The Los Angeles Times is getting child welfare wrong again – and that’s bad news for Los Angeles children

Garrett Therolf was among those speaking at a Los Angeles Times
"Ask a Reporter" event on January 20. Questions were screened in advance.

As usual it's because of Garrett Therolf. The former Times reporter and still their go-to guy for child welfare stories continues to soft-peddle racial bias.  Now he’s campaigning for the use of computerized racial profiling – a.k.a. predictive analytics.  He’s even effectively blaming readers for his own failings as a journalist. 

First of two parts Read part two here.

Remember Garrett Therolf?  He’s a former Los Angeles Times reporter and current Times contributor via his current job with the University of California, Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program.  While writing story after story attacking efforts to keep families together he was accused – by other journalists - of repeated misrepresentations and, on one occasion, accused of making up a quote. 

 ●LA Weekly noted how the Times quietly backed off claims in a Therolf story about child abuse deaths. 

● The respected online news site WitnessLA reported: 

[A]ccording to a number of sources and experts, many of Therolf’s supporting facts range from very fuzzy to downright inaccurate—and seem to be immune to correction … 

Much is at stake when the state’s largest newspaper starts using some high profile tragedies to push—without adequate factual basis and no visible thoughtful consideration—for a change in policy that would result in more kids snatched unnecessarily from non-abusive families into the trauma that is foster care. 

● The founder of the child welfare trade journal The Imprint, Daniel Heimpel was more blunt, blasting “The Times’ myopic, misleading and reckless reporting …” 

Therolf’s specialty is taking child abuse deaths, tragedies that are as rare as they are horrific, and doing two things: Covering them almost to the exclusion of everything else, leaving the impression that the only error the system makes is leaving children in dangerous homes, and drawing broad, sweeping conclusions from these tragedies.  That contributes to foster-care panics, sharp, sudden increases in children needlessly torn from their homes. 

That not only hurts the children needlessly removed, it also overloads the system, making the next tragedy that much more likely.  Of course this doesn't mean Therolf wants his reporting to do harm; I'm sure he wants his reporting to save lives.  But to do this reporting he must immerse himself in the details of some of the most horrific tragedies imaginable.  As he has acknowledged, that can take a personal toll.  And, as with other reporters who have done the same kinds of stories, it seems to have blinded Therolf to the real-world consequences of an approach that omits crucial context.

When Therolf’s reporting came under increasing criticism, the Times issued a response that boiled down to: If you challenge our coverage in any way you want children left in dangerous homes! (See also WitnessLA’s response to that here and here.) 

Garrett Therolf’s journalism certainly isn’t the only reason Los Angeles tears apart families at the second-highest rate among America’s largest cities and their surrounding counties, I think it plays an important part. 

Therolf has a particular problem with the idea that there is systemic racial bias in child welfare – boosting the most extreme white scholars who lead child welfare’s de facto “caucus of denial” while ignoring the credentials and demeaning the work of Black scholars.  As we noted in this earlier post about one such story, in Garrett Therolf’s world white people “marshal data.”  Black people just want to rely on anecdote and “folkways.” 

Hyping “predictive analytics” 

So it should be no surprise that Therolf is pushing that dangerous fad in child welfare predictive analytics, in which an algorithm dredges up data on families who were the subjects of child abuse reports and tells the family policing agency if the case is “high risk.”  Therolf regurgitates all the favorite talking points of Emily Putnam-Hornstein, America’s foremost evangelist for what is actually computerized racial profiling – and someone whose own extremism and penchant for deriding the work of Black people is documented here. 

Perhaps Therolf fears that people are finally taking seriously the existence of systemic racial bias in child welfare.  That would explain two odd events at the Times on January 20: A so-called “news analysis” story that pushes predictive analytics as the silver bullet for child welfare – the only idea greeted with approval in a story headlined “How to fix L.A. County DCFS” -- and an “Ask the Reporters” video presentation in which almost no one outside the Times itself got to ask anything of Therolf, his current reporting partner, Matt Hamilton, and Holly Mitchell, who chairs the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. 

Normally, there is a news peg for stuff like this – some big event in the news prompting a newspaper to offer this kind of additional “context.”  But the only thing new in Los Angeles child welfare is the departure of the head of the County’s family policing agency, the Department of Children and Family Services – a thoroughly routine event that happens on average roughly once every two or three years – and the emergence of a powerful new force for change, the Reimagine Child Safety Coalition.  They’ve issued a series of demands, directed at the Board of Supervisors, which would, at long last, bring a measure of racial justice to Los Angeles child welfare.  In this, they march alongside DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children, which has been active for well over a decade.  I am proud to work with both groups. 

