What happens when the family police and their enablers in politics and journalism treat impoverished children and their families as sub-human? A story in The New Yorker has some answers.

A story in The New Yorker notes that “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have
 ‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” 

There is a standard line used by those most fanatical about tearing apart families and throwing the children into foster care. It comes from the worst of the advocates and politicians, and it’s eagerly quoted by the worst of the journalists. You hear it in an effort to roll back even the most modest reforms, and to justify foster-care panics, sharp, sudden increases in children torn from everyone they know and love in response to high-profile tragedies. 

The exact wording varies, but it’s some version of: Foster care isn’t perfect, but at least the children aren’t dead. 

The first thing to understand about this kind of statement is: It’s inaccurate. In typical cases, not the horror stories, children placed in foster care actually are more likely to die, and suffer severe, debilitating illness, than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. I’ll get to the details about that, and links to the various studies that prove it, below. 

But first, I want to turn to the part about “foster care isn’t perfect…” Anyone who uses that phrase is inherently unqualified to talk about foster care, because it is, in itself, an act of emotional abuse, a way to diminish and dismiss the inherent severe pain and trauma of removal as a mere imperfection. I don’t just mean the high rates of abuse in foster care itself. I mean the kind of routine trauma documented in a story published last week by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. 

The story deals with a class-action lawsuit against the family police agency in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, challenging their routine abuse of “emergency” power to literally, take-the-child-and-run, tearing children from the arms of their parents and throwing them into foster care without asking a judge for permission first. What do I mean by “literally”? As the story itself notes: “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have ‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” 

As The Imprint points out in its own story on the lawsuit, the practice isn’t limited to New York City. In fact, it’s probably worse elsewhere. There's also a good story in the New York Daily News.

But perhaps the most important contribution the New Yorker story makes, and what makes it so relevant everywhere, is the way it brings home the inherent trauma of removal, trauma that lasts long after the children are back home.  Here’s what it did to the children in the family of one of the named plaintiffs in the suit, children who never should have been taken away in the first place: 

They stayed in foster care for almost three years. The first set of foster parents found Jasmine too difficult to handle, so she was sent to another home without her brothers, then to a third home, and then a fourth. The various parents found her so troublesome that they repeatedly called 911. She was forcibly medicated; on about ten occasions, she was sent to psychiatric wards, something that had never happened when she lived with her family. Her mother was not allowed to visit her in the hospital. … 

The three years of separation and foster care will leave a permanent mark on the family. Daevon, who is five, fearfully apologizes to his mother if he does something wrong. … Jasmine withdraws much of the time. While she was away, she once threatened to hurt herself and said that she wished she were dead. She blames herself for things that happened to her in care. When Jeremiah, the middle child, who is seven, was in his foster home, he started pulling out his eyebrow hairs and wetting the bed. He now tells his mom that she is not a bad mother. 

And this is what happened to the children of the other named plaintiff; again, children who never should have been taken away in the first place: 

After A.C.S. conducted its emergency removal of Lorimer’s children … they were taken to the Children’s Center in Manhattan, a holding place for kids who have entered the system. The children were separated from each other and assigned to dormitories by age. It felt to them like a jail. (Many children say they have been assaulted there.) Zoe arrived carrying a spiral notebook that contained years of drawings; it was taken away because wire wasn’t allowed, and she never got it back. 

Although the most recent removal was shorter than the first, [Larimer] sees that her kids have been changed by it. The girls cling to her. Kayden cries when she leaves. Zoe fills her book bag with as many things as she can carry—extra clothes, her sisters’ stuffed animals. … 

Now imagine pain like this inflicted up to 175,000 times every year. That’s how often children are thrown into foster care – officially. It does not, of course, count hidden foster care* placements.  It is a tsunami of children’s suffering, routinely dismissed by the child welfare establishment and its enablers in politics and journalism. 

What does it really mean when they dismiss this pain as “foster care is not perfect” or (inaccurately, it turns out) some version of  “well, at least they’re not dead.” Can you imagine any of these same people being so sanguine if the family police pounded on their door and said: “We’re taking your children tonight. A child died on this block, so we’re just going to take every child on this block – just in case. After all, we don’t want your children to wind up dead.” 

But the enablers of foster-care panic, and those who oppose any effort to curb needless removal, are overwhelmingly middle-class professionals and disproportionately white. So they know full well that their children are largely immune from the harm caused by their own advocacy. It is extremely unlikely a family police agency caseworker will show up at their door at all, much less walk off with the children. 

What this really suggests is that, deep down, the overwhelmingly middle-class professionals who run these systems, govern these systems from statehouses, and write about them from newsrooms, don't really view these overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children, or their families as fully human. They are something less. The suffering of children like theirs somehow doesn’t count the way the suffering of children like ours counts. 

It reveals itself in so many ways: 

● The casual cruelty of never giving Zoe back her notebook – and the fact that even worse acts of cruelty, denying children whose parents were taken from them forever even mementos of their former lives, sometimes is routine. 

● The behavior of journalists in West Virginia – child removal capital of America - who can write 10,000 words about foster care with not one of those words coming from a parent whose children were taken, or from children saying they never needed to be taken. You can find similar behavior among some journalists in other states as well. 

