Another lousy McLawsuit won’t fix LA foster care – and might make it worse

The McLawsuits brought by the group that calls itself "children's rights"
always ignore the elephant in the room.

● These McLawsuits typically lead to consent decrees that drag on for years and sometimes worsen the conditions they were intended to correct.  

● That’s because they systematically ignore the elephant in the room; the problem at the root of all the others: the needless removal of children.  

● The latest McLawsuit reinforces ugly stereotypes about who loses children to foster care. 

● And when it comes to racism in the system, the McLawsuit reeks of tokenism. 

The group that calls itself Children’s Rights (CR) has filed another McLawsuit – one of those nearly identical suits it files all over the country that routinely ignore the need to stop taking so many children in the first place. 

This time the suit is against Los Angeles County’s family police/family regulation agency – terms the McLawsuit itself refuses even to use, except in a single footnote.  It concerns the horrendous treatment of foster youth aged 16 to 21. 

At the outset, there are some things I’m glad to stipulate, as the lawyers would say. 

● I have no doubt that everything in the McLawsuit about how horribly older foster youth are treated is true. 

● Litigation can be effective.  NCCPR board members brought two of the few lawsuits that have been relatively successful,  R.C. v. Hornsby in Alabama and Nicholson v. Scoppetta in New York.  Both those suits focused on curbing the needless removal of children – disproving CR’s repeated claim that this can’t be litigated. 

● CR and the other groups bringing this latest McLawsuit are not “in it for the legal fees.”  As is so often the case among those who get these issues wrong, they mean well. 

But in the rare cases when CR’s McLawsuits are followed by real improvement, it’s almost always in spite of the litigation, not because of it.  And over and over, the McLawsuits have left systems as bad – or worse – than they found them. 

That’s why Michigan’s foremost family defender, Vivek Sankaran, in effect told CR to please get the hell out of Michigan.  More details about CR’s ugly litigation track record are here.  

But the bottom line is simple: In family policing, wrongful removal drives everything else.  That's the elephant in the room.  But CR’s McLawsuits typically say little or nothing about curbing the needless removal of children or reunifying them after they are taken.  The remedies they seek often divert scarce resources from keeping families together. 

The L.A. suit risks doing just that. 

About that “array” 

The major solution called for in the lawsuit is “a minimally adequate array of safe and stable placements.”  The phrase appears at least 19 times in the McLawsuit complaint.  But Los Angeles County already has a “minimally adequate array of safe and stable placements.”   They’re just not using it correctly. 

Los Angeles tears apart families at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities.  If they stopped doing that, a whole array of empty foster homes would be available.  And if L.A. then provided Wraparound services those homes could handle “difficult” older youth. 

Yet there is not one word about the need to take fewer children.  And, in a county where foster homes are filled with children originally taken because their family poverty was confused with neglect, CR couldn’t be bothered to find even one named plaintiff taken under such circumstances. 

On the contrary, the McLawsuit reinforces ugly stereotypes about the kinds of families whose children are taken, by offering no counterpoint to examples such as the youth who 

was cycled by DCFS between various family member placements. During this period, she experienced abuse and neglect from her caregivers, including periods of homelessness. 

CR even implies that such cases are the norm: 

Rosie S.’s childhood had the hallmarks of trauma and instability that DCFS is accustomed to seeing in children entering foster care, including early childhood abuse and neglect, family violence, frequent moves, and unstable placements. [Emphasis added] 

The point is not that such examples should be left out.  The point is that the far more common circumstances under which children come into DCFS “care” should have been included.  Who says poverty is confused with neglect?  Among others, Children’s Rights itself – in its excellent public policy work, which often is at odds with its own litigation.  

As for reunification, the McLawsuit does mention that – but only in one specific context: foster youth
who are themselves parents and wind up needlessly separated from their own children because of various rules and policies in their placements. 

CR rightly condemns this without addressing the question of all the young people in foster care whose own families are denied what they need to reunify. 

With curbing needless removal off the table (as usual in a CR McLawsuit), what’s left?  The McLawsuit doesn’t say, but typically that silence, combined with the false claim that LA doesn’t have “a minimally adequate array of safe and stable placements” means another foster parent recruiting campaign or maybe another pay raise for foster parents – who already often are taking in children because of those children’s own parents’ poverty.  And quite possibly more “group homes,” probably with some sort of euphemism in the name.  

CR’s policy arm produced an outstanding report condemning such “congregate care.”  Perhaps the litigation arm never read it – no wait, that can’t be it; CR’s litigation director is credited as a co-author. 

So when the inevitable settlement takes place it is quite possible that scarce funds that could be far better used to keep families together will be diverted into creating CR’s vision of “a minimally adequate array of safe and stable placements” – as happened in Michigan and Georgia. 

