● Heavily-armed
police breaking down the door is getting all the attention, but what happened
afterwards is worse – because what happened afterwards happens all the time.
● The children were
thrown into separate foster homes – and kept there, in part, because of an
incident in which the father behaved like the executive editor of The New York Times.
UPDATE, MAY 15: At last, after the needless trauma of foster care - not to mention being taken from their parents at gunpoint - these children, who never should have been taken in the first place, have been ordered reunited with their parents. But it was over the objections of the Arizona Department of Child Safety, which felt the parents still had not bowed, scraped, and jumped through hoops to their satisfaction. Unfortunately, the bowing scraping and jumping will have to continue, since DCS retains legal custody. The judge also effectively lifted what had amounted to a gag order.
UPDATE. APRIL 22: Now the judge mentioned in the update below has let reporters back in - but effectively imposed a gag order on everyone. That shows you the Arizona Department of Child Safety knows how badly it screwed up in this case - and how desperate they are that people not find out about it. The best way to fight such gag orders is to make them backfire - by spreading the word about what we already know about this case.
UPDATE, APRIL 15: Perhaps we all should have known this would happen. A lot of the excellent reporting on this story was made possible by the fact that the early court hearings were open to the press and the public. But last week, a different judge kicked out the Arizona Republic reporter who has been writing about the case. Details here.
OK, I admit it. If a parent emailed me and said a police
SWAT team broke down their door and took away their three children – all
because one child had a high fever and had not been vaccinated – I would have
rolled my eyes and deleted the email.
So
it’s a good thing that, when
it really happened
in Chandler, Arizona, it was caught on video by a security camera:
But though it’s the video that’s getting the case national
attention, what happened after the
police broke down the door is even worse.
That’s partly because, while sending in what certainly looks like an
actual SWAT team is very rare, everything else done to the children in this
case is standard operating procedure.
It’s because of the standard operating procedure that even
now, more than a month later, all three children remain trapped in foster
care.
For at least the first 18 days, two
of the children had only one visit with their parents, the third had none. They
also were separated from each other, leaving them nothing and no one comforting
and familiar as they were placed with separate sets of strangers. (Now, after pressure from the court, they are
at least together with grandparents.)
The children’s suffering was exacerbated by a child
protective services agency apparently out to wreak vengeance on the parents for
daring to tell their story to the media – and that, too, is common. But even without that extra bit of cruelty,
the case reveals how children are harmed by the routine way the system
functions in thousands of cases every year.
All of this is why it’s so important to study this case,
which we can do thanks to excellent reporting by Dianna Nanez of the Arizona Republic, and because in Arizona
court hearings in child welfare cases are open.
In this case the hearing stayed open despite the desperate efforts of
Arizona’s Department of Child Safety (DCS) to close it.
The ugly incident
On February 25, Sarah Beck took her two-year-old to the
doctor.
So let’s stop right here. No
one forced Ms. Beck to do this. She saw
that her child was sick and took him to the doctor, as any loving mother would
do. If she really wanted to neglect her
son’s medical needs she’d have just stayed home.
OK,
back to the story:
The child was lethargic and had a fever over 100 degrees –
some news accounts say 105. The child
had not been vaccinated, which is legal in Arizona. (I’ll circle back to that
element of the case at the end of this post.)
Fearing the child might have meningitis, the doctor urged
Beck to take the child to the hospital. But after they left the office, the
child was laughing and playing with siblings. So Beck took her son’s temperature again. It was down to
102. Later that evening it was down to
100.
Having shown the judgment to take him to the doctor when the
fever was high, it’s not a stretch to think her judgment was reasonable when, the
fever having done down, she did not take him to the hospital.
Ironically, one of the reasons Beck was afraid to go to the
hospital was fear that, because they had not vaccinated their children, the
parents would be turned in to DCS.
Another factor, the father
told
Phoenix television station KPNX: They couldn’t afford the cost of an unnecessary
trip to the E.R.
(He also told that to
the police in a phone call more than an hour before they kicked down the door.)
