an easy sell for tax dollars for me, particularly when it's an issue that would actually benefit from coordinated research and expertise. It being children speaks more to the priorities of humans than strict economic accounting, which is why I padded my figure by 80%.
And that's before we even get to a progressive tax system shifting most of the cost towards people who can afford $30-$250 a year in additional taxes.
If they aren't recovered how do you know it was a non-custodial parent?
I'm simply going by the statistics from the people who track those things and using their classification which says 200-400.
I don't know that the specific categorical breakdown really changes my assessment of what I'd be trivially comfortable with paying and charging everyone.
So I did a quick search because that number seemed absurd, even for a developing country like the US, and it's in the right ballpark, but according to the sources "most are found and returned to safety". Most are runaways (92%), and about a third of the remaining 8% are abductions by strangers (would work out to about 13000), and that is disturbing, if true.
That point does make the figure a bit more plausible and logical in a sense. The problem is interpretation since majority of cases are fortunately short-time and quickly resolved.
So not only does 1/1000 of every Americans go missing every single year (that would be wild), and you're telling me it's all children? 600000 every single year?
That’s just the number of missing child reports. The vast majority are teens who are gone for a couple of days without telling their parents where they’re at and are found and returned quickly (92-93%).
A good portion of those reports are multiple reports for the same teenagers that repeatedly run off from home. Frequent runaway teens with 10 or more missing child reports make up 30% of all missing child reports each year. https://popcenter.asu.edu/node/37501
It's extremely misleading. It's every time parents call the cops because they can't find their kid. Many are resolved within hours. Almost all are resolved peacefully. If your kid is a habitual runaway each time you report they didn't go to school or come home counts as one. After kids being assholes the number 2 cause is non-custodial parents.
About 1 in 10,000 aren't found or found alive. So 50 or 60 kids out of 84M that are under 18 at any given time are grabbed by predators or die whilst running away (hint OD)
It's not though. These are based on missing person reports. Just because they are found doesn't mean they aren't missing. If a child is missing for two weeks, and is found safe, does that mean they weren't missing? What's the difference between two weeks and two hours is a parent is missing their child? Just because you're a remarkably apathetic individual who doesn'tcare enough to how statistics of missing children works doesn't change how the statistics of missing children work.
It is misleading. Literally every single person who shares the stat universally claims and believes that these kids are in the wind usually taken by pedos and child traffickers. I have never met a person who shared this stat who didn't believe this.
If a child is reported missing, an official alert goes out for a missing child, and police are dispatched to keep a look out, it shouldn't matter if it takes 10 minutes, or 10 days.
That's why most of the time there needs to be a deliberate amount of time between last seen and the report for a missing child goes out. More times than not when those missing kids are found quickly, it's because the alert went out and people and police were informed and were able to quickly locate them at a park or something.
So what if most missing kids are resolved within hours?
It does not negate the fact that cops are abusing flock. Also, okay 50 - 60 kids out of 84 million are grabbed by predators or die whilst running away, like you said, this abused technology should be used to help find them, all 460K of them reported missing every year in the US, including those that are resolved in hours instead of this type of authoritarian misuse.
A overprotective mother calls in about a missing kid, cop does their damn job, doesn't abuse AI-assisted, authoritarian-enabling cameras to tell the mother within minutes to call their damn neighbor. Imagine that happening instead of this type of bullshit.
No, I get it, I'm just being an ethical poindexter: technically, you are sending them to a different link than the one they think they are being sent to, but, obviously, not a moral issue in this case.
What is the difference between ethics and morals, anyways? Anybody?
That missing kid statistic seems weird to me. Like… what happens to these kids? Are they returned a few days later and then reported missing again? How can this number be so high?
Non-runaway, non-familial custodial disputes leave about 20k very ugly children disappearances each year… I looked it up. Of course even 20k is revolting.
It's extremely misleading. It's every time parents call the cops because they can't find their kid. Many are resolved within hours. Almost all are resolved peacefully. If your kid is a habitual runaway each time you report they didn't go to school or come home counts as one. After kids being assholes the number 2 cause is non-custodial parents.
About 1 in 10,000 aren't found or found alive. So 50 or 60 kids out of 84M that are under 18 at any given time are grabbed by predators or die whilst running away (hint OD)
If I remember correctly it’s mostly kids that runaway get reported as missing and then are found within a day. Or it’s when one parent kidnaps the child. Basically custody battle stuff.
A small number is actual kidnapping by strangers or trafficking.
