The utter waste of resources here is absolutely infuriating. Enforcement officer focused on absolute minor bullshit and doing so incorrectly, police getting involved again wasting time and being wrong, the council then getting involved and still being wrong. Just so many resources that could be doing something, anything useful.
In regards to the comment that points out "a crime requires the perpetrator to have intended to commit the crime," I'm on the council's side there. A 1 year old is absolutely capable of criminal levels of throwing food everywhere, 100% on purpose. Common motivations are discovering gravity and feeding the dog is fun.
A 1 year + 0 months doesn't. A 1 year + 6 months might be catching on to what is going to get other people to make a fuss. a 1 year + 11 months is on the cusp of becoming a menace to society and I wouldn't put being a criminal past them.
a 1 year + 11 months is on the cusp of becoming a menace to society
I don't disagree but it definitely isn't criminal! Most civilized countries put the age of criminal responsibility at 16. (Not my country sadly, ours is generally 14 although with serious crimes like murder/manslaughter it's 10)
Listen, I cant say that at 1 year 11 months my kiddo was a criminal. But like a couple months later if someone wanted to label her that way, I'd be hard pressed to deny the facts.
When my daughter was around that age, she embarked on a campaign to drive her older brother absolutely bugshit every chance she got. It was deliberate and planned out. Subtle enough that she wouldn't get in too much trouble. She did it for a few months, testing the extent of her power, and then stopped. It was fascinating to behold.
Yes. It's all fun and games to talk about how testing limits and figuring out cause and effect are important toddler activities, until the subjects of said experiments are other people. Is it right to say that toddlers are manipulative jerks? Probably not. But it's definitely wrong to say that they aren't.
Right? We don’t exempt kids from moral culpability because they’re pure and innocent, we do it because the natural state of a toddler is gleeful sociopathy.
(Obviously this may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) It's not part of the definition for intent. It is however part of the test to determine if someone is capable of being held criminally responsible. It's the same reason we don't hold people in the midst of an episode of psychosis to be criminally responsible for their actions: at the time they did not know what they were doing was wrong
I mean, an adult supervising the child is the one that faces the penalties, thats why the fine is not going to the child.
That said, this isn't like the baby threw up on a Van Gogh painting at a museum, and the parent is at fault for standing to close to the art with a baby in their arms. This sounds like a baby dropping something on the ground and the parent maybe noticing it, but not picking it up. If it really was something biodegradable like a strawberry, getting fined for that is obviously so absurd that it's hard to believe it's a true story.
Always remember the canonical definition of innocence is "free from a knowledge of good or evil", and the original definition of guilt is "a failure to fulfill one's duty". From these first principles the course of justice should then be clear
This has to be a creative writing exercise. Because "my pre-verbal baby threw a small fruit on the ground and the Council saw it and is fining me" is too on-the-nose.
There are a number of really dodgy security companies employed by local councils for environmental enforcement, and they have form for issuing ridiculous fines.
I saw that last article this morning. I couldn’t believe it was only reduced to £150 after appealing. How can someone litter nature with nature?! It was a freaking reed and an 86 yr old man for fucks sake.
There was once I had a stranger cussing me out for throwing litter out of my stroller, when it had in fact been a disgusting piece of garbage already on the street that had attached itself to a wheel.
I suppose I could have picked it up and claimed responsibility anyways but I wasn't on litter duty that day.
TBH throwing stuff back on the ground (when you are already touching it), instead of just putting it in the nearest trash can, is a bit of a dick move.
I wasn't going to touch it with my hands as it was slimy, wet and gross. But there is also a small part of me that agrees that I could have taken responsibility for it anyway, and might have done so had there been a trash bin within reach and a stick nearby to pick it up. Alas, the stars did not align.
I wish. One of the many impacts of the, now 15 year long, austerity drive and shitty public finances in the UK is that our local councils have outsourced litter offences and petty public nuisance to private companies.
Their operatives have no individual power to force you to hand over your details. But it is an offense to fail to provide them, hence the operative called a copper over (who, like so many of our coppers, doesn't actually understand the law and just follows the path of least resistance, usually by saying 'that's a civil matter, when it is not).
These third party companies are incentivised to pursue the most mundane of offences because either their employer's contract with the council provides incentives based on fines issued/revenue generated or simply because the council will not renew the contract with the company if they think that they're not issuing enough fines/another company tenders who says that they can turn the screw further.
