Some remarkable data from America’s largest locally-run family policing system. Interpret with caution – but don’t overlook it:

In Los Angeles County, from 2015 through 2025:
 
●The number of children reported trapped in foster care on any given day dropped dramatically:

● The number of children reported torn from their families over the course of a year dropped dramatically:

● And child abuse fatalities, including deaths of children “known to the system,” ALSO dropped dramatically: 

(See below for details about how to find these data after clicking on the links.)

Maybe the best way to save children’s lives is to cut short all that needless foster care. Or maybe we should simply stop pretending we can measure system performance by fatality numbers, no matter what those numbers show in one community.

Long ago I proposed something to those who constantly push for a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare: a mutual moratorium on the use of horror stories to make our case. Of course they haven’t accepted. They can’t. That’s because horror stories are all they’ve got. 

The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that the child welfare surveillance state they have championed and nurtured for decades, reveling in its growth to monstrous proportions, has not only destroyed millions of families, it’s made all vulnerable children less safe. 

So, since they didn’t accept the offer, we include regular reminders in our weekly roundups of family preservation journalism and commentary that the horror stories go in all directions. Here’s a sampling from last year. 

More recently, I suggested going further: I proposed a mutual moratorium on using statistics about child abuse fatalities. The reason is one for which we all can be grateful: Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number is low enough to rise or fall for all sorts of reasons unrelated to the behavior of the family policing system, sometimes including random chance. 

But those wedded to tearing apart families don’t want to do that either. On the contrary, they have a habit of cherry-picking fatality data, sometimes over short periods of time and in relatively small jurisdictions. 

The worst demagogues exploit horror stories even when the statistics show no evidence of a change in the rate of child abuse fatalities. That’s happening now in Santa Clara County, California. 

Given that, let’s look at data in one of the largest jurisdictions in the country, in fact, the largest locally run family policing system in America, in a locality with a larger population than 40 states: Los Angeles County, California. And let’s look at the fatality data going back as far as the County has posted it online, to 2015: 

As the screenshots at the top of this post make clear: From then through 2025, child abuse fatalities went down by a lot – both total child abuse fatalities and deaths of children “known to the system.” (2026 data are for the first half of the year only.) 

And what happened to foster care numbers during that time? Well, the fact that none of the child removal evangelists in academia, government or media has sought to bring this to your attention is a pretty good giveaway: As child abuse deaths declined sharply, so did known entries into foster care and the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day. (As always, there's a caveat: We don't know how much of the decline is real and how much is simply making the placements "off the books" using hidden foster care.) 

Los Angeles still has plenty of room to improve. Even with the dramatic declines, it still takes away children at one of the highest rates among America’s largest cities and their surrounding counties.

Did the decline in foster care entries cause the lower number of fatalities? Who knows? The best available evidence, from a massive nationwide study, shows no connection, one way or the other, between foster care entry rates and child abuse deaths. Even in a jurisdiction as huge as Los Angeles, the number of fatalities is small enough to merit caution about drawing conclusions about system performance from fatality numbers. 

There are better measures, including overall re-abuse of children left in their own homes (which, in Los Angeles, has remained about the same even as foster care entries declined), foster-care “recidivism,” the proportion of children reunified who are placed again (which also has remained about the same in Los Angeles) and, potentially most reliable: random-sample casereadings done by experts who come to the task from all points of view. So once again, I’ll suggest that mutual moratorium.

Because, at a minimum, all this tells us that those who cherry-pick data to claim that foster care declines lead to increases in fatalities are engaging in rank intellectual dishonesty. 

They do it because, once again, that’s all they’ve got. 

Into the weeds: Here are the details and sources: 

Los Angeles County makes available online child abuse fatality data starting from 2015. Between then and 2025, total child abuse fatalities declined by 50%. Deaths of children “known to the system” declined 43%. (The data for 2026 are for only the first half of the year.) 

During that same time period, according to the California Child Welfare Indicators Project, the number of children taken away each year started to decline, slowly at first, then, starting around 2020, much more quickly, to the point that, by 2025, entries into foster care were cut by more than half compared with 2015. 