1 in 10,000 aren't found or found alive. The big number makes it sound like child sex traffickers are everywhere taking children to be sex slaves in places with lots of brown people
I never thought about this, but yes, this is an entirely new way of violating our rights, but good luck avoiding the ride to jail or possible death when they shoot you if you happen to do one small thing wrong, or are the wrong skin color.
Always remember that Warren v. District of Columbia and Castle Rock v. Gonzales that in the US the cops aren't there to serve and protect and always assume ACAB.
America only cares about children when it’s sexually abusing them. Food for kids. Nope. Housing for kids. Nope. Caring for babies. Nope. But presidents and people raping children is just the American way. This country is so fucked. It deserves all the bad things.
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Stop. This is the exact argument the police used at a city board meeting I went to to protest FLOCK. This is basically saying "Flock is ok as long as used responsibly". It has not and cannot be used responsibly.
So give me absolute power, I promise to use it responsibility so there shouldn't be any worries, right? One of our biggest strategic errors is constantly acting like we need them to agree with us before we act like we're right.
The trump-epstein child sex trafficking ring is still running to this day as we speak and nobody gives a shit. Everyone wants to release the files but everyone is assuming it all stopped when only epstein and maxwell were arrested. There are thousands of johns and victims, it isn't going to stop because two people arrested.
*No one we allow to rule over us gives a fuck.
FTFY
You can't arrest "missing children", lady.
You can't arrest children simply because they are missing, you just have to conjure up pesky things like evidence of a crime and then you're golden.
Not with that attitude.
ICE says "Yes, we can!"
It's a fair point, but not really the example they want to make. 99.8% of missing children are safely recovered per the FBI.
Yeah, there's no way that many children are actually disappearing permanently per year - unless you include ICE abductions.
It counts one parent taking a child without the permission of the other, usually during nasty divorces and custody battles. Those get resolved easily but the kid is still counted as missing.
If they went to their friend's house and didn't tell their mom, they're counted as missing.
If they went into the woods to get high, they're counted as missing.
All that needs to happen is a parent freaks out and reports them as missing, and that happens really often because kids want their freedom. Or they just plain forgot to tell you, because forgetting stuff is something that kids do a lot, too.
Yeah, this is actually an argument that QAnon uses. All of those missing children must have been kidnapped by Satanists trying to get their adrenochrome or something.
What actually happens is the kid goes missing, the parent panics and calls the police...and then the kid shows up later, because they were off doing something that they forgot to tell their parents about (or didn't want to tell their parents about).
And the ones who stay missing are often ones who were being abused by the parent and/or had a LGBT identity their parent refused to accept. They weren't kidnapped. They fled.
This is good they are found. What is concerning is why number is so high in the first place. Europe estimates are between 170 to 300 thousands
It's because a missing child is not the same as an abducted child.
If you don't know where your child is, you tell the police. They radio the miscellaneous patrol cars and they inevitably find the six year old trying to walk somewhere silly within a few hours.
That's a missing person report.
Divorce going poorly. One parent thinks the other shouldn't get any custody. So they pick the kid up from school when it's not their turn and go to their parents house. That's a missing person and child abduction.
Basically, it's a category error. We're All tracking the same things, but our huge category has the same name as their narrow one.
Apparently 90% of missing children are runaways. Maybe that is more common in the US or maybe it's just differences in counting (for example some countries might count 16 or 17 year olds as adults for these purposes).
It's cataloging differences. The EU number is by outcome, and the US is by how the report started.
The US is saying there were 400k times someone was concerned about not knowing where a kid was for any reason. For the same "stereotyped kidnapping" category the US is roughly the same, with 50-400 per year depending on how you count them.
More than ideal but not a public policy crisis.
I think that’s because Americans are more likely to call the cops in this situation
So that's still a couple of hundred missing a year?
50-60 not found alive or not found about 1 in 10,000. Vastly less than the number who commit suicide OD or die by guns
Yeah. You guys should get rid of flock cameras AND guns.
and that's an acceptable number
No, it's not acceptable, it's just entirely fails to justify building a panopticon.
Acceptable implies we don't need to do anything. I'd happily spend some tax dollars to try to bring it down.
Presumably, a lot of the 0.2% are with a parent or family member who isn't supposed to have custody. I would imagine that in many cases the kids are being treated well. Just because a parent didn't get full custody in a divorce doesn't mean they're a bad parent, just that in court they couldn't prove that they deserved 100% custody. Kidnapping a kid is a radical step, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid is worse off than if they'd remained with the parent who was supposed to have custody at that time.