There have been many posts on LAUK from people who say that the operatives have made up evidence or wilfully misinterpreted a situation. And I've heard from a couple of friends in real life who have similar stories. The bin of one of my mates blew over in a storm before collection the following morning. One of these companies found a piece of litter with his details on it and issued him a fine.
I live above a shop on a highroad so I don't have bins. You can put rubbish bags out in some 2 hour long slots throughout the week.
I put out a bag 5 minutes early.
The council cut open the bag. Photographed everything. Found something with my employers address, and sent a fine to me c/o that address. With photos of my rubbish.
(I'm on the electoral register and I left the thing just outside my house).
The rest of this post is personal weirdness connected to this. Not so relevant. It also makes me sound increasingly nuts. But I'm only 50% nuts...
I have issues with hoarding and part of that is feeling weirdly paranoid about putting out my rubbish. I feel like everyone is watching and judging, when obviously the weird thing is not putting your rubbish out. But this was not helpful for my mental health.
(This then became one of the reasons I got sacked, but as all the reasons were basically a smokescreen for disability discrimination I can't exactly blame the council for that).
It may have been personal. I'm in an odd position of being paranoid while they are out to get me. I have actual reasons to believe the council legal department may hold a grudge against me (due to them previously sending a letter about local tax arrears to a family members address which I am only associated with via an employment tribunal claim I helped that family member take against the council. Long story).
Eh, this one seems semi-believable... insane over-enforcement by outsourced/privatised council officers looking to hit litter-fine targets has been known to happen:
Now: if she'd said that she'd gone through the council's formal appeal process (or even all the way to court) and they'd upheld it there, that would start to stretch credulity.
Well, her mistake was pouring a small amount of coffee down the drain. What she should have done is discharged ten thousand tonnes of raw sewage into a protected waterway, then she would have just gotten told to try not to do it again and been given permission to whack her customers' bills up by another 10%.
Whilst I’m a little sceptical, council enforcement officers do insane shit fairly regularly, it seems to attract people who let a little power go to their heads.
It does hit a lot of buttons but it's not entirely impossible.
Some councils will definitely fine for food, and for accidentally dropped rubbish.
Some councils also aren't exactly humane - I've personally seen someone with extreme (and extremely obvious) mental ill health fined for dropping a cigarette, with the council unwilling to cancel the fine despite evidence of the health issues and linked reliance on benefits.
I'm not saying a dropped cigarette isn't worth a fine, but I do think fining someone who obviously isn't capable of understanding why they shouldn't do that isn't right. If someone can't manage to not walk around obviously talking to themselves maybe we can understand that they might also be have the best ability to follow other minor social rules.
So why not a baby.
I think the most unreasonable I've heard of is fining people for putting household waste in public bins. Obviously you shouldn't be using them instead of getting rid of all your rubbish but doing things like picking up your post as you leave the house and throwing away the junk mail in a public bin isn't exactly unreasonable.
There was a news story recently about a guy who went on holiday. The day after he left council workers painted disabled parking only lines around his car, then he got 4 tickets for this before he got back to the car. There was good CCTV showing the car parked first without the lines, the box being drawn around the car and the excitement of the traffic warden returning day after day to issue further tickets (ironically parking illegally once herself to issue the ticket).
The Council claim the tickets were voided a week before it went viral, but hard to tell if that is believable
honestly, i'm surprised it didn't specify that it was a labour council, and that while they were doing this an immigrant assaulted someone nearby and the cop didn't care about that...
This comment thread is poking fun at all the recent astroturfing posts on legaladviceuk. In several of those, the OP has (completely unasked) stated that the fictional incident they're asking about took place in Birmingham, an area which right-wingers often claim is a "no-go zone" due to the muslim population. (Obviously this is a ridiculous claim.)
Kind of ruins the fun when you have to explain it like this but oh well.
LB refused to pay the baby’s fine and is now in gaol:
Fixed penalty notice issued as my 1yo threw a strawberry on the floor. England.
Hello.
I was in the town centre around a week ago when I was approached by a council enforcement officer who claimed I had "littered" and he had me on camera doing so.
I knew this was blatantly untrue so asked for his evidence to which he responded he had my daughter on camera throwing a strawberry from her pram on to the floor further up the street outside Primark.
I stated - as I believe to be true - that I cannot be fined for my 1yo daughters actions, nor can I be fined if this wasn't intentional and offered to pick me up.
He absolutely refused this, called over a police officer who sided with the enforcement officer and demanded I give my details so a fixed penalty notice can be issued.
I have contacted the council, who have stated the claim was valid and they will still be pursuing payment, and if not paid they will have to pursue further legal action.