Something similar happened to the number of children in foster care on any given day. It stayed largely the same through 2019 and then plummeted. By 2025, the number had decreased by more than 45%. 

In both cases the declines in foster care numbers didn’t start until about 2020. We provide the data back to 2015 because that’s how far back the fatality data are available. 

(Foster care links will default to statewide data. Click on “Single County View” and then “Report Options” to get data specific to Los Angeles. For the fatality data, after clicking on the link, click on “fatality determinations.”)

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 27, 2026

● Who would have thought that one of the most damning indictments of foster care would come from one of the most prominent defenders of tearing apart families? But that’s what happened when Prof. Jill Durerr-Berrick declared that “We don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.” So, best case, we’ve been spending decades conducting a massive experiment on human test subjects without their informed consent – all of them children and, of course, disproportionately nonwhite. If a drug company did it, it would be criminal. The full story is in this NCCPR column in Youth Today. 

● I was a guest on the podcast appropriately named “The F Word” discussing the high rates of abuse in foster care, the mountain of evidence documenting the inherent harm to children when torn from their homes, and the perverse financial incentives that oil the child welfare removal machine: 

 

● As for what to do about those awful financial incentives, check out this webinar from United Family Advocates (enter passcode: mEg.$4MM)  on their bipartisan reform plan. If you don’t have time for all of it, be sure to check out the part starting at 51:17 in, which answers those who can't imagine giving up open-ended entitlement funding for tearing apart families – just in case they feel some urgent need to tear apart more families. 

● Kanaiyah Ward was placed in foster care not because her mother abused or neglected her, but because her mother couldn’t handle her behavior problems – and couldn’t afford to buy the help routinely available to affluent families. So she surrendered her child to the family policing system – which dumped her into a hotel where she committed suicide. Now Kanaiyha’s mother has filed a wrongful death suit.  “They killed my child,” Ward told WRC-TV. “Kanaiyah was my only child, and I couldn’t take care of her as a parent and with her condition, so I gave her to the state and they killed her.” 

● Also in Maryland, from WBFF-TV: Still another expose of still another place where Maryland children are institutionalized. 

● Meanwhile in Arizona, which has seen many such exposes, KNXV-TV reports, the head of the state family police agency has finally figured out how to solve the problem of all those foster children who run away from group homes and institutions: Let the group homes and institutions delay telling the cops that the kids are missing! 

● When Congress passed the Family First Act, it was supposed to curb institutionalization of children. But the institutions lobby made sure they got a great big loophole: They could keep scarfing up federal funds as long as they met minimal requirements to become so called Qualified Residential Treatment Programs. The federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General decided to see how that was working out in Kentucky. Here’s what they found: 

70 instances of noncompliance in 25 of the 30 children's case files and records that we reviewed, including missing family support group documentation, court approvals, discharge plans, and health records and screenings. 

165 instances of noncompliance across the 15 QRTPs that we reviewed related to requirements for background checks, personnel and training records, written policies, staffing, and physical environment. 

These weaknesses exposed children in Kentucky’s QRTPs to unsafe environments, inadequate care, and unqualified staff, and resulted in $571,306 ($416,009 Federal share) in improper Title IV‑E payments during the placements. 

● Family police agencies just hate it when you call them family police agencies. Good heavens, no! We’re kindly caseworkers who just want to help!  And yet, The Center Square reports, those kindly caseworkers at Georgia’s family police – sorry, child welfare agency spent nearly $1 million on a spy truck  - a specially-equipped Chevrolet Traverse outfitted with the latest high tech spy gear – the kind of stuff generally used by, uh, police departments that are supposed to get, you know, warrants before doing the spying. 

Oh, and those kindly caseworkers paid for their big, fancy specially-equipped spy truck in part with money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that’s supposed to help poor people become self-sufficient. You can read more here about how many states routinely use TANF as a child welfare slush fund. 