● Or someone like Prof. Sarah Font, who’s actually suggested that older foster youth may be better off “aging out” with no home at all than being reunified or placed in guardianship with relatives, because, if they age out, they’ll get more financial benefits. 

As I’ve noted before, this attitude, that poor children, especially poor nonwhite children, don’t really suffer when taken from their parents, or at least not enough for it to matter, and all these suggestions that somehow love means less to them than to our children, reminds me of nothing so much as a notorious comment by Gen. William Westmoreland about Asians during the Vietnam War:  “'The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” Westmoreland said. “Life is cheap in the Orient." 

For the worst of the child welfare establishment, and their political and journalistic enablers, the lives of poor, nonwhite children and their parents are cheap indeed. 

Where are children more likely to die? 

That also may explain why this same establishment, and those same enablers, can’t even face up to the simple fact that their approach not only doesn’t save lives, it makes it more likely that more children will die. 

For starters, recall the massive study which found that tearing apart more families does nothing to curb child abuse deaths, and reducing foster care does nothing to increase them. 

But it’s even worse than that. An honest version of the statement about deaths in foster care would be: “…at least they’re not dead yet.” 

Because, as I’ve noted in previous posts, there is now a vast body of research from around the world showing how, in typical cases, children placed in foster care typically fare worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes on all sorts of measures – including premature death. 

So, for example, a Swedish study found that in typical cases, among maltreated children left in their own homes, 1.8% died by age 20. Among children facing the same level of maltreatment at home, when placed in foster care, 8.6% died by age 20. The foster youth were more than four times more likely to die. The most common cause of death: Suicide. 

And we’re not talking about dying at age 70 instead of age 80 – as though that wouldn’t be bad enough. We’re talking about dying before turning 21. 

Premature death is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more will suffer from serious illness and disability. 

There are so many similar studies measuring so many rotten outcomes for foster youth that it’s actually possible to project how many more children will die and will suffer such illness and disability due to a foster care panic, like the one in Santa Clara County, California right now, and how many lives have been saved in places such as New York City and New Jersey that have safely reduced needless foster care. 

So I wonder if Larissa MacFarquhar was really speaking to some of her fellow journalists when she wrote this: 

In the lawsuits against A.C.S., a legal victory may actually be less important than changing public perception, because the law as written isn’t the main problem: the problem is that A.C.S. isn’t following it. A.C.S. isn’t following it because public pressure is pushing it in only one direction. Insofar as most people know anything at all about child-protective services, they know that its caseworkers are people who rescue children from danger. They hear about A.C.S. only when this mission fails and a child ends up dead. Therefore, A.C.S. follows the mantra of “better safe than sorry,” where “safe” often means preventing the kind of harm to a child that A.C.S. might be blamed for, while discounting the harm of separating children from their families. An unpublished report in 2020 found that some A.C.S. staff “described an internal culture that operates on fear and intimidation. . . . This frequently means that staff err on the side of safety for themselves, by seeking removal.” 

This means sending into foster care thousands of children who would be better off with their parents. …  The litigators hope that the seizure lawsuit will bring public attention to unwarranted A.C.S. removals, because, if sufficient outrage can be generated, then “safe”—both for children and for A.C.S. staff—can be redefined. 

*=Some official placements and many hidden foster care placements are with relatives. Those typically inflict less pain. But those most extreme about tearing apart families also are among those most hostile to these kinship foster care placements.

Illustration by ChatGPT

How NYC’s reduction in foster care saves children’s lives; and Suffolk County’s foster-care panic puts those lives at risk

In addition to saving lives, the efforts of New York City and New Jersey to curb needless foster care
also saved thousands of children from other harm.

We all know the knee-jerk response whenever a child previously known to the New York City Administration for Children’s Services dies: “See?” goes the false claim. “See? It’s because the ACS has caved in to the ‘woke mob’ and has been taking fewer children from their families.” 

And now, after the discovery of the horrifying death of Jor'Dynn Duncan in the home of her father’s fiancé in nearby Suffolk County, we will hear that Suffolk County isn’t tearing apart enough families – even though the number of children in foster care in Suffolk County has increased by more than 30% since 2021. 

A massive study, involving 3.5 million records and more than 24,000 child abuse deaths, has demonstrated that the knee-jerk response is wrong. The study found that reducing entries into foster care caused no increase in child abuse deaths and increasing entries caused no decline in such deaths. 

But new research shows that the news is better than that – for New York City, and worse in Suffolk County. The new research, from Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendell of Pale Blue. and Family Seeing, demonstrates that New York City’s moves to curb foster care have saved children’s lives – probably an average of anywhere from 9 to 27 children per year. There were similar gains in New Jersey, which also has worked hard to safely reduce entries into foster care. 

Conversely, the recent increase in foster care in Suffolk County may have contributed directly to the death of Jor'Dynn Duncan and may contribute indirectly to more. 

Here’s what the research shows us: 

A vast scholarly literature from around the world has accumulated over decades, using various means to compare outcomes for children left in their own homes to comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care in typical cases – cases that are vastly more common than the horror stories and which often involve confusing poverty with neglect. 

The studies show that, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, the foster children typically fared worse on an enormous range of outcomes – including premature death. 