In part two of this post, tomorrow, I’ll go paragraph-by-paragraph through the “news analysis” story, since it is a splendid example of Therolf in full spin mode.  But for now, let’s go to the videotape.  

During the carefully stage-managed event, almost all the questions came from Times columnist  Anita Chabria. Audience questions had to be submitted well in advance for screening.  One of those questioners asked: 

Are you concerned that reforms are driven by the worst failures of child protective services, and in focusing on children who died, officials and the public largely forget the trauma and harm experienced by a huge number of children removed from their homes and then removed from repeated subsequent placements? 

Hamilton replied: 

 I don’t think it’s an if/or proposition. You can focus on these complex cases that have a lot of very serious allegations but still also look at the broad number of cases that come in, I don’t think reform is being only driven by these type of cases. 

The problem with that is two-fold: First, for decades what passes for “reform” has been
driven by the horror story cases and almost nothing else – that’s why it’s failed. The one reform that tried to curb needless removal, a waiver to allow more flexible child welfare funding, was a prime subject of misleading attacks by Therolf. 

And second, while one can look at cases that illustrate needless removal, with only token exceptions the Los Angeles Times hasn’t actually done that, something discussed in more detail below. 

The most misleading statistic in child welfare 

Then it was Therolf’s turn.  The first thing he did was remind us of the horror stories – in a common, but misleading way. In fact, he used what may be the most misleading statistic in child welfare.  He said that four to eight children die of abuse in America every day and half are in some way known-to-the-system. 

That is not wrong, but it lacks crucial context.  First, “known” can mean anything from one call to a hotline years before, to a casefile with more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade; which are, of course, the ones on which Therolf focuses. 

But more important, the phrasing – half of children who die were known-to-the-system leaves a visceral impression of something very different: That half of children known-to-the-system die  -- and therefore agencies must be bending over backwards to leave children in dangerous homes. 

To really understand the meaning of half of child abuse deaths involve children known-to-the system, you have to understand how many children are “known to the system.”  Any story that uses the statistic should also include the context. (Shall we take bets on whether someone at the L.A. Times or some other journalist-on-the-defensive will misrepresent the above and say: “Oh, you don’t want us to report how many deaths were known to the system”?)  So here’s the context: 

Nationwide, more than seven million children become “known to the system” every year.  Using Therolf’s high-end estimate, 1,460 of them die.  That means every year 99.998% of children “known to the system” do not die of child abuse and neglect. 

It looks a bit like this:

 

As soon as you point that out, however, it plays into the hands of those, like Therolf and others at the Times, who say this means we must be minimizing the problem and don’t really care if children are hurt. 

And sure enough, that’s what Therolf did, declaring: 

Sometimes reporters are criticized for covering child abuse fatalities: Oh, you’re covering an unusual event.  And while these events are rare, they are happening every day with regularity, and it’s a place where our democracy has an opportunity to make an improvement in an area everybody agrees has not fulfilled its promise. 

No one says journalists shouldn’t cover child abuse fatalities – it’s just Therolf’s way of evading responsibility for the failings in his journalism.  Rather, we’ve said Therolf, and others, should do it better – so their coverage might bring us closer to the only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities: zero, rather than simply repeating the very cycle of failure Therolf acknowledges. And we’ve said they should cover all the other system failings, not instead of the horror stories, but in addition. 

Therolf’s critics are simply doing his job for him.  We’re explaining the problem – and why foster-care panics make it worse -- and suggesting real solutions.  Child abuse deaths are needles in a haystack, and the foster-care panic typically engendered by journalism, Therolf-style, only makes the haystack bigger. 

And then, incredibly, Therolf claims he already covers wrongful removal – and suggests that if readers haven’t noticed it must be their fault.  He gives a lovely little speech that bears no resemblance to his actual reporting. It begins like this: 

On the other end of the spectrum, we also know that far too many families are caught up in child welfare systems that don’t belong there.  

He goes on to label as “horrifying” the fact that “half of all Black children are investigated over the course of their childhood as possible victims of abuse and neglect.” (By the way, in Los Angeles it’s probably 58%.) 

He talks about the documentary King Richard, in which, he says, Venus and Serena Williams describe the trauma of a false allegation of child abuse against their father, and how that was “one of the most searing experiences of their lives.”   And he adds: “It happens with extraordinary regularity to families that have done nothing at all to warrant that type of intervention.” 

