NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 7, 2026

● A federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit in which a disabled couple alleges that the family police agency in metropolitan Pittsburgh tore their child away from them because of their disabilities. WPXI-TV reports that a lawyer for the family alleges that  “the county has an unconstitutional policy of terminating the familial rights of intellectually disabled parents.” 

But while only humans are named as defendants, if the case is not settled, an algorithm also will be on trial – perhaps the most notorious “predictive analytics” algorithm in family policing, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. Because this is the case in which, according to the family’s lawyers, a caseworker told the family their child was being taken because “The machine has labeled you as high-risk.” During the Biden Administration, the Associated Press reported, the U.S. Department of Justice also was investigating this case and others where AFST allegedly discriminated against the disabled. (I have no idea if that investigation is continuing; for obvious reasons, I doubt it.) There’s much more about the case here. 

● One of the most common excuses for needlessly tearing apart families is substance use by parents. The knee-jerk assumption is that any “drug abuse” endangers children – that is, if the alleged drug abuser is poor and especially if the alleged drug abuser is poor and nonwhite. (Whereas, presumably, tearing children from everyone they know and love and consigning them to the chaos of foster care is no problem.) In a comprehensive analysis, the Reason Foundation debunks the myths and offers better alternatives. 

● The problems cited in the Reason Foundation’s analysis are compounded by the very way stories are told within family police agencies. This was illustrated by an experiment in which more than 400 caseworkers in Poland read a case summary. In one version, the “voice” of the summary was that of a professional filing a report. In the other, the voice was that of a family member. In both cases, the facts presented to the workers were identical. Yet those who read the professional version reached more negative conclusions about the family. From the study: 

The findings indicate that apparently objective, professional descriptions of families are not impartial. Rather, they have the capacity to systematically amplify perceptions of risk while obscuring aspects of care, commitment, and potential for change that are characteristic of family life. This finding aligns with the findings of previous analyses of social work reports, which demonstrate that the concept of the “child at risk” is constructed through the use of selective description, deficit-focused language, and narrative choices rather than being a straightforward “discovery” based on the facts of the case.

● Compare that to how some former foster youth tell their own stories, as in this story from Honolulu Civil Beat: 

Patty Chin believes her life would have been very different if Hawaiʻi’s child welfare system worked the way it should. 

She landed in foster care at age 10, she said, because the state mistook the poverty in her mother’s chaotic home in Waiʻanae as a threat to the safety of Chin and her siblings. All six children were removed from the home, and Chin spent more than six years in Hawaiʻi’s foster care system. 

She was shuffled among half-a-dozen foster homes and a shelter, lost contact with her siblings for extended periods, and was sexually abused in one of the foster homes. Chin kept much of her ordeal a secret because she worried no one would believe her, and feared what might happen if she told. 

Chin believes she could have stayed home and avoided much of that suffering if her family had been helped before it was splintered. … 

● In Michigan, children were removed in a case where that was clearly the right call. But then, WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids reports, a private child welfare agency dropped the ball. Friends and relatives in other states were ready to step in and take the children, but the private agency never got around to the paperwork. 

● I’ve previously noted how, in Tennessee, the state family police agency wants formal permission to effectively jail any foster youth they don’t like. But some states aren’t waiting for permission. The Imprint has a story about a report issued by Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Virginia Rep. ​Jen Kiggans that finds many states already stash foster youth who have committed no crime in juvenile detention when they have no place else to put them. 

But, as has always been the case with Ossoff’s reports so far, he buys into the foster care establishment’s party line that the problem is too few foster homes, rather than too many foster children taken needlessly from their homes. As long as Ossoff keeps framing the issue that way, he can issue all the reports he wants, but nothing is going to change. 

● Throwing foster kids out of court is nothing to gloat about (even when it wasn’t a very good lawsuit that got them into court in the first place), and the fact that Asaka’s family police agency is gloating at kids’ expense says everything you need to know about that agency. I have a blog post about it. 

● And the New York University School of Law has published a great summary of a truly joyous event: The dedication of this year’s edition of NYU’s Survey of American Law to Prof. Martin Guggenheim, the founding father of the family defense and family advocacy movement (and a founder of NCCPR). The summary ends with a video of the full event.