There are a variety of reasons for this. In some cases, it’s the high rate of abuse in foster care itself. But also, there is the enormous stress of removal itself. Being torn from everyone loving and familiar, taken away, sometimes literally kicking and screaming, is the ultimate “adverse childhood experience.” So it’s no wonder that, for example, a Swedish study comparing foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes found that the foster children were four times more likely to die by age 20 – and the most common cause of death was suicide. 

There now are enough data to calculate how many more children will die, and suffer serious disability, when a community endures a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden increase in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care. That happened in Suffolk County starting in 2022, and it may well happen again now. In a previous post, I discussed how this research has been applied to the foster-care panic now underway in Santa Clara County, California. 

Conversely, it’s possible to estimate how many children’s lives have been saved in places that have safely and systematically reduced foster care, as New York City has done. 

In New York City, the number of children in foster care has been cut from nearly 16,000 in 2010 to about 7,100 in 2022. The authors of the formula calculate that among the children who were not taken away, there are between 110 and 325 who would have died had they been taken.  Many more would have suffered serious health problems. 

Conversely, after the death of Thomas Valva in Suffolk County, there followed the usual knee-jerk reaction: a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden increase in the number of children taken from their homes. 

In addition to the enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, a foster care panic overwhelms workers, so they have less time to find children in real danger. That may have contributed to the failure to save Jor'Dynn. 

But also, we know from all that research that some of the children taken needlessly in Suffolk County because of the panic will suffer disability. Some will die prematurely. 

One factor the study could not take into account and might reduce the benefit from the reduction in foster care in New York City: The reduction in entries has come with a huge concomitant increase in onerous surveillance.  New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services may not take as many children, but they’ll still pound on doors in the middle of the night demanding entry, require children to be awakened and sometimes stripsearched. Even when the caseworkers leave, everyone knows they could come back and walk out with the children next time. As a result of this trauma, years later, some children run to hide in closets or under beds. I know of no comprehensive studies of the health effects of that kind of toxic stress.  

What needs to be done 

No, this does not mean that no child ever should be taken from her or his home. But it means all family police agencies need to be far more careful about which children they take, making sure to weigh the danger in the home and the risk of allowing the child to stay there against what the science tells us will happen to many of them if they are taken. This is why various laws across the country raising the threshold for removal to standards like “imminent risk of serious harm,” or some variation  - the very laws that give the take-the-child-and-run crowd fits – are essential to keep more children safe. 

Here are the other lessons in New York: 

● New York City needs to continue reducing the number of children in foster care – and it needs to reduce the scope of the child welfare surveillance state. 

● And New York City needs to resist the knee-jerk response to horror stories – no more foster-care panics. 

All that goes double for Suffolk County.

“Educational neglect”: When education bureaucrats and the family police team up to traumatize a family

Just reading about what Michelle Fraser had to do to get her son Jacob the special education services he needed and to which he was entitled under state and federal law is exhausting. To actually do what she did is a true testament to strength, resilience, and most of all a mother’s love for a son who is autistic, has epilepsy and is unable to speak. 

It happened year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year – every year from at least 2015 through 2023. The New York City public school system would deny Jabob the special education he needed and propose an alternative. Each year, Michelle Fraser would check out the school system’s proposed alternatives. One year, she even checked herself out of a hospital after major surgery to visit a school which, it turned out, didn’t have what Jacob needed – and didn’t have an opening for Jacob anyway. 

Each year, Fraser would appeal to an independent hearing officer. Each year, she would win her case. Jacob would get the education he needed to thrive.  Until the next school year, when it would start all over again. 

Apparently, this proved tiring for the school system, too.  But they had a secret weapon: The Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s family police agency. They allegedly filed a blatantly false report. The allegation against the mother who fought so hard to get her child an education: educational neglect. 

But Fraser wouldn’t back down. Even in the face of the investigation, which traumatized the entire family, Fraser kept fighting. And now, she’s the plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the Family Justice Law Center and two private law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, and Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC. 

Though Fraser is the named plaintiff, the lawsuit isn’t just about her case, because Fraser’s family is not the only one put through this hell. The lawsuit alleges that staff from the city’s Department of Education 

are reporting parents of students with disabilities in retaliation for their advocacy—to intimidate or coerce “difficult” parents into dropping their concerns about special education services or requests for placement in a different school. 

Even a former ACS attorney has said: 

 “If schools don’t get the parents to agree to what’s being recommended—not all the time, but sometimes—they will call ACS to pressure them.” 

And indeed, according to the lawsuit, in Fraser’s case, 

Defendants reported Plaintiff to the [New York State child abuse hotline], falsely and maliciously alleging that her son had not been attending school for years. Later, the reporter told an ACS caseworker that she had actually called the [hotline] because the “stalemate” with Plaintiff had “been going on too long” and her supervisor “wanted ACS involved.” 

This kind of behavior has been well documented for years in news accounts from, among others, The 74 and The Hechinger Report.  And not just in New York. The Hechinger Report stories document cases in Illinois as well as New York. Searchlight New Mexico documented the problem in that state. And the Boston Globe documented how such charges were used to harass families during the COVID pandemic - but not all families. 

Many states don’t even include “educational neglect” in the jurisdiction of their family police agencies. And, indeed, as far back as 2009, the respected Vera Institute of Justice said it should be drastically curbed, if not abolished, in New York as well. 

What is different now is that, thanks to the Family Justice Law Center and its partners, families can fight the entire regime of retaliation. 