But then he has the gall to suggest, without quite saying it, that such stories are prominent in the Times and a regular part of his reporting. 

We’ve certainly covered it at the Los Angeles Times at various periods of my career. …  I did a story about a Black mother named Monique Baker who struggled for over a year to regain her children on the basis of allegations that proved to be false.  We have done those stories. 

Yeah, once.  Oh, wait, that’s unfair.  There was also that great story he did covering the issue when it came up at a Board of Supervisors meeting – in 2002.  Odds are, over the course of more than two decades, there have been one or two more. 

But, on those extremely rare occasions when the cries of children wrongfully removed make
it into the Los Angeles Times, those cries are drowned out by the tsunami of coverage of the horror stories – coverage that almost always implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, blames efforts to keep families together.  Times subscribers can easily confirm this with a check of the newspaper’s online archive. 

Or consider the promotion for the online event itself.  The headline reads “Children keep dying. Why can’t L.A. County protect them?” If Therolf’s words on the video were reflected in his work at the Times the headline would have been more like “Families torn apart but children still die. Why can’t L.A. County stop the tragedies?”  The promotional material includes a link to that one story Therolf cited about wrongful removal – and at least 27 stories about the deaths of children “known to the system.” 

Flunking the Bagdikian test 

Therolf’s claims in the video are, in fact, the classic approach news organizations take when criticized for ignoring perspectives they don’t like.  Former Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian explained it decades ago in his seminal work of media criticism The Media Monopoly.   

One of Bagdikian's important observations is how newspaper editors who have strong feelings about an issue deal with the side of that story they don't like: 

They cover it. Prominently. Once. 

That's just enough for the editors to say to critics "Oh, we covered that. We even put it on the front page" – when they know full well that anything covered only once has almost no impact. It's what's repeated over and over again that leaves an impression. 

Columbia Journalism Review made much the same point last week, in a column about coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.  What makes the difference, CJR argued is 

[W]hich stories are not just worthy of an article, but of real focus and consistent amplification. [Emphasis in original.] 

Even that one prominent story Therolf points to with pride stumbled when dealing with the issue of racial bias.  In fact, that part of the story made Therolf so uncomfortable that he accompanied the story with a sidebar  – the story mentioned at the beginning of this post, in which he stacks the deck to support the claim that any disparity in entries into foster care is due to “past” discrimination making Black people bad parents. 

And then comes the coup de grace: Therolf says to readers, in effect: If you haven’t noticed the side of the story I almost never cover, it must be your fault!  Or as Therolf puts it: 

Unfortunately, [stories about wrongful removal] don’t stick in folks’ memory quite as much as the fatalities do, but they are there for the folks who are interested in looking at them. 

Good luck finding them. 

Read part two: Garrett Therolf and The Magic Algorithm!

The Pulitzer winner who understands child welfare

Lobby of the Los Angeles Times building in 2011 (Photo by Chris Eason)

UPDATE, OCT. 25, 2024: Once again, Robert Greene has taken a principled stand.  In the wake of the Times owner prohibiting the editorial board from endorsing a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, he resigned.  It was the right thing to do - but a big loss for the vulnerable children and families of Los Angeles.

On Friday, the board that administers journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prizes gave the award for editorial writing to Robert Greene of the Los Angeles Times.  The award was for a series of editorials about criminal justice – including one noting the fact that decades later we’re still paying for our botched, racist response to crack cocaine. 

But over the years, Greene has also written with rare wisdom about child welfare, even when that meant subtly taking on his own newsroom. 

So by way of congratulating Mr. Greene, we reprint a post abut his work from ten years ago. At the time we concluded that his editorials about child welfare “should be required reading in every county office – and at every desk in the Times newsroom.”  

That’s still true – and not just at the Los Angeles Times: 

ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 11, 2011:

Foster care in Los Angeles: Two solid editorials from the L.A. Times

There is a ritual of sorts at American newsrooms.  After a reporter does a big project or one or more front page stories filled with alleged revelations about government shortcomings, the editorial page is supposed to give the reporter a pat on the back.  The editorial congratulates the reporter for her or his enterprise and demands that government immediately do whatever the reporter wants it to do. 

But all through the years that Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf has been trying to foment hype and hysteria about child welfare in Los Angeles, the Times editorial board has refused to play along. 

For a long time the editorial page was simply silent on the issue.  Then it offered up its own careful, measured assessments which simply ignored Therolf’s pet theories. 

But this week, the editorial board went further.  Instead of giving Therolf a pat on the back, the editorial board administered a kick a little lower.  As Celeste Fremon explains in this excellent analysis on her Blog WitnessLA, the criticism of Therolf’s reporting was subtle – but unmistakable. 