Tokenism about racism 

Children’s Rights is a group that once actually claimed, in a fundraising pitch, to be “driving a national conversation about the urgent need to end unjust government intervention in the lives of Black children and families.” 

That makes especially offensive how that whole issue is handled in this McLawsuit.  It isn’t.  It is simply mentioned in passing that “The overwhelming majority of foster youth in Los Angeles County come from low-income Black and Latino communities.”  And then, much later: “[T]he harms of Defendants’ failures disproportionately fall on already marginalized youth—youth of color, queer youth, pregnant and parenting youth, and youth with disabilities—as these youth are vastly over-represented in the Los Angeles County foster care population.” 

There is nothing about why this is the case, except for a hint, buried in a footnote. 

For clarity purposes, this brief uses the traditional terms “child welfare system” and “foster care system” to refer to the system of policies and supportive services meant to ensure the safety, wellbeing, and permanency of children, youth, and families. We recognize that the term “family

regulation system” more aptly describes this set of government structures, which far too often unjustly regulates marginalized families. 

But the Los Angeles McLawsuit doesn’t address how to stop “this set of government structures” from unjustly regulating marginalized families. 

The McLawsuits never do.

Big city child welfare: Philadelphia gets a little better, Los Angeles gets worse, and the “professional kidnappers” are hard at work in Phoenix

In addition to tracking the propensity of states to take children from their families, NCCPR does a separate index for America’s top ten cities and their surrounding counties.  These ten communities alone account for nearly one in eight children torn from their families in America each year. NCCPR has just updated its Big City Rate of Removal Index.  With one exception, Chicago, the data are from no later than the end of 2019, so they are not affected by COVID-19. The full Index is available here.

Here are the highlights:

Activism gets results in Philadelphia 

After NCCPR and other advocates spent years of hammering home the message, media in Philadelphia are paying attention to the fact that the city long has been an extreme outlier, tearing apart families at either the worst or second worst rate among big cities.  That, plus activism by everyone from Councilmember David Oh, to Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, to the grassroots activists at DHS Give Us Back Our Children to other groups of families who are fighting back is making a difference. 

Philadelphia is still an outlier when it comes to taking away children, but it’s less of an outlier. 

In 2019 DHS took away 399 fewer children than in 2018.  Because Philadelphia got a little better, and Los Angeles got significantly worse, in 2019, Philadelphia took children at the third or fourth highest rate – it’s least bad showing since NCCPR started compiling these data. 

It’s important to remember, however, that the communities with the four highest rates of removal, including Philadelphia, are probably significantly higher than the remaining six. Philadelphia still takes away children at double the rate of New York City and Chicago.  

The decline in entries also is consistent with a similar rate of decline in the number of children in foster care on any given day reported in this excellent story from Broke in Philly.  The story focuses on the single most important reform Philadelphia can make to continue this improvement: expanding high quality interdisciplinary legal representation for families. 

The key now is to keep the pressure on. That’s going to happen. NCCPR is proud to be represented on a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council, created at the urging of Councilmember Oh and co-chaired by Oh and Councilmember Cindy Bass, examining child separation. 

Los Angeles: from bad to worse 

In part because Philadelphia got better, but mostly because Los Angeles County got worse, that system replaces Philadelphia in second place when it comes to family separation.  Both cities have long been outliers, and the naming of Bobby Cagle to run the county Department of Children and Family Services – fresh from presiding over a foster care panic in Georgia – did not augur well. 

To Cagle’s credit, when COVID-19 struck he did not impose a blanket ban on family visits – unlike many other child welfare agency chiefs.  But the data show that, when it comes to actual performance in sparing children the trauma of needless foster care, Cagle has lived down to his reputation. 

Arizona: Everyone got the message on those t-shirts 

You may recall that Arizona is the state where most of the workers in one field office thought it would be a great idea to dress up in t-shirts that said “Professional kidnapper” on one side and “do you know where your children are?” on the other. 

Those workers apparently were fired – but the data suggest that’s only because they said it out loud.  Among America’s biggest cities, number one for tearing apart families is Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County. 

Not only is Phoenix the worst, no other big city even comes close. 

Even when you factor in rates of child poverty the rate of removal in Phoenix was: 

25% higher than Los Angeles

50% higher than Philadelphia

More than double the average for the ten cities and their surrounding counties.

More than triple the rate in New York City and Chicago. 

And, by the way, the rate of removal in metropolitan Tucson is even worse than  Phoenix.

Yes, it was only some workers in one field office who wore the t-shirts. But all over Arizona, the state’s child welfare agency is practicing what those t-shirts preached. 