Others are probably running away from a bad situation at home. It would be good to get them the help they need. But, it's likely that if you just spent more on looking for missing children, they'd simply be brought back home and have to live through whatever made them run away. Sometimes I'm sure the kids are better off at home, but other times they're running away from severe abuse.
There's probably a tiny fraction that are kidnapped by strangers. Say it's only 1% of those that go missing and aren't returned. That's about 12 per year in a country of 350 million. How much extra tax would you be willing to pay (and force everyone else to pay) to reduce that by 1?
Your math is off. You're starting with the number that already excludes things like non-custodial parents and runaways, wandered from care and so on.
The 200-400 number represents the final total of lost or stranger abducted children children, not young adults.
And that number is pretty good for a population of 350 million! It's also 300 children who have been kidnapped and likely face an unpleasant and grim fate.
I would happily charge everyone in the country $0.05/child a year in additional funding to lower that number.
We can keep it budget neutral by canceling a few fighter jets.
Keeping people alive is an easy sell for tax dollars for me, particularly when it's an issue that would actually benefit from coordinated research and expertise. It being children speaks more to the priorities of humans than strict economic accounting, which is why I padded my figure by 80%.
And that's before we even get to a progressive tax system shifting most of the cost towards people who can afford $30-$250 a year in additional taxes.
No, that number includes non-custodial parents and runaways that are returned or come back. The ones who don't are part of the 0.2%.
If they aren't recovered how do you know it was a non-custodial parent?
I'm simply going by the statistics from the people who track those things and using their classification which says 200-400.
I don't know that the specific categorical breakdown really changes my assessment of what I'd be trivially comfortable with paying and charging everyone.
you might be willing to part with that nickel but I'm not.
I find that statistic concerning.. Mainly because its made-up, and its attempted exaggeration unnecessarily adds to the social panic.
So I did a quick search because that number seemed absurd, even for a developing country like the US, and it's in the right ballpark, but according to the sources "most are found and returned to safety". Most are runaways (92%), and about a third of the remaining 8% are abductions by strangers (would work out to about 13000), and that is disturbing, if true.
What about abductions by their parents? It's the one I was warned the most about in my 15 years of working with children
Of the 8% that aren’t runaways, it’s about 2/3 of that. Or 6% of missing kids are abducted by a non-custodial parent.
That point does make the figure a bit more plausible and logical in a sense. The problem is interpretation since majority of cases are fortunately short-time and quickly resolved.
Could have gone with "13,000 unsolved missing child reports" and been more effective, because the number would have been credible
If you read the Epstein files, most of those children were never categorized as missing, runaway or anything similar.
The missing children? That's not a made-up number...
So not only does 1/1000 of every Americans go missing every single year (that would be wild), and you're telling me it's all children? 600000 every single year?
From a few comment below: https://globalmissingkids.org/awareness/missing-children-statistics/
And yeah, children go missing very easily. These are the number of reports. Most children are found very quickly after reporting.
That’s just the number of missing child reports. The vast majority are teens who are gone for a couple of days without telling their parents where they’re at and are found and returned quickly (92-93%).
A good portion of those reports are multiple reports for the same teenagers that repeatedly run off from home. Frequent runaway teens with 10 or more missing child reports make up 30% of all missing child reports each year. https://popcenter.asu.edu/node/37501
It's technically not. Someone else said 92% are found quickly. Runaways, parents don't know where their kid is, etc, its the number of "reports".
But the other 8% are about 13k kids. Even that amount is kinda crazy tbh.
But they don't believe it's real, and their own perceptions of reality are clearly more important than actual reality!
It's extremely misleading. It's every time parents call the cops because they can't find their kid. Many are resolved within hours. Almost all are resolved peacefully. If your kid is a habitual runaway each time you report they didn't go to school or come home counts as one. After kids being assholes the number 2 cause is non-custodial parents.
About 1 in 10,000 aren't found or found alive. So 50 or 60 kids out of 84M that are under 18 at any given time are grabbed by predators or die whilst running away (hint OD)
It's not though. These are based on missing person reports. Just because they are found doesn't mean they aren't missing. If a child is missing for two weeks, and is found safe, does that mean they weren't missing? What's the difference between two weeks and two hours is a parent is missing their child? Just because you're a remarkably apathetic individual who doesn'tcare enough to how statistics of missing children works doesn't change how the statistics of missing children work.
It is misleading. Literally every single person who shares the stat universally claims and believes that these kids are in the wind usually taken by pedos and child traffickers. I have never met a person who shared this stat who didn't believe this.
If a child is reported missing, an official alert goes out for a missing child, and police are dispatched to keep a look out, it shouldn't matter if it takes 10 minutes, or 10 days.