Most of the editorial Sunday blasted the Board of Supervisors for defying the Bureau of State Audits and refusing to provide the Bureau with reports on child abuse fatalities.  That is all-too-typical of the bunker mentality that has characterized the Board and DCFS, and the Times does an excellent job of demolishing the Board’s flimsy excuses.  But a newspaper coming out for more openness in government is strictly dog-bites-man stuff.  The man-bites-dog part of the editorial is this extraordinary paragraph: 

All that said, the supervisors' actions may be comprehensible, even if indefensible. Child deaths from abuse and neglect are fraught with emotion and can result in sensational headlines, in newspapers like this one, to which supervisors feel compelled to respond. One more study of fatalities, such as the state audit demanded after the killing of Seth Ireland, steeps policymakers in a swamp of exceptional failures and worst cases. It makes it easy to forget that data show overwhelmingly that outcomes are better for children who stay in their homes — even with families struggling with poverty, even in neighborhoods with inadequate schools — than for those removed by well-meaning or backside-covering county agencies. It makes it easy to forget that the county's most effective and most economical response to children in trouble is to help their families with resources and programs to cope with their challenges. 

But the Times wasn’t done.  The next day the Times published another editorial blasting governments that react to high-profile tragedies by becoming, among other things, “too prone to snatch children from their homes and too unwilling or too clueless to help troubled families.” 

The editorial continues: 

High-profile cases of abuse at the hands of violent or addicted parents resulted in panic and waves of removals, supposedly in the interests of child safety. Abuse in foster homes led officials to send children the other way, back to their families. Instead of a ladder leading upward, child welfare programs seemed to operate like a pendulum, swinging back and forth depending on the latest outrage. 

Later the editorial condemns “policy changes spurred by child deaths rather than hard data.”  It continues: 

But progress is real. Studies that follow children who were kept with their families or placed with relatives show that they do better in school, have fewer run-ins with the law and have better prospects for the future than their counterparts removed to foster care. 

The editorial concludes by calling for the appointment of a permanent director for the county Department of Children and Family Services “who will stand up to the Supervisors and not allow them to make panic, rather than progress, the key factor in departmental decisionmaking.” 

On one point I think the second editorial is mistaken.  For reasons discussed in one of the first posts to this Blog, foster-care panics don’t work in reverse – that is, with very rare exceptions, deaths of children in foster care don’t prompt child welfare agencies to take away fewer children.  Indeed, as we discuss in our report on Los Angeles child welfare, when Viola Vanclief died in foster care in 2010, Therolf wrote his stories in ways that appear intended to make sure that death didn’t prompt calls to reduce foster care.  And in fact, during the months after Viola’s death entries into care were higher than during the same months the year before. 

Nevertheless, both editorials are almost entirely on the mark.  They should be required reading in every county office – and at every desk in the Times newsroom.

In Los Angeles, the child welfare debate has sunk to this: You’re killing kids! No, YOU’RE killing kids!

It’s the kind of rhetoric that fuels foster-care panic. Weak leadership and dissembling from the head of the child welfare agency isn’t helping.

 

A game of political one-downmanship by County Supervisor
Kathryn Barger and one of her opponents in the next election,
Darrell Park, is doing what once seemed impossible: lowering the
quality of the child welfare debate in Los Angeles County.

             Here’s how low politicians can sink in an effort to score points off of child abuse tragedy.  After a high-profile child abuse fatality an elected official declares: “The bureaucracy’s gonna kill us, and it’s killing kids.”

            Just days later, someone running against this same elected official blames the same death on “the direct failure of a county government that rewards the [governing body of which the elected official is a part] for how many parties they go to rather than for actually doing their jobs.”

            There is nothing new about politicians exploiting child abuse tragedies for political gain.  And, indeed, this exercise in crass political one-downmanship occurred in exactly the place where it was most likely to occur: Los Angeles County, California.

            It’s been a decade since I first wrote that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, or, as it should properly be called, “The B.S.” might well be the worst political governing body in America when it comes to child welfare.  At that time I wrote this about the m.o. of the B.S.:

In 1954, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont denounced his notorious colleague Joe McCarthy in words that need be changed only slightly to explain the modus operandi of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in child welfare cases. To paraphrase Flanders:

"They don their war paint; they go into their war dance; they emit their war whoops; they go forth to battle -- and proudly return with the scalp of a social worker."

