NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 9, 2025

● I’m not sure how to talk about this first item without sounding all clickbaity, but what happened in a New York appellate court late last week really did play out almost like the climactic scene in a Hollywood movie. It was oral argument in the latest in a string of cases concerning the New York City family police agency harassing survivors of domestic violence and their children.  Fortunately, it’s all on video. I have a blog post about the case, with a link to the video.

● New York State’s highest court is sending a similar message. I’ve often written that, in much of the country, families would get about as much “representation” from a cardboard cut-out in a three-piece suit as they get from the overloaded court-appointed lawyers who may meet them for the first time five minutes before the court hearing. That can happen even when it’s a hearing to terminate children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate description of the stakes than “termination of parental rights”). The Imprint reports on a case in which the New York State Court of Appeals said that’s not good enough. 

Perhaps most notably, when a lawyer defending the termination tried to play the bonding card, the court didn’t buy it. From the story: 

“There is no question that it is very important and imperative that these cases be resolved in a speedy fashion,” [Judge] Troutman said during the appeal proceedings. “But we cannot throw the Constitution in the garbage with respect to people’s rights in order to get there.” 

● One hopes the message all these judges are sending will reach all across the nation, or at least across New York, including to Rochester, where, writing in the Rochester Beacon, a mother describes what happened when she fought for a better education for her son, and the school retaliated by calling the family police agency: 

As a Black parent, I do not feel safe asking for the support I need. I fear I will be met with accusations and racialized surveillance. For Jeremiah, he becomes very anxious when asked personal questions—especially from those in authority positions. He fears threats of being removed from his environment. The reality is, we were both traumatized by our interactions with CPS. 

● Study after study keeps showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better even than children alleged to be comparably maltreated but placed in foster care.  Most recently, there was that Swedish study showing that, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to have died. But there’s an even more fundamental question: Why have we allowed foster-care apologists to reverse the burden of proof? My column in The Imprint: Safer Compared to What? Foster care apologists set an incredibly low bar — and still can’t clear it 

● Remember the expose of horrible conditions in residential treatment in Arizona and Kentucky and Tennessee and Indiana and Utah and Iowa and Oklahoma and Rhode Island and Washington State and Arkansas and New York and Connecticut, and Idaho? 

Now, thanks to excellent reporting from The Marshall Project – Cleveland, add Ohio. In the follow-up story, in which various officials shoveling children into the institution tell us how shocked – shocked! -- they are, a spokesperson for metropolitan Cleveland says that now, after all the abuse has been exposed, and they need to find someplace to put all those children, “reunification also is a priority.”

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions:

In 2003, Dewey Sloan, then the chief juvenile prosecutor in an Iowa county where Native American children were in foster care at a rate seven times higher than the rate for white children told the Des Moines Register, "I don't think there's anything in any of these cases that points to something positive about Indian culture, except the culture of drugs and the culture of poverty and the culture of abuse." 

Five years later, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reports, Sloan’s office got a judge to terminate the rights of a family of Native American children to live with their mother. Here’s what happened next, according to a lawsuit filed by one of the children, now an adult: 

In 2009, when [Mikalla Starr] Winkel was 4 years old, she and two of her siblings were placed in the foster home of Norman and Cammie Winkel of Sioux City – a couple who had no connection to the Santee Sioux Nation or any other Native American community. 

According to the lawsuit, at the time of the foster-home placement Norman Winkel was a former prison inmate who “had an extensive drug-related criminal history with five drug convictions, including a felony for which he received a 25-year prison sentence.” 

In 2010, Winkel was legally adopted by the couple. The lawsuit alleges that while Mikalla lived in the home, Norman Winkel “began to exhibit grooming behaviors toward Mikalla,” and then, as she matured, the “grooming escalated to sexual assault, including fondling, mutual touching, and sexual assault in the foster home.” The alleged sexual abuse “continued for multiple years,” according to the lawsuit.