What the lawsuit tells us about ACS 

Though ACS itself is not a defendant in the case, the lawsuit also reveals a lot about that agency’s failure, on several fronts. 

● First, ACS has refused to seek the state legislation that could have allowed it to refuse to be a party to DOE’s retaliation scheme. In New York, the state runs the child abuse hotline, but localities do the investigating. That creates a huge incentive for the state hotline to funnel b.s. reports on to the localities – making it someone else’s problem. 

One partial solution would be to allow localities to do their own screening, something that already happens for most cases in Pennsylvania, which has a similar system. 

But ACS has refused to ask the state for permission to do the same. Perhaps it just prefers to be able to pass the buck and say “the state made us do it” in cases like that of the Fraser family. 

● Second, ACS is fond of touting its version of “differential response” known as CARES. These cases supposedly get a kinder, gentler approach.  It’s not an investigation, they say, it’s just an “assessment.” 

When there’s a full-scale investigation, caseworkers ask children about the most intimate details of their lives, let everyone the family deals with know they’re under investigation for child abuse and search every room in their homes.

Let’s go back to the lawsuit Complaint to compare that to the Fraser case – which was assigned to the CARES track. 

Plaintiff received a call from her daughter, who was upset and said there was a strange man walking around outside their home. 

Plaintiff then discovered she had a voicemail from an ACS caseworker, Nikunj Patel. He was investigating a report that her son had not been attending school. 

Plaintiff immediately returned home with her son. Mr. Patel was still outside the house. Mr. Patel demanded to see every room in the house, including private outdoor areas where Plaintiff’s son liked to spend time as well as the bedrooms of both of Plaintiff’s children. He also said he needed to see the children’s medical records. 

The caseworker’s visit was very upsetting for Plaintiff’s son and caused him to cry in distress and retreat outside while the caseworker was in the home. 

Although this baseless ACS report concerned only Plaintiff’s son, the caseworker also interrogated her daughter, a competitive student athlete, with invasive questions about her family home, whether she felt undue parental pressure to engage in sports, and whether her mother ever yelled at her. 

After the visit, Plaintiff called the head of her daughter’s school, officials at the YMCA that hosts her son’s school program, and her children’s doctors to alert them that ACS may be contacting them, after the caseworker told her that he would be calling people who regularly interacted with the children. She felt embarrassed to have to tell people that she was being investigated for child neglect, and she experienced constant anxiety while the investigation remained pending. 

After a comprehensive investigation that included the home search and conversations with the children’s schools, doctors, and father, ACS found that no child abuse or neglect had taken place and raised no concerns about the children’s welfare. ACS closed the investigation. [Emphasis added.] 

Fraser’s daughter told the Daily News how it had all affected her: 

“I walked into school I think days later,” said Mia. “All I could think to myself was, I don’t want this to become a public thing. I don’t want my friends to know. I don’t want my teachers to know.” 

Years later, Mia, now 16, is more open about the experience — but she still thinks about the trauma that it caused. 

“I did mention it in one of my college essays,” she added. “One of my drafts was about the incident, and how all I could think about in the entirety of the situation was, what’s going to happen to my brother?” 

But hey, at least it was just an assessment and not an investigation, right? 

Still, the “assessment” did lead to one useful bit of information. Again, from the lawsuit complaint: 

During an initial call, the ACS caseworker asked the psychologist the reason for not reporting Plaintiff’s son’s absence from school until June 2023, if he had not been in school since 2016.

The caseworker documented the psychologist’s response: that Plaintiff “has taken legal action against DOE, she has constantly requested Re-evaluations, and Impartial hearing” and that Plaintiff has a legal background and “is very by the book, and strict in her speaking.” 

Another failure for the “training” panacea 

No matter how much harm family police do to families, no matter how egregious their behavior, they will insist everything can be fixed with “more training.” They’ve been saying that for decades, and during that time, the child welfare surveillance state has grown to its current massive proportions. 

Yet both ACS and DOE insist that the harm done to the Fraser family and so many others can be fixed with more training. Let’s return to the lawsuit complaint to see how that’s working out: 

Defendant DOE has acknowledged that educators have been overreporting to the [child abuse hotline]. Since the report against Plaintiff, DOE has begun work with ACS to develop a training module indicating that reports to ACS in retaliation for advocacy are unlawful and encouraging staff to check their biases and connect families with services. … 

OK, let’s just stop there. DOE says its employees need special training to know it’s against the law (not to mention morally wrong) to call in a child abuse report as an act of retaliation? Really? 

The training material also informs DOE employees that “Just because you disagree with a parent’s decisions or actions does not mean a child is being abused or maltreated.” And the new material reminds employees that there is an actual DOE regulation prohibiting retaliation. 

However, as the Complaint points out 

There is no evidence to indicate that the updated guidance and trainings have resulted in a decrease in retaliatory reports from educators against parents who advocate for services. Indeed, upon information and belief, some DOE employees have continued to retaliate against parents who advocate for their children with disabilities even after DOE began training staff in fall 2023 that “a call to the SCR is an option of last resort.” 

No, training isn’t going to do the job. But a hefty damage award in this lawsuit might.

Child welfare in New York: “Despicable” them.

That’s just one of the choice words appellate court justices applied to the behavior of the New York City family police agency during oral argument last week.