● The Guardian tells a story of international adoption in general and adoption of Korean children in particular that is largely ignored amid the treacly features about white savior American parents “rescuing” supposedly abandoned children. From the story: 

In March of 2025, South Korea admitted government responsibility for enabling private adoption agencies to “mass export” Korean children for sale abroad, sometimes without the consent of birth families, since the 1950s. Now, more than 100,000 Korean-born adoptees in the US are asking themselves questions like: “Who am I, really? And how did I get here?” … 

South Korea announced international adoption of its children will end by 2029. … Months before the announcement, Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, offered a “heartfelt apology” to adoptees and birth parents for the government’s complicity in allowing agencies to dismantle generations of Korean families so white people could make new ones in the west.

The Guardian tells the stories of what some of those children endured.

NCCPR in Youth Today: A massive human experiment without informed consent

Suppose, hypothetically, a big pharmaceutical firm comes up with what they think will be a miracle drug. They call it, say, Fosterox. They are in a hurry and worry they can’t find enough test subjects for their clinical trials if they seek informed consent. So they use the drug on human subjects without such consent. 

The initial trials are inconclusive. The lead researcher tells the company president: 

“We don’t know whether Fosterox is a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.” 

Instead of ending the experiment, the company president demands ever larger trials, all on human subjects, all without their informed consent. 

Oh, and all the test subjects for this massive human experiment are children, and they’re disproportionately nonwhite. 

If a drug company did that, they could be subject to lawsuits and civil penalties. In at least one state, California, those responsible could be jailed. …

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: Child welfare won’t change until help reaches the families 'struggling for support.'

The Times-Dispatch series this summer “Struggling for Support” paints a picture of children enduring horrific suffering while overloaded caseworkers look the other way, refusing to investigate cases or remove children in time. That’s half the story — or maybe less than half the story. 

Because for every such case there is another in which children were torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care, perhaps, as your series notes, because of “homelessness [or] inability to pay rent …” 

Read the full column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 21, 2026

● Last week, an NCCPR Blog post asked the question: “How often is institutionalizing children, and the foster-care system in general, not the cure for children’s “behavioral problems” – but rather the cause?”

An investigation by Hearst Connecticut Media helps answer the question. It’s the latest in a long, long line of stories across the country exposing hideous conditions in “residential treatment” – this time it’s the Albert J. Solnit Children’s psychiatric center. But consider one case the story examines: 

"Her behaviors are much worse, I would argue, in Solnit than they were when she was not hospitalized," [her attorney, Josh] Michtom said. "She's miserable now, and she wasn't miserable then." 

She is regularly placed on restriction and prevented from going outside when she misbehaves, he said. Her preferred language is Spanish, but Solnit has no Spanish-speaking clinicians, making it difficult for her to communicate, Michtom said. … 

She can't be released from Solnit until her behaviors improve, but Michtom says, her behaviors are unlikely to improve as long as she's there. 

"In this highly restrictive environment, she gets frustrated," he said. "So it's been a cycle of not being able to take her out of this restrictive environment because the restrictive environment itself provokes behaviors in her that lead to more restriction." 

A follow-up story looks further at this case.

Unfortunately, however, the solutions offered all focus on trying to make the institution bigger and better, instead of focusing on the issues raised in this other excellent Hearst Connecticut Media story: the need to stop taking children when their poverty is confused with neglect. 

Speaking of which ...

● NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on what really works to reduce child abuse tragedies – and what doesn’t:

Wrongful removal drives everything else. That’s why curbing it should be the first and foremost “way forward.” That requires more than heaving a sigh and saying, if only we made more use of the Family First Act — which, in fact, doesn’t allow funding the kinds of basic, concrete help most families need. It requires more than saying: We wish we had more preventive services but until then we’ll just have to hold children in foster care in a state with one of the worst reunification rates in America.

● Guests on this edition of The F Word podcast, include Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan discussing the lack of due process in family policing. 

● Last year in New Mexico, the governor issued a child confiscation at birth decree. Even as she was bragging that, supposedly as a result, no child had died, one child was dead – possibly as a consequence of that very approach. I have a blog post about it.

