NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Oct. 28, 2025

Before the week in review, a note about a new resource from NCCPR: The Good Bill Bank has links to excellent legislation from around the country aimed at curbing the vast power of the family police. Take a look and see what might work in your state. 

● Last week, I highlighted a study, the author of which described its key finding as “staggering.” This study, from Sweden, found that, by age 20, children who had endured foster care were more than four times more likely to die than children left in their own homes. And no, the children placed in foster care did not suffer worse maltreatment or have worse problems beforehand. The cause wasn’t what happened before foster care. The cause was foster care. 

The major cause of death: suicide. A tragic illustration can be found in Baltimore. In the Baltimore Sun, Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore wrote about the real roots of these tragedies and what can be done about them. 

● Every once in a while, family policing systems give us a peek into the depths of their cruelty. A story in The Imprint gave us such a peek last week. It’s about the Georgia family police agency’s response to a lawsuit demanding that it stop making parents pay ransom to get their kids back. (Oh, they call it “child support,” but when you take away someone’s child against their will and then make the parents pay money to get the child back, obviously, the proper term is “ransom.”) 

The Georgia family police agency response included this: 

 “All parents have a duty to support their children,” a duty that is not “performed only at the voluntary pleasure or whimsical desire of the parent.” 

The story also notes that, even as the lawsuit is pending, the mother “continues to receive letters threatening jail time if she doesn’t pay off her accumulating debt.” 

● Given how the Georgia family police agency behaves, it’s no wonder nonprofit organizations have to cobble together a patchwork of support and work with those caseworkers who really do want to do the right thing, whenever they want to keep children out of family police clutches. From The Imprint, here’s one example. And another. And another. 

That last one includes a reminder of why an omnipresent child welfare surveillance state backfires: 

Months later, she said she had refused our help at first because she feared that accepting assistance from anyone connected to CPS might jeopardize reunification. She added that what she needed — but was afraid to ask for — was recovery support and connection to a healthy community, plus help with a car repair to keep work and court appointments. 

● Child abuse pediatricians allegedly are at it again – this time in Indiana. And once again, a news organization, this time WRTV Indianapolis, goes beyond that immediate issue to explore larger failings in the family policing system. 

● Welcome to Sacramento County, California, where the family police will take an infant away from his mother in the midst of breastfeeding – and later, threaten to cancel visits if the mother didn’t stop crying. Afro LA has a story about a program intended to stop situations from escalating to that point – and about the enormous difficulties getting it funded under the so-called Family First Act. 

There’s better news from New York on two fronts: 

● In June, the online publication Documented told the story of two Asian families that the New York City Administration for Children’s Services and its contracted agencies tried to destroy. For one, it was too late, but the other family – and all vulnerable children – won a huge victory in the form of a landmark decision from New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. The court reversed the termination of a child’s rights to his father (a more accurate way to look at it than termination of parental rights).  As the Center for Family Representation, which represented the father, said: 

As the Court noted, "[e]conomic challenges, like those experienced by father, are often the most difficult to overcome because lack of financial resources may be at the root of other barriers to reunification." As a result, the Court held that agencies have a responsibility to assist parents with economic challenges when they present a barrier to reunification. 

● The NYC Family Policy Project reports on two policy changes since 2020 that are helping children and families: The city’s public hospitals no longer test pregnant and postpartum women for drugs without their consent, and, when it’s necessary, hospitals and other institutions are doing more to connect mothers directly to help instead of turning them in. 

The result, says the report:

 -- ACS cases involving newborns fell almost 50% between 2017-2024. 

-- Newborn foster care entries also fell by 37% between 2019-2023. 

-- For infants, ACS involvement fell less dramatically but substantially, with reports dropping by approximately 20% from 2019-2023 and foster care entries declining by 23%. 

There is no evidence that newborns and infants are less safe because of reduced ACS involvement. Child maltreatment fatalities of children under 6 months and under 1 are rare in NYC and have remained stable since 2017. 

● But the lesson hasn’t been learned everywhere. WXIA-TV Atlanta reports on how, back in Georgia, non-consensual drug testing and calling the family police at the drop of a hat combine to cause misery for children and families. 

● The Imprint reports on youth and family advocates who brought the case against the American family policing system to the United Nations. 

● One often reads stories about a “shortage” of caseworkers. In fact, the problem almost always is not too few caseworkers, it’s too many children needlessly investigated and placed in foster care. That’s especially true in Alaska, which, for decades, has torn apart families at one of the highest rate in America. 

So KTOO-TV took a different look at issues involving caseworkers: The disconnect between their background – overwhelmingly white – and the background of the children and families – overwhelmingly Alaska native, and the fact that the state family police agency doesn’t seem to give a damn. 

The story quotes an email from an agency flak in which she writes that the agency 

“does not view this as a ‘concern’ in the sense of a problem to be fixed, but it does guide our efforts to provide culturally responsive care.” 

Yeah. That sure seems to be going well.