Imagine being 11 years old. You’ve moved with your brother and your mother to a new state to start a new life in a new school. Suddenly, armed sheriff’s deputies are marching through the halls, calling out your name. When they find you, all your new friends can see as they bring you to a semi-public place to interrogate you.  

Now imagine it’s Christmas morning. You’re at home celebrating, family are visiting. Suddenly the armed sheriff’s deputies are back, pounding on the door, loudly calling out that they’re there because there’s a child welfare agency case against your mother.  They demand entry, “observe” you and your brother and search the entire apartment, all in front of the guests. 

Of course, it’s all ok because a “child welfare” agency would only do this when parents are accused of beating or raping children, right?  Well, OK, maybe they’d also do it if parents were accused of starving children, or running a drug lab in a basement, right?  But they’d never, ever inflict so much trauma on children whose parents were accused of doing nothing to them at all – would they? 

Of course they would. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time. But last week, in a scene that played out like the climax of a courtroom drama, one mid-level appellate court judge pledged that, at last, in one state, in at least one type of case, it will no longer be tolerated. She called the behavior of the agency in question, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), “despicable.”  

Said Presiding Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels: 

The issue here is that this woman has done nothing wrong, but she's being treated like a criminal, and her children are being retraumatized again and again. That's the issue here, and that's going to be put to a stop! 

You can see it all in the video above of oral argument in the case, known as Matter of Liam M. The argument starts at 2:22:22 in.  If you follow this link  it goes a little past that, to 2:38:00. That's the point where, at long last, an agency which normally is accountable to no one, finally is held to account for what it has done to so many children. 

Lawyers sometimes refer to judges who ask a lot of questions as a “hot bench.” This one was on fire. That requires some explanation. 

The context 

More than 20 years ago, a federal court barred ACS from tearing apart families and throwing children into foster care just because a parent, usually the mother, was herself a survivor of domestic violence. New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, effectively extended that statewide. (NCCPR’s Vice President, Carolyn Kubitschek, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in that landmark case, which has been cited scores of times across the country in the intervening years.) 

Of course this didn’t stop the practice completely, but it curbed it. But the response from ACS could be summed up as: Oh yeah? Maybe we can’t take the kids, but we can still harass families with endless supervision and surveillance as much as we want! 

Two recent appellate court decisions stopped ACS from doing this at an early stage in the process. To which ACS effectively responded: Oh yeah? Maybe you can stop us early on, but we can still harass families with endless supervision and surveillance at later stages in the case! 

That brings us to the case argued last week. 

The facts of the case 

What might prompt such questioning from the justices? 

Here’s the backstory, as recounted in the brief for the mother, known as Ms. C., submitted by the Family Justice Law Center and the New York University School of Law (quotes in blue) and in oral argument, mostly from the Legal Aid Society, which represented not the mother, but the children (quotes in green). (And, lest there still be any question who really is on the side of protecting children here, they were supported, through amicus briefs, by, among others, Children’s Rights, Lawyers for Children, who do what the name implies, and the National Association of Counsel for Children.) 

The family is from Florida. They moved to New York to be close to the children’s grandmother, who was suffering from cancer. They moved to a New York home that the mother owned with her ex-husband. On one occasion, the ex got violent with her in front of the children. The mother did everything right, immediately calling the police and then getting all the court orders she needed to kick the father out of the house and keep him out. He followed those orders to the letter. 

The father consented to a finding of neglect against him. The mother was never charged with anything, and, indeed, ACS records repeatedly attest to the fact that she took excellent care of the children.  Eventually, she and the children moved back to Florida. So any supposed “threat” from the father was now 1,300 miles away. 

But through it all, ACS repeatedly demanded that the mother and the children be under their surveillance and control, and the Family Court repeatedly rubber-stamped those requests. The only grounds ever given for this surveillance: the father had not yet jumped through all the hoops in his case plan. 

Here’s what this did to the family: 

ACS monitored Ms. C.’s care of her children for more than five months, conducting numerous announced and unannounced searches of her home, from which the respondent father remained judicially barred. Caseworkers searched every room in the apartment during every home search. They even repeatedly inspected inside the refrigerator. 

I keep wondering: Did ACS think the father was hiding in the fridge?  

When ACS said, “Jump!” the family immediately had to say, “How high?” If they weren’t home when the caseworker was at the door, they had to drop everything and race back there – even when they were visiting their grandmother, sick with cancer. 

When the family moved back to Florida, things actually got worse. ACS went high-tech, demanding the right to virtually enter the home at any time and surveil every room (and, yes, the refrigerator again) by video. But that wasn’t enough for them. They recruited armed Florida sheriffs to inspect the family in person, and not just at home. As the children’s lawyer told the court, and the brief explains, one of the children 

was at school with her new schoolmates, and these unformed people with guns come, like, running into the school, calling out her name and saying they're there on behalf of ACS. They take her out of class. They interview her in a quasi-public space. Kids she wanted to be friends with saw. 

She began “shaking and crying with embarrassment and rage” and “yelling at the sheriffs to leave her alone.” 

She was so humiliated and mortified, her mother had to come to school to take her off campus. She couldn't even calm down. She was so upset. 

And after that, it was hard for her to even come back to school. But when she did come back … she started having problems that she had never had before. She started having behavioral problems. She started getting in fights. … 

She's finally doing better now, but it took a while. It took a really long time. 

