I know... this is borderline as a M/R issue. I'm highlighting it for specific reasons. Here is how it ties in for me; this could have resulted in the false arrest of (mostly) random men. If it had, there would have been consequences to those men that possibly would have been uncorrectable. This could have been very damaging to people who did nothing to deserve the damage. It also ties in with the false-allegation environment in today's society, wherein adult women feel entitled to use false allegations to get what they want. Social and legal failure to curb that tendency when it presents itself in a child may be partly responsible for that sense of entitlement in adulthood. For those wanting a TL;DR, that was it.

On to the story:

Yesterday, there was this story about an attempted kidnapping in my state. I have lived and worked in that community in the past, know the parks, know some of the people, know some of the cops there... they are pretty down to earth, but perceptive and vigilant... a lot like veteran small town cops, even though they're really not small town because the area is comprised of a bunch of suburbs roughly jammed together.

The story was kind of a shocker. Yeah, it's a metro area. No, it's not in a high crime part of the metro area. The community is pretty well watched over. There's petty stuff, but the municipality does not see the level of violent crime experienced in some of the surrounding municipalities. The burbs are burbs... small towns engulfed in metro traffic, metro clutter, and metro crowding. I wouldn't let an 11 year old play alone at the park there, but I was still surprised to read about an attempted kidnapping. I thought, how panicked area parents must be! There are parks in residential areas, near schools, and in sheltered areas... what must be going through their minds right now?

Then I saw the update explaining that the whole thing was a lie.

No idea yet how this is going to be handled. I will be watching to see if anything else gets reported, but area news has a habit of not following up on stuff like this.

I just hope the whole thing does not get swept under the rug. It's not that I want to see the book thrown at a kid. Kids do dumb stuff... it's part of how they learn. It's what the child will learn from this that concerns me - I think it's vital that the seriousness of what she did be communicated to her in no uncertain terms. Otherwise, she'll learn from this that she can use false allegations for excitement and attention, with impunity, and other kids who know what she did will take their lessons from whether or not her actions have consequences that they, at their age, can understand and measure.

Not only did she waste resources, put police and a community on alert for nothing, and cause the spending of part of a tight budget on a wild goose chase, but she also endangered innocent people. What if there had been men nearby fitting the description from her story?

both men were either Latino or light skinned African American The driver was in his early 50's, the passenger about 30. Neither of the men wore shirts and they were both heavily tattooed.

This is vague enough to finger any tattooed, darker-skinned man with an appearance of age between 30 and 50... a fairly large contingent of men in that area, or any metro area for that matter. Their alleged vehicle, a jeep (detail from video included on page,) is also fairly common. There was every chance that the cops might have wrongfully arrested guys based on that description. And an arrest like that can cost a job. Ohio is a will-to-work state, which means you can get fired without explanation at any time. If an arrest - even a wrongful one - results in a no-call-no-show, the employer has no fear of just letting the employee go. By calling it a no-call-no-show, the employer expects to get out of paying unemployment. And the Dayton Metro area was hit fucking hard by the economic crash, so employees really are disposable, but jobs are not. There is always someone else waiting in line for that job... and any job you might apply for if you have to replace it.

All of that, the lesson learned, the damage done, and the potential damage that could have been done, are why, even though the kid is 11 years old, and even though I'm sure there will be folks in that community calling for lenience due to her age and probably due to her sex (though that may not be more clearly stated than just referring to her as a little girl instead of a kid) I think she should be charged with lying to the police during an investigation, tried as a juvenile offender, and generally have the poop scared out of her by the system, with a memorable penalty like some kind of community service applied to drive the point home. As a parent, this is what I would expect to face if it were my child committing local police to a wild goose chase, frightening the local community, and creating a risk of wrongful arrests like this kid did.