Metro uses scare tactic on careless parents

By Abigail Goldman

Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Metro Police investigate enough cases of children left in hot cars to have the process down pat — it’s your basic grim abuse and neglect assessment, except for one step:

In the past year or so, every time a child has been left in a car, detectives have cross-referenced the location of the incident with a database of registered sex offenders to determine how many sex offenders live nearby.

This has no investigative value. It merely allows police to make a dark point to parents, the press and anyone who will listen: If the threat of death isn’t enough to keep you from leaving a child in a car, maybe the threat of abduction is.

It’s a desperate tactic, and one that makes its own dark point: Despite public information campaigns, legislation criminalizing leaving kids in cars, high-profile fatalities and bumper-sticker scoldings — check the back seat! — kids are still being left to swelter shy of death.

So far in 2009, hot cars haven’t claimed any children’s lives in Metro’s jurisdiction. Last year there was one death, the first since 2005. Of course, one is too many, and talking about hyperthermia in terms of death rates may be missing the point.

Deaths reveal nothing of the close calls and hideous injuries. Moreover, the number of incidents that Metro detectives investigate is likely only a fraction of the whole — the cases bad enough that police got involved. That’s why Lisa Teele, civilian supervisor of Metro’s Abuse and Neglect Detail, cages her statistics in terms of cases that have “come to the attention” of her detectives — the implication being that most haven’t.

So far, 95 cases of children being left in cars have come to the attention of Metro detectives this year. Last year the detail investigated 71 cases. In other words, even without fatalities, this year has been worse than last. And now that the weather is not surface-of-the-sun scorching, Teele says, the number of cases could increase because parents think it’s OK to leave their kids in cars.

It isn’t. Even on mild days cars can quickly reach dangerous temperatures. Not sinking in yet? OK, well, registered sex offenders don’t migrate for the winter.

The problem may be that most cases of children left in cars are accidents — parents and caregivers who simply forget. Sometimes there are histories of abuse and neglect. Other times, however, they’re utterly devoted parents, people whose own rage and heartache will mete out much more pain than any punishment from the justice system. Studies suggest the brain is not selective when it comes to forgetfulness, and not inclined to weigh an object’s relative value before ignoring it. Academics have said forgetting a child in the back seat is as easy as forgetting a cup coffee on the roof.

This comparison will outrage people. But too much “that would never happen to me” confidence is its own danger. Studies show that kids are left in cars by all kinds of people and parents: men, women, rich, poor, good, bad. If you think it couldn’t happen, some child advocates say, you might be a little too cavalier.

Nationally, the number of kids left in cars dramatically increased in the 1990s, when concerns about air bag safety prompted parents to put children in the back seat. Unless this uptick also mirrors an increase in the country’s bad parent population, it’s more evidence that children out of sight are easily, horribly out of mind.

The solution, advocates say, isn’t to put kids back in the front seat, but instead to put a purse in the back, or the diaper bag in the front. Something to jog that faulty memory when the specter of death — and now sex offenders — isn’t enough.