Would you get into trouble for this?

Wow!! Get help.

@Nicknacky Friend of yours?

Exactly, not to mention it’s absolutely none of her business what happened anyway

Yes, this'll definitely be what happened. You can tell what the other poster's like just from her reasoning and general attitude on this thread.

She's buttonholed the officer who's busy trying to do his actual job in a stressful situation, moaned at him.and given him a mouthful about how many police cars there are/why aren't you out catching real criminals etc, and he's thought to himself "shall I get involved in a lengthy conversation with this random woman and try to give her a genuine explanation that she won't accept anyway and that will just lead to further arguing? Or shall I just quickly tell her what she already thinks and get rid of her?"

I'm okay with your perception of me based on your internal psychosis

Apologies for boring you. Just hate seeing people post as if they know what they are talking about.

You actually don't know if I have no idea. Just judgemental really, aren't you .
Any hoo bored with you now. Time to unwatch thread.

Sorry to OP if this 8 has interrupted the flow of the thread.

It’s nothing to do with being sceptical. You posted that there was too many officers in your opinion dealing with an incident. I’m pointing out you have no idea what was going on or how many officers it took to safely deal with the incident.

Note to self.

Remember to video all transactions and incidents for future reference and to prove a story to sceptical people.

And do you really think they will have told you the full circumstances if there was potentially more to it than just a breakdown?

Not to mention. They are better placed to decide how many resources are needed to safely deal with the incident than you are

Seriously? 😂 sorry for not listing every person who was up blame. I thought the fact the person who left them in the car was pretty obviously the main person to blame here.

Have a good look at yourself before posting such a pathetic and petty post.

I spoke to the officer. Directing traffic. "Just recovering a vehicle, we'll be thirty minutes or so".

You can't say it was for no reason. You have no idea what was going on there. It might have looked like a breakdown but been something else. It could have been a breakdown which has suddenly become more complicated. They don't just shut roads for no reason.

That aside. That would be traffic cops dealing with that. They don't go to your average response call so a different type of officer as you suggest.

There used to be community officers who did local policing but guess what they've been cut back too

It happens every year and when you read the findings into the reasons most are simply over stretched parents. No history of neglect.

That's why it's so horrible, it can happen to anyone it doesn't tend to be neglectful high risk parenting. Yes there are intentionally left cases but most tragically are people who simply went into automatic pilot.

I would have smashed the front windsheild or asked the local windsheild seller to do just that.
Why couldn't the kids be instructed to open the door?

You would not have been prosecuted - especially when a number ofyou were clearly concerned and you had witnesses.

The children could have been told that they must not open the doors to strangers and would be fearful of doing so .

And 99.99% of the time, people do. But human brains are fallible. And circumstances combine which mean minor oversights can have tragic consequences. If you read into incidents like this, it doesn't happen because parents don't love their kids. Usually, something in a routine has changed, people are under unusual pressure, they make an assumption that every other day would be fine (e.g. that their partner has taken the kids to school), and their brain just goes with it. Even an alert in the car saying "check the back seat" won't work every time, because people will get used to it, assume the back seat is empty as it always should be on a Thursday (or whatever) and ignore it. It's not modern society, it's human brains.

Every so often on Mumsnet there'll be a thread of parents sharing stories of how they forgot to pick a child up from school, or only picked up one sibling because they thought the other had a club etc. My DH has fallen asleep and missed school pickup. I'm a Brownie leader and at least once a year will have to call a parent to collect their child - they've usually just got distracted and forgotten. They don't not love their kids because of this, they're not bad people, and it could happen to you. Usually the stakes are lower, fortunately.

You’re allowed to smash windows to rescue a dog, so I’d definitely do it to rescue a child

Children have died after being left in hot cars in the US and parents apparently forgetting g about them.

edition.cnn.com/2024/07/17/us/hot-car-deaths-charges/index.html

And yet no one in the actual situation as reported by the OP did this. Which is perhaps a better guide to actual likely behaviour than what you imagine you would definitely do. An old sociology lecturer in my institution used to fake collapsing with a fit or heart attack in a packed 300-seater lecture every year to demonstrate the ‘bystander effect’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystandereffect

I imagine that’s probably what happened here — having multiple people observing diffuses the sense of responsibility one person would feel on discovering whatever it was alone, and ‘social influence’ (how other people are perceived to respond to a situation governing individual responses ) mitigated their sense of how immediately requiring of action it was, especially when the police didn’t send someone, and the children weren’t in obvious immediate danger.

Plus I imagine that it’s unlikely that the first thing anyone did was check CCTV, so no one knew for a while the children had been left for hours, which meant that, while concerned, many people initially thought a parent would return any second, and think they’d overreacted and damaged their car if they’d smashed in a window.

I imagine it’s also likely that the fear of hurting a child while smashing in a window prevented this being the immediate response. And if it was in the OP’s sister’s workplace, there was probably a sense of ‘someone senior needs to make a call on this’.

So while I’d love to think I’d weigh in like the Rock and smash the window and lift the children to safety with my rippling biceps, it’s not hard to imagine why this didn’t actually happen.

A six year old should also be able to undo a car seat buckle as well, surely?

It's Easy enough to say "smash the window" but with what? What do most people have lying around that would easily and safely smash it. Not to mention the danger to the kids. If the kids were in actual danger (e.g. unconscious in a hot car) then yes I would have had to do something immediately, but "distressed" isn't the same as active danger. I'd be less concerned about any possible issues surrounding being blamed for the car, and more about injuring the kids by shattering a glass window very close to them.

It's also just as easy to complain about "the police" but who are you actually moaning about? The actual officers on the street who aren't aware of incidents until they are told about them and tasked to attend? It's not like they are told "there's a stabbing, a shoplifter, someone in MH crisis and 2 kids trapped in a car, which one do you fancy going to?"

Or the dispatchers who probably categorised it as the highest priority (the most they can do) but if they don't have anyone available to send there's nothing they can do. I used to work with the police and there were shifts when there would be literally only two officers covering the whole area. If they are in the middle of arresting someone and taking them to custody what do you want them to do, exactly? Let the suspect go to attend this new incident?

How do you know?

And it was still a priority incident even if only a breakdown

It was

Do you work for the emergency services?

Is this UK?
If I was in that situation I would dial 999 and use the phrase "risk to life". And this would be a top priority.

I really doubt this would happen as described in the UK.

You do realise that a situation like that would be an immediate response as there is a threat to life?

And you have no idea to the full circumstances. It may not have been just a “breakdown”.