I'm wondering what my best cause of action here is, as I genuinely find this utterly ridiculous and frankly absurd. Any advice would be vastly appreciated and welcome.
Dog fouling is a specific offence. The difference is one is a dog and his daughter is presumably human, unspecified in the OP. Criminality is personal you aren't responsible for someone else's crimes even your children.
This situation is absurd. It's hard to believe that a one-year-old can be fined for littering, yet here we are. Hopefully, this will highlight the ridiculousness of such enforcement and lead to some much-needed changes in how councils handle these minor offenses.
A relative of mine got a littering fine for throwing an orange rind on the ground while jogging. The orange came from their own orange tree that they have growing in their yard just a few streets away.
i mean, that is still littering though. it's not like orange rind magically evaporates. if everyone did that every day, with noone picking it up, you'd quite quickly have a lot of manky orange rind around the place.
I hear banana peels are bad for this - they can take a surprisingly long time to decompose and they're not nice while they're rotting.
The other thing is pets. My dog is a nightmare for picking up food he finds on a walk. Even if it's biodegradable, please don't leave food litter. I keep him away from it as much as possible, but he's a lot closer to the ground than I am.
It can be a problem for wildlife, too, depending on the specific location. Food waste thrown along roads attracts various critters and results in higher animal activity in the road, which in turn tends to result in more cars hitting animals.
I feel like you'd be singing a very different tune if someone started throwing an orange rind into your yard once a day. It can take up to 2 years for it to decompose, you'd very quickly have a large pile of rotting orange rind that was growing much faster than it was decomposing
Except in your own garden you clean it up. In the landfill, it's already cleaned up. In someone else's garden or a public street, some one else has to clean it up.
I mean, that one is perfectly valid, though. If the orange tree dropped it in his own garden, it wouldn’t be littering because it’s in his own garden. When he drops it on the public space it’s a completely different thing.
Your relative littered. If you don't wanna put it in your pocket, don't bring it on a run. That's totally different than a 1 year old child dropping a strawberry.
While also paying attention to other pedestrians, any holes/bumps in the pavement, obstacles like bins or cars, keeping an eye on the traffic, etc. There's no way of paying 100% attention to one thing
It was a parent, not an NFL officiating crew. There wasn't a line judge. They don't have All-32 camera access to the baby. Or do you expect them to mount the baby on a selfie stick and have them in their direct line of sight at all times.
I'm big fan of the choice to mount a baby on the stick rather than the stick on the baby. I'm imagining someone walking around, talking to themselves livestream style, with stick-mounted baby a couple feet above them.
I've had some absolutely wild toddlers in the family for whom leashes were only a mild inconvenience, lashing them to a pole might have been the only way to contain the madness tbh. Good product, would buy.
I am honestly puzzled by all the outraged comments. Is there no concept of being responsible for your minors actions in the USA? What is a one year old even doing unsupervised that he can drop garbage to the ground?
EDIT:
Over here you are responsible for supervising your minor at all times and if your minor commits criminal offences while unsupervised they become your responsibility due to your lapse in supervision.
The utter waste of resources here is absolutely infuriating. Enforcement officer focused on absolute minor bullshit and doing so incorrectly, police getting involved again wasting time and being wrong, the council then getting involved and still being wrong. Just so many resources that could be doing something, anything useful.
Exactly what I was going to say. JFC, don’t they have better things to do?
If Hot Fuzz is to be believed... no, these small town cops don't have anything better to do
But how can this use of police resources be for the greater good?
The greater good.
Stop saying that!
In regards to the comment that points out "a crime requires the perpetrator to have intended to commit the crime," I'm on the council's side there. A 1 year old is absolutely capable of criminal levels of throwing food everywhere, 100% on purpose. Common motivations are discovering gravity and feeding the dog is fun.
But they have to know doing so is wrong for it to be criminal. A 1 year old doesn't know right from wrong
A 1 year + 0 months doesn't. A 1 year + 6 months might be catching on to what is going to get other people to make a fuss. a 1 year + 11 months is on the cusp of becoming a menace to society and I wouldn't put being a criminal past them.
I don't disagree but it definitely isn't criminal! Most civilized countries put the age of criminal responsibility at 16. (Not my country sadly, ours is generally 14 although with serious crimes like murder/manslaughter it's 10)
Listen, I cant say that at 1 year 11 months my kiddo was a criminal. But like a couple months later if someone wanted to label her that way, I'd be hard pressed to deny the facts.