And then, two months later, this happened: 

On Christmas morning, ACS sent armed sheriffs to Ms. C.’s apartment. In public outside the apartment building, the sheriffs loudly announced that they were there because of a children’s services case against Ms. C. and demanded to see her children. The sheriffs observed Liam and Sari and searched the apartment. Ms. C. had family over for the holiday and testified that the law enforcement search was “humiliating.”… 

Ms. C. felt “constantly threatened” that she would lose her children if she did not comply, a possibility that kept her awake at night. As she explained, “I [felt] like I left one abuser for another. …  ACS use[d] methods of control, including sending sheriffs to my apartment, to remind me that they’re in charge.” 

[The children] felt “watched and controlled” by ACS, and were “embarrassed and frightened” by sheriffs demanding to see them at school and at home … They implored the caseworker directly: “we don’t want to talk to you, don’t call us.” 

Even a family court judge overseeing the case said: 

“[I]t bothers me that ACS reached out to the Florida law enforcement authorities that put [Ms. C.] and her children through . . . these embarrassing ordeals.” 

But the judge let ACS keep on doing it anyway. 

Now, however, some appellate justices are making clear they’re not going to tolerate such “despicable” behavior.

NCCPR in the New York Daily News: How the Daily News changed NYC’s child welfare

A half century ago today, child welfare reform began when the Daily News stunned the city with the first installment of a six-part series about the system by reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain, headlined “Big Money, Little Victims.”

Then as now, New York City has a harmful child welfare system. While foster care has declined, children still are taken needlessly. And a massive child-welfare surveillance state remains, with children still tormented by needless investigations and stripsearches, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. The time wasted on these cases is stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

But the New York City system also does far less harm than its counterparts almost everywhere else, and it is far less harmful than it used to be. ACS now tears apart families at half the rate of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Phoenix. 

Many organizations and visionary leaders contributed to this transformation, and continue to fight the system’s ongoing harm. But a good case can be made that the progress began 50 years ago this week with a stunning work of journalism. …

Read the full commentary in the Daily News

NCCPR in the New York Daily News: Can ACS stand up to foster care panic?

 In 2011, Joette Katz stepped off the Connecticut Supreme Court to take a far more difficult job: running the state Department of Children and Families, Connecticut’s equivalent of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. 

Within months, the death of a child “known-to-the-system” made headlines. As happened at least twice previously, there were calls to tear apart more families, and enormous pressure on Katz to tell her workers to do just that. In past years, her predecessors had caved. Katz did not. 

“I think in the past that’s been exactly the mistake, frankly,” Katz said at the time. “A child dies and the next thing you know workers are getting thrown under the bus and 500 children get removed [from their homes] the next day because it’s a reaction to a tragedy. I think that’s the exact wrong way to behave.” That’s why, at the time, I called Katz the gutsiest leader in child welfare. 

Now ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser will face the same pressure. Will he have the same kind of guts? Children’s lives may depend on it — literally. ...

Read the full column in the Daily News

UPDATED: New York’s structure for screening child abuse reports guarantees one thing: mutually-assured buck-passing. The Legislature should change that.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2018

The State Assembly holds a hearing Oct. 9 that could be a first step in the right direction

Last March, the New York City Family Policy Project, an essential resource, and not just for New Yorkers, published a comprehensive report on the harm done by the state’s child abuse hotline, which is run by the state Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS).  The report found that New York screens out false reports at a far lower rate than most states. That causes havoc for families wrongly investigated, and deluges workers with so many false reports they have less time to find the few children in real danger. 

Responding to the Family Policy Project report, the State Assembly Committee on Children and Families announced it will hold a hearing on the issue on Oct. 9.  

I hope they will zero-in on one nearly unique element in the New York system that makes it particularly destructive: a built-in incentive for what should be called mutually-assured buck-passing. Only one other state has the structural problem New York has built into its process.  I also hope the legislature will take a look at some relevant history, both recent and ancient. 

The structural problem 

In most states, the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) is a state agency.  That state agency runs the hotline and that state agency does the investigations and takes away the children.  In 10 states,* the investigating and family-separating is a local government function.  But in five of those states, including California and Minnesota, the localities typically run the hotline as well, while in three more, localities can screen most or all reports sent from the state hotline. 

Only one other state, North Dakota, does it in the awful way New York does it: 

In New York, all calls alleging child abuse and neglect go to the statewide hotline run by OCFS.  They then send the reports they screen-in to localities to investigate.  The localities have no choice – if the state hotline sends it, the locality must investigate it. 

And it sure seems like, at least in New York City, they want to keep it that way.  The reason for that has to do with safety – no, no, not safety for the children, safety for the city family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). 

Over and over again, when ACS needlessly investigates and traumatizes an innocent family, the
agency’s commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, says something like: We didn’t want to wreak havoc on this family; the state made us do it!  

The state, for its part, has an incentive to send huge numbers of reports to the localities.  After all, if the hotline wrongly screens out a report and later there’s a tragedy, the state agency gets the blame.  This may well be a key reason the New York hotline wrongly screens in so many cases. 

Meanwhile, ACS speaks often of the need for better training so mandatory reporters don’t phone in false reports, (but since they’re mandatory reporters, they still may be afraid not to report) and ACS is piloting some supports in schools to encourage those reporters to seek alternatives to calling the hotline.  But Commissioner Dannhauser has never publicly called for the Legislature to simply give ACS the power to screen out false reports sent to his agency by the OCFS hotline. 