● Georgia Public Broadcasting reports on a judge’s decision to curb, slightly, the practice of the state family police agency of forcing parents to pay ransom to get their children back. But the ruling applies only to the most ludicrous cases. The general practice can continue. 

The lawyer representing the parent in this case points out that which is obvious to everyone except a vindictive family police agency: 

"The children were seized because of poverty in the first place," he said. "So then to turn around and bill those parents hundreds of dollars per month serves no purpose." 

● In The Conversation, Prof. Jennifer L. Brinkley of the University of Dayton writes about the harm done when family police agencies go after parents for letting their children exercise reasonable childhood independence: 

In my scholarship and in my work as a family lawyer, I’ve seen how overly broad child neglect laws can fail families. 

These statutes are being revisited as scholars, psychologists and journalists are increasingly finding fault with “helicopter parenting,” or overprotective parenting that limits children’s independence and autonomy. 

Yet cases like Parkinson’s suggest that when the boundaries of neglect are unclear, the law continues to give parents a powerful incentive to err on the side of constant supervision.

Was Skylar Magana a casualty of child-confiscation-at-birth in New Mexico?

 

Last year in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a child-confiscation-at-birth decree. Any child said to have been born exposed to certain substances is taken away on the spot, no matter what the circumstances. The rationale, of course, was the claim that it would save lives. In fact, for reasons discussed here, it is likely to lead to an increase in child deaths. The general failure of New Mexico’s plunge into foster-care panic is discussed here. 

Now it turns out that even as the governor was bragging that since the imposition of her decree no child has died, one child already was dead. And confiscation-at-birth might have been part of the reason why. 

Even before the official confiscation-at-birth edict, New Mexico’s family police agency, the Children Youth and Families Department, was glad to confiscate children at birth in these situations. That’s what happened to Skylar Magana when she was born in August of 2024. In May 2025 – just before the governor issued her edict, as it happens -- Skylar died, allegedly at the hands of her foster mother. The foster mother has been charged with intentional child abuse resulting in death. 

But her death has gotten almost no attention from New Mexico news media. Indeed, this story last week that touches on it – but de-emphasizes the circumstances – is only the second I can find in any mainstream New Mexico news outlet. The first, and a commendable exception, is this story from KOB-TV. 

Perhaps because the death of Skylar Magana calls into question the “master narrative”* of many New Mexico news organizations. 

Some news organizations practically swooned over the confiscation-at-birth directive. And some of them looooved it when the state’s foremost proponent of tearing apart families declared that “there is no other metric that matters.” 

One of the organizations that appears most keen on the confiscation-at-birth approach and on tearing apart more families in general is the Santa Fe New Mexican. Their reporter on this beat has managed to churn out scores of stories about child welfare without, as far as I can tell, even once including a comment from a birth parent. (I concede I might have missed one or two, so I emailed him yesterday morning (Oct. 19) to find out. So far, I have received no response.) 

In other words, a reading of his stories suggests that he views birth parents as so subhuman they can’t possibly have a perspective readers should know, and of course their children will be better off rushed into the arms of strangers, so let’s be sure readers never hear otherwise. 

That may explain why, in his story for the New Mexican, this reporter downplays the underlying facts in Skylar’s death.  Instead, the story focuses on CYFD’s refusing to turn over records to the lawyer representing Skylar’s estate in a wrongful death suit. Reporters love that issue since it touches on their own vested interests. 

Yes, the open records issue is in the public interest as well, and, when it comes to family policing, it’s especially in children’s interest. That’s why NCCPR has long favored a strong rebuttable presumption that almost all such records are open in all cases, not just fatalities or near fatalities. 

But it’s also in children’s interests not to effectively promote bad public policy that falsely equates child removal with child safety, allowing only occasional token dissent. And it’s journalistic malpractice when your biases are so blatant that you systematically shut out the perspective of parents who know how much their children are suffering when they are taken away when there are better, safer options.