When my daughter was around that age, she embarked on a campaign to drive her older brother absolutely bugshit every chance she got. It was deliberate and planned out. Subtle enough that she wouldn't get in too much trouble. She did it for a few months, testing the extent of her power, and then stopped. It was fascinating to behold.
Yes. It's all fun and games to talk about how testing limits and figuring out cause and effect are important toddler activities, until the subjects of said experiments are other people. Is it right to say that toddlers are manipulative jerks? Probably not. But it's definitely wrong to say that they aren't.
Right? We don’t exempt kids from moral culpability because they’re pure and innocent, we do it because the natural state of a toddler is gleeful sociopathy.
Oh I thought it's because the justice system is afraid of toddlers. I am
Think of the poor staff of a Toddler Prison too.
I don't remember that being in the definition of intent.
I could see it used as a defense, mind you.
(Obviously this may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) It's not part of the definition for intent. It is however part of the test to determine if someone is capable of being held criminally responsible. It's the same reason we don't hold people in the midst of an episode of psychosis to be criminally responsible for their actions: at the time they did not know what they were doing was wrong
I mean, an adult supervising the child is the one that faces the penalties, thats why the fine is not going to the child.
That said, this isn't like the baby threw up on a Van Gogh painting at a museum, and the parent is at fault for standing to close to the art with a baby in their arms. This sounds like a baby dropping something on the ground and the parent maybe noticing it, but not picking it up. If it really was something biodegradable like a strawberry, getting fined for that is obviously so absurd that it's hard to believe it's a true story.
Always remember the canonical definition of innocence is "free from a knowledge of good or evil", and the original definition of guilt is "a failure to fulfill one's duty". From these first principles the course of justice should then be clear
Hmmm yeah I guess i can see that being a menace probably is part of a not quite baby/not quite toddler's job description.
I agree. The dog is the criminal party. Throw the book at them!
This has to be a creative writing exercise. Because "my pre-verbal baby threw a small fruit on the ground and the Council saw it and is fining me" is too on-the-nose.
With regret, it is plausible.
There are a number of really dodgy security companies employed by local councils for environmental enforcement, and they have form for issuing ridiculous fines.
Bit of a round up of one company's activities https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/22/firm-uses-aggressive-tactics-to-collect-millions-in-fines-for-councils
Man is fined for spitting out leaf that blew into his mouth https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp34xykk653o
I saw that last article this morning. I couldn’t believe it was only reduced to £150 after appealing. How can someone litter nature with nature?! It was a freaking reed and an 86 yr old man for fucks sake.
People suck.
There was once I had a stranger cussing me out for throwing litter out of my stroller, when it had in fact been a disgusting piece of garbage already on the street that had attached itself to a wheel.
I suppose I could have picked it up and claimed responsibility anyways but I wasn't on litter duty that day.
TBH throwing stuff back on the ground (when you are already touching it), instead of just putting it in the nearest trash can, is a bit of a dick move.
I wasn't going to touch it with my hands as it was slimy, wet and gross. But there is also a small part of me that agrees that I could have taken responsibility for it anyway, and might have done so had there been a trash bin within reach and a stick nearby to pick it up. Alas, the stars did not align.
I wish. One of the many impacts of the, now 15 year long, austerity drive and shitty public finances in the UK is that our local councils have outsourced litter offences and petty public nuisance to private companies.
Their operatives have no individual power to force you to hand over your details. But it is an offense to fail to provide them, hence the operative called a copper over (who, like so many of our coppers, doesn't actually understand the law and just follows the path of least resistance, usually by saying 'that's a civil matter, when it is not).
These third party companies are incentivised to pursue the most mundane of offences because either their employer's contract with the council provides incentives based on fines issued/revenue generated or simply because the council will not renew the contract with the company if they think that they're not issuing enough fines/another company tenders who says that they can turn the screw further.
There have been many posts on LAUK from people who say that the operatives have made up evidence or wilfully misinterpreted a situation. And I've heard from a couple of friends in real life who have similar stories. The bin of one of my mates blew over in a storm before collection the following morning. One of these companies found a piece of litter with his details on it and issued him a fine.
I live above a shop on a highroad so I don't have bins. You can put rubbish bags out in some 2 hour long slots throughout the week.
I put out a bag 5 minutes early.
The council cut open the bag. Photographed everything. Found something with my employers address, and sent a fine to me c/o that address. With photos of my rubbish.
(I'm on the electoral register and I left the thing just outside my house).