That's why most of the time there needs to be a deliberate amount of time between last seen and the report for a missing child goes out. More times than not when those missing kids are found quickly, it's because the alert went out and people and police were informed and were able to quickly locate them at a park or something.
There does not in fact need to be a minimum time that is a fact you got from TV. Also its besides the point the point.
So what if most missing kids are resolved within hours?
It does not negate the fact that cops are abusing flock. Also, okay 50 - 60 kids out of 84 million are grabbed by predators or die whilst running away, like you said, this abused technology should be used to help find them, all 460K of them reported missing every year in the US, including those that are resolved in hours instead of this type of authoritarian misuse.
A overprotective mother calls in about a missing kid, cop does their damn job, doesn't abuse AI-assisted, authoritarian-enabling cameras to tell the mother within minutes to call their damn neighbor. Imagine that happening instead of this type of bullshit.
But hey, you keep licking those boots.
No idiot I want the cameras gone not justified whilst they are in fact used by fascist tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_E._King_Jr.
This atrocity has been going on since at least the 80s, it would seem.
The Franklin Coverup was a crazy read.
Your period fell outside the parentheses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_E._King_Jr.
I know, it gives me the heebie jeebies to end a URL with a period too.
Edit: Oh, this looks like the editor also get the heebie jeebs; it's not you, it's lemmy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_E._King_Jr.
Set the URL as text for the link:
The hero we need.
Edit: though maybe that's technically unethical. I don't use that style because I like people to see exactly what they're clicking on.
As long as the links match, they are technically being shown more correct information that way.
No, I get it, I'm just being an ethical poindexter: technically, you are sending them to a different link than the one they think they are being sent to, but, obviously, not a moral issue in this case.
What is the difference between ethics and morals, anyways? Anybody?
I’d say the taste, personally.
lmao, 500,000 kids per year
That's concerning, maybe the rich eat them at that rate ?
That missing kid statistic seems weird to me. Like… what happens to these kids? Are they returned a few days later and then reported missing again? How can this number be so high?
Half a million kids go missing?
Yes but it's always the same kid. He is very disturbed.
this is fairly accurate
Non-runaway, non-familial custodial disputes leave about 20k very ugly children disappearances each year… I looked it up. Of course even 20k is revolting.
It's extremely misleading. It's every time parents call the cops because they can't find their kid. Many are resolved within hours. Almost all are resolved peacefully. If your kid is a habitual runaway each time you report they didn't go to school or come home counts as one. After kids being assholes the number 2 cause is non-custodial parents.
About 1 in 10,000 aren't found or found alive. So 50 or 60 kids out of 84M that are under 18 at any given time are grabbed by predators or die whilst running away (hint OD)
If I remember correctly it’s mostly kids that runaway get reported as missing and then are found within a day. Or it’s when one parent kidnaps the child. Basically custody battle stuff.
A small number is actual kidnapping by strangers or trafficking.
1 in 10,000 aren't found or found alive. The big number makes it sound like child sex traffickers are everywhere taking children to be sex slaves in places with lots of brown people
Its seems weird because its probably made up, its the common rule of the internet - not everything is true.Edit: The lower bound is actually true for the USA, see other comments for explanation.
How private jail system would profit from missing children?
Private jails donate so much for campaigns, think about them
I never thought about this, but yes, this is an entirely new way of violating our rights, but good luck avoiding the ride to jail or possible death when they shoot you if you happen to do one small thing wrong, or are the wrong skin color.
They're already using flock cameras to support speeding tickets.
Always remember that Warren v. District of Columbia and Castle Rock v. Gonzales that in the US the cops aren't there to serve and protect and always assume ACAB.
America only cares about children when it’s sexually abusing them. Food for kids. Nope. Housing for kids. Nope. Caring for babies. Nope. But presidents and people raping children is just the American way. This country is so fucked. It deserves all the bad things.
Its all about civil forfeiture! Free car, house, bank accounts and most PDs get to keep half and the rest goes to the state.
But that's after ICE started the purge.
Ya but we're not allowed to look for or put Flock cameras in Trump's basement... So we get to track stoners.
Epstein files
Ah, of course - we should point a Flock camera at every family home. Problem solved.
The fact they haven't even bothered with 1 "feel good story" where they find a lost kid is just a fuck you.
Is this a thing that happened or an imagined, but possible scenario?
https://banthecams.org/posts/2026/08/05/flock-camera-used-for-weed-search-and-mandated-at-dispensary/
But tbh, why do you think the cops would be honest about it? "PrObABlE cAuSe"
lmao every time, like clockwork.