And no wonder: If ACS were to get that power, screen out a report, and then there’s a tragedy  – well, you know. 

Hence, mutually-assured buck-passing. 

I figure Dannhouser is likely to testify at the Oct. 9 hearing.  I hope one of the lawmakers asks him this question: You keep blaming the state hotline for forcing you to investigate reports you know are b.s.  Why have you never asked us for a law allowing you to screen out those reports yourself?  (And if the legislators don’t, I hope a reporter covering the hearing will.) 

UPDATE, OCT 10. WHAT HAPPENED AT THE HEARING:

On the one hand, for the first time I know of, Dannhauser made some noises about wanting some power to screen calls after they are received from the hotline. 

 However, Dannhauser is a master of calculated ambiguity.

 All he really said in his prepared testimony is that the state should consider creating a system in which localities would submit a plan that OCFS would then have to approve which would allow ACS to "conduct an expedited and less intrusive review of the allegations." He seemed to go a little further in answer to questions – or did he?  But this is certain: At no time did he call for simply giving his own agency the power to screen out reports it deems to be false.  It doesn’t sound like he wants to give up the power ACS truly covets: the power to pass the buck.

As I said, only North Dakota does it the way New York does it.  There also are two hybrid states.  In Colorado, there’s a state hotline and local hotlines.  Most calls go directly to the local hotlines which, of course, can screen reports. Pennsylvania has a state hotline that passes on calls to local family police agencies.  But, unlike New York, those local agencies have discretion to screen out almost all reports alleging “neglect” – which are, of course, the overwhelming majority of reports. Pennsylvania localities are not allowed to screen out reports alleging abuse or “severe neglect” – but this still is an improvement over New York’s approach. 

Pennsylvania also teaches something else: Giving localities the authority to screen won’t work miracles. Both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh take away proportionately far more children than New York City – and Pittsburgh decided to screen in the worst possible way – using “predictive analytics.” 

So why make the change? For starters, just taking away ACS’ excuse and making localities accountable for launching needless, harrowing investigations of families would be worth it. 

But also: right now, New York localities have to investigate 100% of the reports sent to them by the hotline.  If they get the authority to screen and wind up investigating 90% of the reports instead of 100% that’s still an improvement. And there’s nothing to stop OCFS from using predictive analytics at the state level should it so choose. 

Even without a law, it is possible to change regulations to allow for a kind of “circuit breaker” in which localities would have the authority to stop an investigation at a very early stage if the report never should have been sent to them in the first place. 

Also, there’s a more encouraging lesson from a county in Upstate New York. 

The relatively recent history 

At one time, two Upstate counties, Monroe (metropolitan Rochester) and Onondaga (metropolitan Syracuse) ran their own hotlines.  In Monroe County that was true until 2015 when, in the wake of a child abuse death, the state took that authority away.  Showing notably more courage than their New York City counterparts, Monroe County officials actually asked for that authority back. But, in a remarkably nasty response, the state OFCS said no – because, they said, when Monroe had its own hotline they screened out too many calls.  

Well, OCFS sure “fixed” that problem! Once the state took over, the number of screened-in calls skyrocketed. 

The ancient history 

All the way back in 1987, the (long-since defunct) New York State Legislative Commission on Expenditure Review gave hypotheticals to 23 hotline operators, 12 at the state hotline in Albany, eight in Onondaga County and three in Monroe County.  In each case, they asked: Screen-in or screen-out?  

The results: Big differences between Monroe County, Onondaga County and state hotline screeners (at that time the Monroe County operators were far more likely to screen-in reports) and no consistency among the state hotline operators. 

In one case, for example, all the Monroe County operators said screen it in, almost all the Onondaga County operators said screen it out, and the 12 operators at the state hotline split: 8 yes, 4 no. 

There is no reason to think the hotline is any less arbitrary, less capricious or less cruel today. 

Improving that will require a better screening tool and yes, operators will have to be trained in how to use it, and others will have to be trained to be sure they are using it correctly.  But beware of the use of “training” as a copout. Because in addition to being invoked when it’s needed, it’s also invoked – endlessly – as a way to avoid real change.  Training is no substitute for due process. 

So if you’re in Albany on Oct. 9, please be extra careful on the roads.  Because if anyone suggests a drinking game based on how often some family police official at the hearing uses the word “training,” you can expect a lot of drunk driving. 

*-Nine states are fully local. I also count Wisconsin, since the state runs child welfare in only one county, albeit the largest, Milwaukee.  I do not count Nevada, where the state runs the system everywhere except the largest county Clark County (metropolitan Las Vegas)

Is this guy the most helpless “child welfare” leader in America? His own comments suggest the answer is yes.

New York City Administration for Children's Services
Commissioner Jess Dannhauser

UPDATE: SEE ACS'S RESPONSE AT THE END OF THIS POST

Poor Jess Dannhauser.  The head of New York City’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, says he’s really, truly concerned (though apparently not much more) about all those families and children traumatized by needless investigations and strip-searches resulting from all those false allegations, trivial cases or cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”

But sheesh, all that whining!  Over and over again he offers the same response: It’s not my fault!  That mean old state government makes us do it!  And yet, Dannhauser ignored the obvious solution.  That should make us wonder if he really just wants to keep things as they are. 