When the doctor found out that Beck had not taken the child
to the hospital, she called DCS. The DCS
worker then contacted Chandler police to
go to the home and do a “welfare check” on the child. A caseworker also was on
the way to the house.
Why call the cops?
OK, let’s stop again. Why call the police at all? There was nothing to indicate the parents
were dangerous or the caseworker’s life would be in danger. Why not just send the caseworker?
Back to the story:
The police knock on the door. No one answers. A neighbor
sees what’s going on and tells the police that Beck “is a good mother.” The
police ask her to call the home.
Meanwhile, the caseworker has shown up. The father, Brooks Bryce, calls the police
back, even as the boy is sleeping in his arms. He declines to let the police
in.
DCS gets a warrant to enter the home and remove the
children. About an hour and 20 minutes after the phone call with Bryce, police
knock and got no answer. Bryce says the
family didn’t hear the knock, because they were sleeping in the back bedrooms –
“with their sick children.” (The other
children had illnesses that were not serious.)
And then, this happened:
The father came out of the house with his hands up, as
instructed, Ms. Beck came out holding her son in her arms. The son was taken away. So were the other two
children.
The uglier aftermath
So now we get to the part that’s typical.
The three children, ages 6,4,and 2, are taken from their
parents – and taken from each other - -each placed in a separate home with
total strangers. Think of it as the Donald Trump Mexican border approach to
child well-being. For at least
two-and-a-half weeks two of the children got to visit their parents only once;
the toddler didn’t get to see them at all.
This is, by the way, the age when children are most likely
to think that the removal was their fault, that they had done something
terribly wrong and now they were being punished – a perception that, I suspect,
is reinforced when heavily-armed police break down the front door, point guns
and then take you away.
None of it was necessary.
Even if one assumes there was a need to check on the health of the children,
once that was done, and any necessary medical treatment was provided, there was
no reason to keep the children away from their parents for another minute.
But wait, you say, what if the parents “neglect” their
children’s medical needs in the future?
Well, first of all, there’s no evidence they neglected the children’s
medical needs in the first place. It’s
entirely reasonable not to take children to the E.R. if a fever spikes and then
goes down again. But even if one thinks
what happened on Feb. 25 was neglect, a court simply could have ordered DCS to
make random visits to the home (without an accompanying SWAT team) to find out.
The ultimate fishing
expedition
But here’s the problem: Once an agency such as DCS enters
your life it’s the ultimate fishing expedition.
If doesn’t matter if the original reason for breaking down the door was
absurd. Once in the home, they can put everything the family does under a
microscope. And since no family can come out 100% perfect under that kind of
scrutiny, they’re bound to find something.
So let’s begin with this, from the Arizona Republic account of the court hearing:
The state's attorney
argued that the children shouldn’t be returned to their parents yet because
they’d been hostile to DCS workers and weren’t cooperating.
Imagine that! After
having heavily-armed police break down their door, and having children taken
from their arms at gunpoint, the parents allegedly were “hostile to DCS workers…”
I’d be more worried about the parents’ mental health if they
weren’t hostile to DCS workers.
As a sympathetic state legislator pointed out:
“It doesn’t say
anywhere that after your kids are taken, after police bust down your door, that
you have to be nice to DCS to get your kids back.”
Well no, not in writing. But it’s actually the First
Unwritten Rule of child protective services all over America.
It even has a name,
“the
attitude test.” (And it cuts both
ways.
Adults who really have abused children
and are “system wise” know that the best way to sucker a caseworker is to suck
up to the caseworker.)
Now, back to DCS’ objections to reunification, as described
by the Arizona Republic:
[The lawyer for the
state] said the parents had attended a DCS visit with members of [a family
advocacy organization, the] Arizona DCS Oversight Group who were combative
toward DCS workers. He said the grandfather had tried to videotape a meeting
with DCS, and recording is not allowed to protect the privacy of the children.
OK, let’s unpack this one.