*-The phrase “master narrative” was coined by the late William Woo, when he was editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "There are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")  Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story.  The best reporters seek out a wide variety of sources, including those who might challenge their master narrative. With some notable exceptions, most New Mexico reporters covering child welfare have not done that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 13, 2026

● The Imprint reports on the child welfare finance reform plan proposed by United Family Advocates, the group that represents true bipartisanship in child welfare. But the most revealing part of the story may be a comment from one of those who has “concerns”: 

Wendy Henderson, the former leader of Wisconsin’s child welfare agency said it was worth discussing reform ideas given the steep decline in foster children’s eligibility for Title IV-E reimbursement. But she questioned setting a baseline for new grants based on recent years, when foster care entries have been at a historic low. As recent changes to welfare cash assistance and food aid take effect, Henderson and others expect to see more families becoming involved with child welfare. 

In other words: More families will be poor – so we have to take their children! 

● See also UFA Executive Director Joanna Lack’s op-ed column in The Hill about the urgent need for this reform.

● Who really has mental health issues? Who has the real “behavioral problem” – the children who respond normally to being forced into hideous institutions and shelters and having to endure horrible conditions or the adults who force the children into these places and then rationalize their actions to themselves and the rest of us? Ella Bat-Ami offers remarkable insights on the first episode of the latest season of a podcast aptly called “The F Word.” As Bat-Ami puts it, “When you’re in foster care, your brain is perpetually on fire.” I have a blog post about her insights, with a link to the full podcast. 

● Bat-Ami said what made the biggest difference for her was 

having non-system-involved adults involved in my life … Most of what went right actually had nothing to do with the system doing the right thing; it was the community of Tennessee and my local community stepping up … 

Former foster youth said something remarkably similar as they spoke to NPR about the enormous harm they suffered as their mental health problems were misdiagnosed – and often worsened – as they were moved from one institution to another. Yes, occasionally they would find a helping adult who understood what they really needed. “But often, that key adult was someone totally outside the foster care system.” 

● Also on The F Word podcast, Lily Colby, another former foster youth who is founder of the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections, discussed the forced separation of foster children from their siblings, often for mind-bogglingly stupid bureaucratic reasons.  

● You’ve all heard Joyce McMillan’s call for people involved in “child welfare” to become mandatory supporters, not mandatory reporters.  New York City schools have taken an impressive step in that direction. 

Rachel Fee, a housing activist, got an email when her child was out sick. Instead of a threat to call the city’s family police agency, the email was a menu of ways various city agencies can help. Ms. Fee tweeted out the full email here and here’s a screenshot:

● Here’s a good rule of thumb when judging the accuracy of a news story. If someone whose agency has been exposed for allegedly doing awful things says at a community meeting: “The information and the reports that are out in the community are just factually wrong,” but then can’t name a single factual error, odds are the information and the reports that are out in the community are just factually right. Case in point: The Tampa Bay Times expose of hidden foster care, discussed in this follow-up story. 

● The Tampa Bay Times also took a broader look at the alleged reduction in the Florida foster care population  -- alleged because no one really knows how much is real and how much is, yes,  hidden foster care. 

● Imagine a law so manifestly just and necessary that even the current U.S. Supreme Court won’t overturn it, and won’t even hear the latest attempt to overturn it. The Imprint reports on the failure of the latest challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act. See also the statement from the Native American Rights Fund. 

● The Imprint also has another reminder of the ugly history that makes ICWA essential. 

This week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● From West Virginia Watch: 

Child victims in a gruesome abuse case have been awarded $4.4 million in a settlement with the state Department of Human Services due to Child Protective Services failures in the case.  

A white couple living in Sissonville, West Virginia, had kept their adopted Black children in deplorable conditions, treating them as slaves. Some of the children were forced to live in a shed without running water or a bathroom.

● From The Sun in San Bernardino County, California: 

Riverside County has agreed to pay more than $4.2 million to two siblings who alleged in a lawsuit that they were sexually abused in their foster home by a boy with a history of sexually deviant behavior. 

The settlement is just the latest in Riverside County resulting in a multimillion-dollar payout to families who accused county social workers of placing youths with documented histories of sexual abuse and/or sexually violent behavior into foster homes with children they subsequently abused.