            The worst of the bunch was Michael Antonovich. Indeed, while he was in office, to paraphrase a line originally used for at least two U.S. Senators, the most dangerous place to stand in Los Angeles was between Michael Antonovich and a television camera.

In the years since, four out of the five Supervisors, including Antonovich, left office.  But guess what: Here come the new Supes, just like the old Supes.  A year ago I wrote:

Do we really have to go through another round of preening, posturing, finger-pointing and general sound and fury signifying nothing in the aftermath of a horrible child abuse death?  Do we really need another round of “[name of politician here] demands answers”-type press releases?  Don’t political leaders in Los Angeles finally owe the county’s most vulnerable children more?

Those are the questions we should be asking after the latest high-profile death of a child “known to the system” – the death of Anthony Avalos.  But so far, all we’ve gotten is more of the same.

            The worst of the new batch? Probably Kathryn Barger, who made an inane statement in the wake of the death of Anthony Avalos that I singled out at the time.

            So guess who made that inane statement about the bureaucracy killing kids in the wake of the death of another child, Noah Cuatro. Yep, Kathryn Barger.  What I did not know last year, is that Barger learned from the worst: She was the staffer in charge of child welfare issues for Antonovich.

            And it’s Barger’s former and current opponent, Darrell Park, who sank to the same level in suggesting that behavior by the Supervisors is killing children.

Foster-care panic? Who cares?

            But we learned something even worse about Barger this time.  She knows rhetoric like hers can cause a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden spike in removals of children from their homes – but she doesn’t seem to give a damn.  Indeed, she seems to think it’s somehow inevitable.  So, she told the Chronicle of Social Change:

[Y]ou can see the rates of kids being pulled out their homes go up because social workers are petrified that they could be the next casualty of what’s going on.

Well, yes. That can happen when politicians accuse the “bureaucracy” of killing kids – and they’re the bureaucracy.

Bottom line: Barger learned well from her mentor. Crank out those press releases!  Accuse whoever’s convenient of complicity in child abuse deaths!  Grab those headlines any way you can!  And if a whole lot of children suffer the trauma of needless removal because of it, and if workers are further overwhelmed, leaving them even less time to find the next child in real danger, well, that’s just too bad.

But while, as Chronicle publisher Daniel Heimpel put it in a follow-up story, Barger seems to think a foster-care panic is “all but a fait accompli” – it doesn’t have to be.  Proof of that can be found in Connecticut.

In 2011, Gov. Dannel Malloy persuaded Joette Katz to step down from the State Supreme Court to take the hardest job in state government, running the Department of Children and Families. She stayed in that job through both of Malloy's terms in office.  The state had gone through at least three cycles of foster-care panic since 1995.  And months after Katz started on the job, it could have happened again.  But it didn’t.

This time, after a child “known to the system” died, there was no mass scapegoating of front-line workers, no hiding behind confidentiality, and no foster-care panic. 

“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.  But just as important, her boss backed her up. Gov. Malloy proved to be America’s gutsiest political leader on child welfare issues.  And he continued to back her up through both his terms, even as he suffered politically for it.

In contrast, the B.S. is – well, we’ve seen exactly what it is.

Bobby Cagle isn’t helping

And the Los Angeles system is run by Bobby Cagle, who presided over one of America’s worst foster-care panics when he ran the child welfare system in Georgia.  Nothing he has done or said in Los Angeles inspires confidence.

And indeed, even as he claims not to want a foster-care panic in Los Angeles, he’s misleading the public about the fact that one already is underway – albeit not as bad an increase as one might expect.

Bobby Cagle

A foster-care panic affects every decision point in child welfare.  Faced with horror story headlines and a barrage of messages to report anything and everything, people do just that – almost certainly increasing the proportion of false reports.  Caseworkers, terrified of having the next tragedy on their caseload are more prone to label a flimsy allegation “substantiated.” And even when they don’t remove the child, they are more prone to drag a family into court and force it to jump through the hoops of court supervision – adding enormous needless stress on the family, and overloading the courts.

Sure enough, those court petitions are up.  But, Cagle tells us, there is not a foster-care panic because

“Although the rate of petitions may have gone up somewhat, it did not result in more children coming out of the home proportionally” [emphasis added].

But if you are bringing more families into court needlessly and then taking the same proportion of children away, that means you are taking more children needlessly.

And, in an example of the insensitivity to the harm child welfare can do to children that characterized his tenure in Georgia and L.A., Cagle adds:

I think it’s never a bad thing to have the courts become involved, that’s a safety mechanism to have another set of eyes on it.

