Today’s Contemporary Americana!
I had been meaning to write about this so today’s the day.
Brian Dickerson in the Freep
And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.
The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.
Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.
snip
The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.
“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”
But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.
“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.
OK let’s stop there. One of the very worst problems we face in America is that most Americans lead such meaningless lives devoid of any spiritual or natural fulfillment that they cannot handle being put in positions of authority. There are millions of little Napoleons in uniform with badges and some with guns running around this country just waiting to stamp down on some poor schmuck that runs afoul of the millions of laws in this country that tie us all down.
So we have this lowlife security guard at Comerica Park who sees his big chance to nail someone and he takes it. A simian simpleton could see the dad made a mistake and let it go with a warning. But not in 2008 America. We now train authority figures to have a Gestapo-like adherence to the letter of every law and every violation must be stamped out ruthlessly.
An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.
Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.
The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.
“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”
But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.
And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who’s getting booted from “Dancing with the Stars” and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan’s children is going about its work.
Yes indeed. Here we have two upper middle class white educated couple being treated like this. So imagine what would have happened if the parents were poorer, minority, or unable to use the University of Michigan’s legal department to bail them out of this mess? Yes, it can happen to you. Don’t believe me - get thee to an airport. And remember it’s to protect the children!
And you if you really think you can tear the average ‘Murkan from his/her trash TV, you’ve got another thing coming buddy.
Now I’m not a big fan of CPS in general but they’ve been taking a lot of heat for this incident. In truth, once a court order is made, CPS basically has to act like robots - they must enforce the order.
Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.
The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.
And there you have it. The officer at the scene who had a real sense that this was an honest mistake and not a crime was overruled by her ’supervisor’ who, in reality, is the one who really escalated this incident out of control. Of course it’s easy if you’re sitting at a desk and you’re only real concern is covering your ass, to flop the case over to CPS. Once that happened, what happened next was probably inevitable.
And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. “This is so unnecessary,” one told Ratte before driving away with his son.
But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.
And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they’d see their little boy again.
Again, it was a decision made at the supervisory level at CPS that compounded the idiocy made at the police department level.
Now there are a lot of letters at the end of the story defending the caseworkers and that’s understandable as far as it goes. There may be no ‘quota’ as they say, for the amount of children seized. BUT, you cannot deny that every child taken is recorded and used as a justification for the budgets of the office and the supervisors. If they don’t seize a certain number of children, perhaps the next budget go around in Lansing, they won’t get so much money. Careers and nice suburban houses are on the line here. So you know what happens.
You can read the rest of this sad and sorry case. Ratte naively believes CPS will learn from this case. They will not. There is a vested interest in seizing children under any pretext. It’s a corollary of the Iron Law of Institution - the institution will do anything necessary to preserve itself - even at the expense of its core principles.
And you know as well as I do how many clear cut cases of child abuse fall right through the cracks of many state CPS investigators. But let some dad mistakenly give a kid a hard lemonade at a ball game and the whole system swings rapidly into gear to take the kid. Seriously, what is going on here?
I liked the response to Dickerson’s column here:
Freep reader reaction
In response to Brian Dickerson’s April 28 column, “Hard lemonade, hard price; Dad’s oversight at Tigers game lands son in foster care”: What hath God wrought, here in the People’s Republic of Michigan? What’s next for Christopher Ratte? Will he be sent away to be rehabilitated? Will the Ministry of Truth seek to delete the Detroit Free Press’ reportage of this episode?
Fortunately, the Ministry of Love reunited Mr. Ratte with his family, rather than submitting him to a purge. The party must have been satisfied he had not committed a thought crime.
When one reads this story, hard on the heels of the previous day’s exposé of the flawed prosecution process for sex offenders in Oakland County, it is clear that in its zeal to protect our children, our state and local law enforcement agencies have gone completely haywire.
Unquestionably, our children are the most powerless and vulnerable of our citizenry, the least able to defend or speak for themselves. Their protection is simply paramount. Nonetheless, whither sanity, reason and justice along the way?
After the Free Press reported the structural failure of the foster care system in Michigan, it would appear that overkill is the state’s solution to that problem. It is not enough that the state ran roughshod on Mr. Ratte; his son, the very victim they sought to protect, must have been traumatized to no end. Meanwhile, how many other children who are truly in grave danger of one form or another are left unprotected by Child Protective Services?
The entire child welfare system, from state agencies to the courts to the law enforcement agencies, is overworked and underfunded. Nonetheless, knee-jerk Orwellian overreaction is not the answer. We must have a thoughtful dialogue on this issue, starting in Lansing.
Lawrence D. Hadley
Can’t add anything more to that except this:
In reality, the state assumes ownership of your children once they are born. You are merely the legal custodians under the law. If any any time, one of the minions of the state feels you are no longer a fit parent for any reason, the state can and will, with guns drawn if necessary, take your child. Yes, there are legitimate cases where kids need to be seized for their own safety - absolutely. But more and more we hear about stories like the Ratte’s. And we wonder what the real aim of all these laws are.
So be ultra-careful at all times when you’re out in public with your children. You never know who is watching - and itching - to be a good German.