The latest example to emerge from Dannhauser’s whine cellar is a letter to the editor in the New York Daily News.  That newspaper published an excellent commentary from the city’s family defense providers calling on the City Council and/or the State Legislature to pass a “Family Miranda” law – requiring ACS to tell families their rights.  Because if you don’t know your rights, you don’t have your rights. 

Dannhauser (or some flack in the ACS p.r. department) wrote a letter to the editor that regurgitated his standard excuse.  He writes: 

Anyone can make a report to New York State’s child abuse hotline. If a call about a New York City child is accepted by the state, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is required by state law to respond to allegations and assess the safety of the child. ACS can’t choose which families to respond to but must, under law, respond to reports the state accepts. 

He continues: 

A Black child is seven times more likely than a white child to be in a report to the hotline. This is concerning. 

Let me interrupt here: just "concerning"? 

ACS can’t control calls made or reports accepted, 

Yes, you already said that. 

so we have been retraining mandated reporters on when to appropriately make a report and when, instead, they should connect the family to support. 

Because training is what you do when you don’t want to make real change. 

Here’s what Dannhauser never mentions.  Laws can be amended.  If he doesn’t want to be “required by state law” to do something, why doesn’t he go to the New York State Legislature and ask them to change the law? 

Perhaps if I say that more slowly ACS will understand: Ask. Them. To. Change. The. Law. 

Perhaps I need to say it louder: Ask. Them. To. Change. The. Law. 

The change would be simple: Authorize ACS and its county counterparts across the state to set up their own mechanisms to screen calls and decide if they need to be investigated. 

Of course, asking for such a change doesn’t mean he’ll get it.  But not asking guarantees he won’t.  So I figure there are three possible explanations: 

● It never occurred to him to ask.

● He’s asking but it’s top secret because he wants it to be a surprise and he hates spoilers.

● He likes things the way they are because they enable Maximum Feasible Buckpassing. 

I’m thinking it’s the third one. Because it so benefits both ACS and the state agency that runs the hotline, the Office of Children and Family Services.  That means it also benefits the mayor and the governor.  Here’s why: 

As things stand now, the state has an incentive to screen out fewer cases, since all those false reports become the localities’ problem.  The localities get to go full Dannhauser and say: It’s not our fault that we traumatized all these families with needless investigations and strip-searches, the state made us do it!  And both are in a position where it’s less likely they’ll wind up on the front page of the New York Post for wrongly screening something out.  In short, it works for everyone – except the children and families. 

Oh, and by the way: Nothing Dannhauser wrote in his letter is a reason not to pass family Miranda legislation.  On the contrary, if Dannhauser really believes that often his investigators shouldn’t be knocking on families’ doors at all, isn’t that more reason to make sure those families know their rights? 

The consequences were perfectly illustrated in a new report from the NYC Family Policy Project.  The report found that New York State screens out, proportionately, far fewer reports than the national average. 

As The Imprint reported: 

The report quotes several parents by first name. Cynthia said that as her CPS investigation dragged on, she couldn’t concentrate at work and eventually lost her job. Her 3-year-old daughter “was so nervous being interrogated by strangers so many times that she started behaving irregularly.” A mom identified as Ruth said she went through five years of “malicious calls,” leaving her anxious and depressed. 

“My daughter wet the bed for three years straight,” she stated. “There has to be some mechanism put in place so you’re not destroying families.” 

Among the report’s many great recommendations: 

“Enabling ACS and county agencies to have discretion to screen out reports” 

It’s not just Jess Dannhauser who needs to answer a question.  Reporters have published his don’t-blame-me-the-state-makes-us-do-it whine over and over.  Why has no reporter ever asked Dannhauser why Dannhauser doesn’t seem to have asked the Legislature to change the law?

UPDATE: I just had an interesting email exchange with an ACS flack:  Here it is, in full:

Kaufman, Marisa (ACS)	2:52 PM (6 minutes ago)

Hi Richard,

We saw your blog post today.  We are not asking you to make any changes.  We did want to be sure that you were aware that the Commissioner has asked for there to be a review and changes to the state laws related to the SCR. 

 

As an example, please see our testimony (attached) from the September 2023 Assembly hearing where at the top of page 4 he says, “ We believe that the State should conduct a full review and assessment of SCR practice and policies, as well as mandated reporter laws, and then take actions (legislative or otherwise) to address.”

 

In addition, in the Imprint article about the hearing it says:

 

At a public hearing last fall, the head of New York City’s children’s services agency, Jess Dannhauser, said state leaders should conduct a “full review and assessment” of the Statewide Central Register of Abuse and Maltreatment, including a potential overhaul of the relevant statutes.

“We cannot make sufficient progress within the current laws that were written over 50 years ago,” Dannhauser said.

Thanks,

Marisa Kaufman

ACS Division of External Affairs

AND HERE'S MY RESPONSE:

Richard Wexler	2:58 PM (3 minutes ago)
to Marisa

I am well aware of that.  Asking for "a full review and assessment" is like asking for "more study," which is another classic copout.  It is not the same thing as going to key legislative leaders and saying: Can you please introduce and pass a law that lets us screen reports.  Why won't you do that?