But all those additional court cases are stealing time caseworkers could spend finding the relatively few children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their homes.  All those additional court cases are slowing down the entire process, delaying provision of services to families and prolonging time spent in foster care.  And indeed, while entries actually have not gone up dramatically, there has been a disturbing increase in the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day.

Cagle’s dissembling is not unusual.  The head of New York City’s child welfare agency, David Hansell, keeps trying to pull the same sorts of stunts to hide the most recent foster-care panic there.

But at least New York City starts out with a relatively low rate-of-removal.  It’s that much worse in Los Angeles which tears apart families at more than double the rate of New York City.

Paradoxically, that may help explain why, in recent years, there have not been dramatic spikes in removals – in spite of the behavior of the Supervisors.  The baseline is simply so high it’s hard to go higher. (On the other hand, that’s never stopped Philadelphia, which is even worse.) Or it’s possible that, in the largest locally run child welfare system in America, and one that sprawls across a large urban landscape, a small countywide increase may hide a larger spike in the region where the latest high-profile tragedy took place.

Here’s what we do know: The bureaucracy is not killing kids.  The Supervisors are not killing kids.  In fact, Barger, Park and the rest probably have convinced themselves that they're actually helping - rationalization is powerful. But they're not. 

The process of making Los Angeles County children safer will begin when, finally, at least one member of the B.S. has the guts to say: “We’re taking away far too many kids. Those needless removals are doing terrible harm to children, and denying caseworkers the time to find kids in real danger.”

In the meantime, the B.S. brings to mind another famous comment directed at Joe McCarthy: “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

Los Angeles child welfare and the definition of insanity

If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then politicians and child welfare officials in Los Angeles need what parents so often are put through when child welfare agencies get into their lives: a psychiatric evaluation.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is doing what it does best
after a child-abuse tragedy: grandstanding at children's expense

Do we really have to go through this again?

Do we really have to go through another round of preening, posturing, finger-pointing and general sound and fury signifying nothing in the aftermath of a horrible child abuse death?  Do we really need another round of “[name of politician here] demands answers”-type press releases?  Don’t political leaders in Los Angeles finally owe the county’s most vulnerable children more?

Those are the questions we should be asking after the latest high-profile death of a child “known to the system” – the death of Anthony Avalos.  But so far, all we’ve gotten is more of the same. Take out the name Anthony Avalos and substitute Gabriel Fernandez, or Yonatan Aguilar or Dae’von Bailey or Lars Sanchez, among other Los Angeles child welfare tragedies, and you could barely tell the difference. 

That’s because the real root of the problem is that Los Angeles takes away too many children, not too few. That overloads the system, leaving less time for workers to find children in real danger. Each time there’s a high-profile death it sets off a foster-care panic – encouraged by those grandstanding politicians. Even more children are taken needlessly. So workers have even less time. So the cycle repeats over and over.

It happens almost everywhere, of course.  But part of the reason it’s often worse in Los Angeles is that Los Angeles child welfare has long suffered from being overseen by one of the worst governing bodies in America on these issues, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors – or as I’ve called them before, the B.S. 

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about the m.o. of the B.S.:

In 1954, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont denounced his notorious colleague Joe McCarthy in words that need be changed only slightly to explain the modus operandi of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in child welfare cases. To paraphrase Flanders:

They don their war paint; they go into their war dance; they emit their war whoops; they go forth to battle -- and proudly return with the scalp of a social worker.

Though there’s been a lot of turnover on the B.S. in recent years, when it comes to child welfare, most of them share their predecessors’ fondness for clueless grandstanding.

Consider this statement from supervisor Kathryn Barger, who said that after Gabriel’s death:  “I didn’t think something like that could happen again…”

In fact, it’s never stopped happening.  Every year, among the tens of thousands of cases investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, there are some in which warning signs, sometimes subtle, sometimes achingly obvious, are overlooked.  And every year some of those children die.  It’s just that every few years, for reasons ranging from particularly horrible details to random chance, media and politicians fixate on a single case.

That distorts our entire perception of what’s wrong with DCFS and how to fix it.  Child welfare systems are more secret than the CIA.  They can hide almost all their blunders behind “confidentiality.”  Almost the only time we see their failures is when a child “known-to-the- system” dies. So we assume that all the errors go in only one direction – leaving children in dangerous homes.

But child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel – they err in all directions.  They tear many children from their homes needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect.  In other cases, there are real problems but they could be solved without resorting to traumatizing the children by taking them from their homes.