There is nothing wrong with bringing allies to a meeting. In
a few, enlightened child protective services agencies, it’s even encouraged. As
for the videotaping, as the parents’ attorneys pointed out:
The grandfather did
what most people would think they had the right to do - record government
officials.
And how, exactly is making such an attempt relevant to
whether the children would be safe in their own home?
But what really has DCS upset, of course, is that the
parents spoke publicly about what DCS did to their children. That’s why DCS asked that the court hearings
in the case be closed.
In most states, they wouldn’t even have to ask. Fortunately, Arizona is different. As the judge in this case, Jennifer Green,
put it: “In Arizona, we like our courts to be open.” As for the privacy excuse, the judge did the
obvious: prohibited disclosure of information identifying the children, as is
routine in states where these hearings are open.
Pile on the hoops and
make the family jump
Another standard operating procedure: Pile on a cookie-cutter
set of conditions parents must meet before their children get to live with them
again, conditions unrelated to the actual accusation and usually unrelated to
any actual problems the family might have.
In this case, the state demanded the parents undergo psychological
evaluations – in spite of the fact that neither has a history of mental
illness. Why? Because child welfare agencies want to reframe every problem as a
mental health problem, and they use the evaluations as fishing expeditions. So
they are required in almost every case.
In 2017 the Arizona Court of Appeals
blasted
DCS for how it handles these evaluations.
The father fought the psych eval demand, and lost. But he agreed
to another irrelevant demand – that he undergo drug and alcohol testing, despite
the apparent lack of any evidence of a drug and alcohol problem.
(But, of course, that very fact means this
case probably will be listed as a case involving suspicions of substance abuse,
thereby inflating the proportion of such cases, and fueling the
hype
and hysteria over drug use and child abuse.)
And, apparently, there were so many other requirements, DCS
couldn’t keep track of them all. From
the Republic story:
A DCS investigator, a
former police officer, took the stand. She said … [the parents] weren’t
following steps to regain custody of their children.
One of the parents
attorneys asked the DCS investigator to outline specific steps the parents must
follow to get their children back. The caseworker said she couldn’t remember
any of them.
There are two dymanics going on here: The routine piling on
of irrelevant conditions and a few extra twists of the knife as retribution for
the parents talking to media. That, too, is common.
The DV diversion
Judge Green approved the removal because the mother dared to
disagree with the doctor and also because of a supposed “history of domestic
violence.”
Even when there really is domestic violence, removing the
children from the non-offending parent is even more traumatic for the child
than removing that child in other circumstances.
One expert calls it “tantamount to pouring
salt into an open wound.”
There is what
should be an obvious alternative: Remove the abuser. But Arizona, even more
than most states, takes an approach to these situations best summed up as “please
pass the salt.”
The
Arizona Court of Appeals had a lot to say about this, too.
But in this case, the Republic reports that, in claiming this alleged history the example the judge cited was domestic violence only if the father were living with a wall of his house. The judge specified “an incident in which the father punched a wall.”
Sometimes even the calmest of people will do that – even high-ranking
news executives such as Dean Baquet, now the Executive Editor of
The New York Times.
Baquet’s
blow to an office wall is well-known, but I’ll bet if he’d had young children
at the time, child protective services would never have taken them away.
Thwarting extended
family
When children can’t stay in their own homes
study after study
has shown that kinship foster care – placement with a relative – is better for
children’s well-being and safer than what should properly be called stranger
care.
With that in mind, the children’s “law guardian” – a lawyer
tasked with recommending whatever s/he happens to think is best for the
children – pressed the court to order that the children be placed with
grandparents. Again, from the Republic story:
The judge asked what was delaying placing three
children with their grandparents. The state's attorney said the grandparents
still needed a home-safety check.
[Judge] Green asked if that check could be expedited.
The state's attorney said DCS contracts with a company to conduct safety
reviews and has no control over timelines but that it could take up to 30 days.
