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.”)
