It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane.

The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.

What's even worse is that they now probably made it a lot worse for that family, adding stress and trauma (at the very least). So in fact, the neighbor made the kid more unsafe than they originally were.

Perhaps the neighbor who called it in thought that if they approached the child themselves, they might be seen as a potential child molester.

Also I would note that every person beyond the nosy neighbor had a profit motive to pursue charges.

I live in the neighborhood in question. While my immediate neighbors are all really awesome people, the neighborhood as a whole has a LOT of retired people whose sole activity in life is to report their neighbors to The Authorities. Usually that's the HOA management or the security office, but sometimes they'll call the actual police.

Many of us find it frustrating, though exposure is almost random. Someone who used to live on our street used to get very upset about trash cans being visible from the street, for instance. I think this person moved in the last two or three years because the passive aggressive HOA letters about this apparently heinous nuisance have stopped. But among groups of affluent people, I find that a small percentage never outgrew the tattle-tale phase and still behave in such a way into their sixties, seventies and eighties.