The judge didn’t buy it. She demanded the state get it done
in four days – in this one highly-publicized case. But what this tells us is that Arizona
routinely worsens the emotional trauma for hundreds, perhaps thousands of children
by delaying kinship care placement for up to 30 days, because it suits the
convenience of DCS and its contractor.
It is a classic example of a problem Prof. Vivek Sankaran of
the University of Michigan Law School
wrote
about last month: how the system loses sight of the fact that it is dealing
with flesh-and-blood human beings, subordinating their needs to bureaucratic
convenience.
That subordination of these three Arizona children’s needs
continues. As noted earlier, the judge
also approved the demand for the “psych evals.”
But again, because bureaucratic convenience comes first, it takes months
to get such an evaluation. That means
months before the children are returned to the parents from whom they never
should have been taken in the first place.
Meanwhile, in
Maricopa City…
I often point out that all the time, money and effort wasted
tearing apart innocent families is, in effect, stolen from finding children in
real danger. Workers overloaded with
false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused
with neglect have no time to investigate any case carefully – less time to,
say, go to the door of a home themselves, knock politely and engage a family
instead of immediately calling the cops.
That’s why the SWAT team approach (literally or figuratively)
makes all children less safe. But rarely is there so stark an example as in
Arizona.
Even as the police were sitting in their cars getting ready
to break down the door in Chandler, less than 30 miles away, in the City of
Maricopa, seven adopted children allegedly were being imprisoned and horribly
abused by their adoptive mother, Machelle Hobson – for failing to perform to her satisfaction in
YouTube videos.
Hobson allegedly
pepper-sprayed the children, sometimes on their genitals, but not before
putting on a mask to protect herself, one of the children said.
She also locked them
in a closet, which one child called "the green screen room," for days
without food, water, or a bathroom, and forced them to take ice baths, in
addition to a slew of other abuses the children recounted to police.
New Times reports
that DCS had received nine reports alleging abuse in the home.
They rescued the children in mid-March, after
the tenth allegation.
And, of course,
DCS had approved the mother for adoption – seven times.
Each such approval brought with it the
potential of a bounty paid by the federal government
to DCS ranging from $5,000 to $12,000 – another incentive not to look too
closely.
(Now that the children have
been removed from the home, the state still gets to keep any bounties it may have
received.)
All this helps explain why DCS was so much less interested
in the children in Maricopa City than they were in the children in
Chandler. When the alleged abuse is in a
foster or adoptive home the agency is, in effect, investigating itself,
creating an extra incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and
write no evil in the case file.
A victory for the anti-vaxxers
No I haven’t forgotten about the vaccines. The toddler in the family from Chandler had
not been vaccinated. That may have made
the doctor’s original concern more understandable. But that doesn’t change the fact that no one
has contradicted the parents’ account that the fever was down well before the
police broke down the door.
The anti-vaccination movement is pernicious. It is a threat
to the health not only to those who are not vaccinated but to children around
them, as recent outbreaks of measles make clear. But – unfortunately, in my
view -- Arizona has extremely liberal laws allowing parents to leave their
children unvaccinated. To the extent, if
any, that this was a factor in this case, the solution is to change those laws,
not break down the doors of the homes where children have not had vaccines.
Indeed, given the extent to which the anti-vaccine movement
is fueled, in some quarters, by paranoia, it’s hard to imagine a greater gift
to anti-vax crusaders than a video of police breaking down the door to get
their hands on an unvaccinated child.
(And sure enough,
The
Washington Post reports, conspiracy theories are already circulating
online.)
What are parents who have made the decision not to vaccinate
their children likely to conclude from all this? Will they think: Gee, I guess I’d better get
my child vaccinated after all? Or will they think: I’d better just hope this
fever breaks, because I can’t risk taking my child to the doctor – if I do,
they might suffer lifelong trauma at the hands of those charged with protecting
them? For that matter, now even some
parents who have vaccinated their children may hesitate when their child has a
high fever.
So congratulations Arizona Department of Child Safety – you screwed
this one up in every possible way. Worse, we now know you’re screwing up a
whole lot of cases that don’t involve SWAT teams, too.