The rest of this post is personal weirdness connected to this. Not so relevant. It also makes me sound increasingly nuts. But I'm only 50% nuts...
I have issues with hoarding and part of that is feeling weirdly paranoid about putting out my rubbish. I feel like everyone is watching and judging, when obviously the weird thing is not putting your rubbish out. But this was not helpful for my mental health.
(This then became one of the reasons I got sacked, but as all the reasons were basically a smokescreen for disability discrimination I can't exactly blame the council for that).
It may have been personal. I'm in an odd position of being paranoid while they are out to get me. I have actual reasons to believe the council legal department may hold a grudge against me (due to them previously sending a letter about local tax arrears to a family members address which I am only associated with via an employment tribunal claim I helped that family member take against the council. Long story).
"Somehow, this is Immigrants fault!"
[Nigel drives by in a solid-gold Rolls with Russian Diplomatic plates]
Eh, this one seems semi-believable... insane over-enforcement by outsourced/privatised council officers looking to hit litter-fine targets has been known to happen:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg435gg66gpo
Now: if she'd said that she'd gone through the council's formal appeal process (or even all the way to court) and they'd upheld it there, that would start to stretch credulity.
Well, her mistake was pouring a small amount of coffee down the drain. What she should have done is discharged ten thousand tonnes of raw sewage into a protected waterway, then she would have just gotten told to try not to do it again and been given permission to whack her customers' bills up by another 10%.
Whilst I’m a little sceptical, council enforcement officers do insane shit fairly regularly, it seems to attract people who let a little power go to their heads.
It does hit a lot of buttons but it's not entirely impossible.
Some councils will definitely fine for food, and for accidentally dropped rubbish.
Some councils also aren't exactly humane - I've personally seen someone with extreme (and extremely obvious) mental ill health fined for dropping a cigarette, with the council unwilling to cancel the fine despite evidence of the health issues and linked reliance on benefits.
I'm not saying a dropped cigarette isn't worth a fine, but I do think fining someone who obviously isn't capable of understanding why they shouldn't do that isn't right. If someone can't manage to not walk around obviously talking to themselves maybe we can understand that they might also be have the best ability to follow other minor social rules.
So why not a baby.
I think the most unreasonable I've heard of is fining people for putting household waste in public bins. Obviously you shouldn't be using them instead of getting rid of all your rubbish but doing things like picking up your post as you leave the house and throwing away the junk mail in a public bin isn't exactly unreasonable.
There was a news story recently about a guy who went on holiday. The day after he left council workers painted disabled parking only lines around his car, then he got 4 tickets for this before he got back to the car. There was good CCTV showing the car parked first without the lines, the box being drawn around the car and the excitement of the traffic warden returning day after day to issue further tickets (ironically parking illegally once herself to issue the ticket).
The Council claim the tickets were voided a week before it went viral, but hard to tell if that is believable
It should have been illegal to paint parking control markings around a legally parked car in the first place.
honestly, i'm surprised it didn't specify that it was a labour council, and that while they were doing this an immigrant assaulted someone nearby and the cop didn't care about that...
"I am being forced to take trans ideology classes!"
And even though nobody asked, all of this went down in Birmingham.
And OP's baby took a nap shortly after dropping the fateful strawberry, so is facing an additional charge of being insufficiently woke.
[deleted]
/r/wooosh
This comment thread is poking fun at all the recent astroturfing posts on legaladviceuk. In several of those, the OP has (completely unasked) stated that the fictional incident they're asking about took place in Birmingham, an area which right-wingers often claim is a "no-go zone" due to the muslim population. (Obviously this is a ridiculous claim.)
Kind of ruins the fun when you have to explain it like this but oh well.
It reaffirms every feeling I’ve ever had about the UK. Not sure if that makes it more or less believable but it’s certainly on the nose.
LB refused to pay the baby’s fine and is now in gaol:
Fixed penalty notice issued as my 1yo threw a strawberry on the floor. England.
Hello.
I was in the town centre around a week ago when I was approached by a council enforcement officer who claimed I had "littered" and he had me on camera doing so.
I knew this was blatantly untrue so asked for his evidence to which he responded he had my daughter on camera throwing a strawberry from her pram on to the floor further up the street outside Primark.
I stated - as I believe to be true - that I cannot be fined for my 1yo daughters actions, nor can I be fined if this wasn't intentional and offered to pick me up.
He absolutely refused this, called over a police officer who sided with the enforcement officer and demanded I give my details so a fixed penalty notice can be issued.