Lessons from the border

One need only look about 129 miles south of Los Angeles, to the Mexican border, to see just how horrible such separation can be.  A professor of pediatrics called the trauma of separation “catastrophic.”

Remember those sounds of crying children smuggled out of a detention center and published by ProPublica?  It doesn’t matter if the person separating parent from child is a border patrol officer carrying out a policy of pure evil or a DCFS caseworker with the best of intentions – the children shed the same sorts of tears for the same sorts of reasons; the damage done to them is the same.  So it’s no wonder massive studies have found that, in typical cases, children left in their own home fare better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

That harm is done even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. As for group homes and institutions: The record in California speaks for itself.

The typical response to high-profile tragedies – the general chest thumping and calls for heads to roll - makes everything worse. Workers become terrified of having the next tragedy on their caseload and facing everything from media censure to criminal charges. So there’s a foster-care panic: Workers rush to inflict more catastrophes on children by taking more of them needlessly. 

That only makes the other kind of catastrophe – the death of a child “known to the system” – more likely, because overloaded workers have even less time to find children in real danger.

Just as tearing apart more families at the border doesn’t improve border security, tearing apart more families in Los Angeles County won’t improve child safety.

Enter the Fox News of Child Welfare

Already the so-called Chronicle of Social Change, the Fox News of child welfare, is laying the groundwork for the next foster-care panic in Los Angeles. The Chronicle ran a story that seeks to justify the panic in advance, arguing, in effect: What do you expect? More people call in reports alleging child abuse so of course more children will be removed. 

 

But often, during foster-care panics the increase in removals far exceeds the increase in reports.  And because, during a foster-care panic, anyone and everyone is hectored repeatedly to report anything and everything, no matter how absurd, a greater proportion of reports is likely to be false. There should be no automatic assumption that more people calling in their slightest suspicion should mean more children torn from their homes.

And, of course, the story quoted DCFS director Bobby Cagle falsely equating child removal with child safety – just the way Donald Trump falsely equates child removal with border security.  But then that’s the same Big Lie of American Child Welfare that Chronicle publisher and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" Daniel Heimpel pushes at every opportunity. 

(A quick reminder of Heimpel’s track record: He has analogized the increase use of family preservation to cancer, dismissed concerns about racial bias in child welfare as a “panic” and published and promoted a column using a vile racial stereotype to attack one of the mothers profiled in the New York Times story about foster care as the new Jane Crow.)

Computerized “poverty profiling” won’t help

Nor will we fix the system by taking all the human biases that exist now and automating them. That’s what the current fad sweeping through child welfare, “predictive analytics” really is all about.  Predictive analytics involves using masses of data about people – mostly, it turns out, poor people – and coughing up a score that supposedly tells workers for agencies like DCFS who is most likely to abuse a child.

Contrary to a column in the Los Angeles Times by Naomi Schaefer Riley (the same Naomi Schaefer Riley who was barred from blogging for an education trade journal after writing a column widely viewed as racist) the first Los Angeles experiment with this approach was not dropped because the county used a private company. It was dropped because the software produced a false positive rate of 95 percent.  As Judge Michael Nash, director of the county’s Office of Child Protection explained, 95 percent of the time, the software labeled as “high risk” children “who were not at risk for a negative outcome.” 

The same column goes on to praise the predictive analytics experiment in Pittsburgh.  But, as I discuss here, that experiment doesn’t correct the biases of humans, it magnifies them.  In her book, Automating Inequality, Prof. Virginia Eubanks aptly called it “poverty profiling.”

Los Angeles already takes away children at more than double the rate of New York City and more than triple the rate of Chicago, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. There is no evidence L.A. children are two and three times as safe from abuse.

If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then politicians and child welfare officials in Los Angeles need what parents so often are put through when DCFS gets into their lives: a psychiatric evaluation.

No large child welfare system in America ever has been able to stop every child abuse death – just as no police department can stop every murder.  But the few that do better at curbing child abuse have one thing in common: They do far more than Los Angeles to keep families together and avoid needless foster care.

Why not try that for a change?

Los Angeles County quietly drops its first child welfare predictive analytics experiment

● Apparently, a 95 percent false positive rate was considered a tad high

● Head of county’s Office of Child Protection urges slow, cautious approach to any use of predictive analytics

In Los Angeles County, they called it Project AURA (Approach to Understanding Risk Assessment).

It was among the most highly-touted experiments in the burgeoning fad for using predictive analytics in child welfare – that dystopian sci-fi nightmare-come-true in which computer algorithms predict who will abuse a child (but, we are assured, child protective services agencies would never ever actually use that information to tear apart families).