I have contacted the council, who have stated the claim was valid and they will still be pursuing payment, and if not paid they will have to pursue further legal action.
I'm wondering what my best cause of action here is, as I genuinely find this utterly ridiculous and frankly absurd. Any advice would be vastly appreciated and welcome.
Thank you.
Cat fact: cats could represent themselves in court but they choose not to due to their disdain for human law.
The punishment for throwing a strawberry on the floor, shall be one raspberry applied directly to the tummy.
Excellent title. I'm giggling just imagining the court scene.
Unclear from the description and comments if OP saw it fall and left it there, or was unaware until shown.
This is obvious ragebait and LA's commenters swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
Every single time, just like AITA
I obviously don't know the laws of the UK, but how is this situation different than a pet pooping around? One still has the duty to pick it up, no?
Dog fouling is a specific offence. The difference is one is a dog and his daughter is presumably human, unspecified in the OP. Criminality is personal you aren't responsible for someone else's crimes even your children.
This situation is absurd. It's hard to believe that a one-year-old can be fined for littering, yet here we are. Hopefully, this will highlight the ridiculousness of such enforcement and lead to some much-needed changes in how councils handle these minor offenses.
lol imagine the kid just sliding a contract across the table with crayons, i hope it works out for them.
A relative of mine got a littering fine for throwing an orange rind on the ground while jogging. The orange came from their own orange tree that they have growing in their yard just a few streets away.
i mean, that is still littering though. it's not like orange rind magically evaporates. if everyone did that every day, with noone picking it up, you'd quite quickly have a lot of manky orange rind around the place.
I hear banana peels are bad for this - they can take a surprisingly long time to decompose and they're not nice while they're rotting.
The other thing is pets. My dog is a nightmare for picking up food he finds on a walk. Even if it's biodegradable, please don't leave food litter. I keep him away from it as much as possible, but he's a lot closer to the ground than I am.
It can be a problem for wildlife, too, depending on the specific location. Food waste thrown along roads attracts various critters and results in higher animal activity in the road, which in turn tends to result in more cars hitting animals.
The orange rind does exactly the same thing whether it’s in one garden or the garden two streets over or the landfill twenty miles away.
I feel like you'd be singing a very different tune if someone started throwing an orange rind into your yard once a day. It can take up to 2 years for it to decompose, you'd very quickly have a large pile of rotting orange rind that was growing much faster than it was decomposing
Throws all leaves and grass clippings into neighbor's yard
"Why are you upset? It's just from my yard, right here. It would be doing the same thing if it were in my yard."
Except in your own garden you clean it up. In the landfill, it's already cleaned up. In someone else's garden or a public street, some one else has to clean it up.
oh ok. where do you live? we can just dump all our rubbish in your garden, because it's basically the same as it being in a landfill 20 miles away
I mean, that one is perfectly valid, though. If the orange tree dropped it in his own garden, it wouldn’t be littering because it’s in his own garden. When he drops it on the public space it’s a completely different thing.
Your relative littered. If you don't wanna put it in your pocket, don't bring it on a run. That's totally different than a 1 year old child dropping a strawberry.
I mean parents should be paying attention to what their children are doing. This is how you lose shit you can afford to lose
Ofc we should pay attention. But accidentally overlooking your kid throwing something isn't the same as a adult purposely throwing something
While also paying attention to other pedestrians, any holes/bumps in the pavement, obstacles like bins or cars, keeping an eye on the traffic, etc. There's no way of paying 100% attention to one thing
It was a parent, not an NFL officiating crew. There wasn't a line judge. They don't have All-32 camera access to the baby. Or do you expect them to mount the baby on a selfie stick and have them in their direct line of sight at all times.
I'm big fan of the choice to mount a baby on the stick rather than the stick on the baby. I'm imagining someone walking around, talking to themselves livestream style, with stick-mounted baby a couple feet above them.
I've had some absolutely wild toddlers in the family for whom leashes were only a mild inconvenience, lashing them to a pole might have been the only way to contain the madness tbh. Good product, would buy.
I am honestly puzzled by all the outraged comments. Is there no concept of being responsible for your minors actions in the USA? What is a one year old even doing unsupervised that he can drop garbage to the ground?
EDIT:
Over here you are responsible for supervising your minor at all times and if your minor commits criminal offences while unsupervised they become your responsibility due to your lapse in supervision.
You understand this isn’t an American legal advice thread right
m(
No, I actually didn't. So much for my assumptions. Still, UK doesn't have that concept, either?