Project AURA was the subject of gushy news stories, and even gushier stories promoting the gushy news stories.  It was an experiment particularly beloved by those who are most extreme in their desire to see more children taken from their parents.

And now, thankfully, it is reportedly dead.

Buried on page 10 of a report to the Los Angeles County Board of supervisors by Michael Nash, executive director of the county’s Office of Child Protection, is word that the county Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) “is no longer pursuing Project AURA.”

AURA stood for Approach to Understanding Risk Assessment. It was developed by software firm SAS.  Exactly what’s in it is a secret. No one outside SAS knows exactly how the algorithm works.

AURA was never used on any actual cases. Rather it was tested on past reports alleging child abuse or neglect. Then SAS looked to see what actually happened to those families.

As Nash’s report revealing the death of Project AURA explains:

While the tool correctly detected a high number of children (171 cases) at the highest risk forabuse, it also incorrectly identified an extremely high number (3,829 cases) of falsepositives (i.e., children who received high risk scores who were not at risk for a negative outcome). [Emphasis added.]

In other words, AURA identified a staggering number of innocent families. Had AURA actually been in use, an astounding number of children would have been placed at risk of needlessly being torn from their homes and consigned to the chaos of foster care.

 What finally killed AURA?

The results of the AURA experiment – including the false positive rate -  have been known for nearly two years. But that didn’t stop the county from pushing ahead – and it didn’t stop the gushy news coverage. It’s not clear what finally prompted DCFS to pull the plug. 

Perhaps it’s because, as Nash points out, all those false positives would further overload the system. More likely, it was an initiative by the State of California to try to come up with a “better” predictive analytics model.

Unlike AURA, developers of the new model are promising a completely open process, including consultation with various “stakeholders” and transparency about exactly what risk factors are used and how they are weighed - allowing anyone to “interrogate the algorithm.”

Also encouraging, Nash’s report, commissioned by the Supervisors themselves, is filled with warnings about the need to proceed “cautiously and responsibly.” He says a set of strict standards “to address the important operational legal and ethical considerations…” should be adopted “before considering the use of predictive-analytics models.”  Those standards should include “understanding how racism and other biases may be embedded in systemic data and addressing these within the model.”

Nash even noted that the independent journalism nonprofit ProPublica found exactly that bias in predictive analytics tools already in use in criminal justice.

All this means that, if nothing else, the nightmare of “Minority Report”- style policing in Los Angeles child welfare is at least another year or two away.

The bad news is that Nash’s report accepts the naïve view that once a good algorithm is created it can be properly controlled and limited. 

He writes:

Determining [predictive analytics’] “right” use – to identify families most in need of supports, rather than to trigger any negative consequences for them – will be fundamental.

But Nash, himself a former juvenile court judge, must know that’s now how child welfare works in the real world.

Whatever controls are in place at the outset will disappear the moment a child “known to the system” dies and the caseworker handling the case says “DCFS had all this information about the family, and they knew it was ‘high risk’ but they didn’t tell me.” 

Philip Browning

Then, all bets - and all restrictions - are off, and it will be take-the-child-and-run in every family where the computer spits out a high "risk score."

One more bit of bad news: One of the strongest boosters of predictive analytics in Los Angeles, former DCFS director Philip Browning, has been hired as a consultant to “help” New York City’s child welfare agency.

SDM is let off the hook

The other bad news concerns the other model of risk and safety assessment that the Supervisors asked Nash to study – the one currently used in Los Angeles - Structured Decision-Making.

Like predictive analytics, SDM also has been found to raise issues of racial and class bias. Nash acknowledges those issues in passing:

Users of the tool, in particular, fault it for not incorporating into its assessments theentire story of what is happening within a family, but instead focusing on a few broadstrokes without giving weight to important nuances. Users additionally state that the toolis too narrowly focused on the caregiver and does not take into account the strengths ofthe family as a whole.

But immediately he adds this parenthetical aside:

(The latest version of SDM has been revised to try to be more strength-based in its approach.)

But in my own experience, some version of  “Yes, but the new version is different” is what developers of SDM have said for more than a decade, each time similar concerns are raised.  That can only leave one wondering about all the “risk assessments” and “safety assessments” performed with old, unimproved versions of SDM.

The defeat of AURA shows that, contrary to what some predictive analytics proponents say in their worst moments of hubris, it is not inevitable that every legislative body and child welfare agency will embrace this latest fad in child welfare.

At a minimum, opponents in Los Angeles have more time to organize. And using predictive analytics in child welfare no longer has an AURA of inevitability.