Making all children less safe 

But hey, inflicting all that trauma on innocent families is worth it because at least in Phoenix there is never a child abuse horror story, right? No child “known to the system” ever dies because caseworkers are being “cautious” as they run around “erring on the side of the child” by tearing children from all they know and love; isn’t that so?  Same thing with L.A. and Philadelphia, correct? 

Didn’t think so. 

That’s because a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare so overloads systems with false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect that workers have less time to find children in real danger.  So in addition to exposing children to the enormous emotional trauma of needless foster care, and the high rate of abuse in foster care, the approach taken by cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and, still, Philadelphia – and most of the rest of America – makes all children less safe.

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?”

For the record: No, Los Angeles County does NOT have the nation’s largest child welfare system

No matter how many times the Fox News of Child Welfare says it does, it’s still not true.

I have previously noted the serious potential for harm caused by the slanted “journalism” practiced by the so-called Chronicle of Social Change – the Fox News of child welfare. Things like promoting a column using a vile racial stereotype to attack an impoverished birth mother, or the Chronicle’s cozying up to the group home industry. 

But there’s something else worth noting: A bizarre, if relatively harmless, obsession on the part of its publisher - and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" -- Daniel Heimpel:  His demonstrably erroneous claim, repeated over and over, that Los Angeles County has the largest child welfare system in America.

It does not.

Even using Heimpel’s measure of choice, it does not. 

I have no idea why it matters so much to him. Sure, he lives in Los Angeles, but it’s not as if having a super-sized child welfare system is anything to be proud of. Yet Heimpel’s fervor about this runs so deep that less than a month after Chronicle’s editor John Kelly corrected the error, Heimpel repeated it, and seemed to double down on it. It’s been repeated in story after story ever since.  It’s reached the point where people in Los Angeles County child welfare are starting to believe it.

Does it really matter? Not nearly as much as the Chronicle’s other failings.  But if they can’t – or won’t – get something so basic correct, why should they be trusted on larger policy issues?

It’s big – but not biggest

The Los Angeles County child welfare system is very, very big. That makes sense given that Los Angeles County is very, very big. It’s likely that Los Angeles has the largest child welfare system run by a county or other unit of local government.  But in most of America, states, not individual counties, run child welfare. And it’s easy to forget that there are states that have many more children than Los Angeles County – so many more that it’s unlikely on its face that Los Angeles County would have a larger child welfare system.

TABLE #1: Sources are listed at the end of this post

So if you simply measure the system by the number of children it has the potential to be involved with, Florida and Texas (as well as Georgia and Illinois, by the way) all are bigger. (Other states with larger child populations are like California – individual counties run child welfare.)

Another approach is to use only measures that detail how often the child welfare agency actually intervenes in a family’s life.

This table offers several possible measures, including Heimpel’s choice, discussed below. Los Angeles comes out third in all of them:

TABLE #2: Definitions and sources are listed at the end of this post.

● Number of children who were subjected to child abuse investigations? Los Angeles is third,  behind Texas and Florida.

● Number of children in foster care? Los Angeles is third again, behind Texas and Florida.

But Heimpel offers an answer for this one, writing:

Los Angeles’ child welfare agency is the largest in the nation, serving more than 34,000 children, almost 21,000 of whom are placed in out-of-home foster care.

In other words, he simply combines the number of children in foster care and the number receiving “services” in their own homes.

There’s just one problem: Florida and Texas also provide in-home “services.”  And yes, they report doing it for a larger number of children than Los Angeles.

So in category after category after category – including Heimpel’s category of choice -- Los Angeles County, California is not the largest child welfare system in America.

Complicating things further: There is plenty of room for fudging some of these figures. For example, Texas coerces large numbers of children into kinship foster care placements without taking the family to court - and doesn’t count them in its statistics on the number of children in foster care.

And, of course, these figures say nothing about the rate at which these jurisdictions place children in foster care. One reason the Los Angeles system is so large is the simple fact that it takes away too many children.

The UN-correction

The Chronicle’s error actually used to be even bigger. A year ago, the Chronicle published this story which, in its original form, called the Los Angeles system the biggest in the whole world!  So I sent an email to Chronicle Editor John Kelly pointing out the problem. I’ve excerpted it here:

From: Richard Wexler 
Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Errors in the Charity Chandler-Cole story
To: John Kelly

I know it’s difficult for Heimpel & Co. to grasp that Los Angeles is not the center of the universe, but there is one blatant factual error in this story,  …

Los Angeles County does not have the largest child welfare system in the world, or even in the United States.  The state-run systems in Texas and Florida both are larger, whether measured by the number of children living in those states or the number of children trapped in foster care in those states.  If you measure only by child population, Illinois and Georgia also are larger. …

Kelly corrected the text of the story and, after I sent a second email, he corrected the headline.

But while the Chronicle has never again called the L.A. system the largest in the world, in story after story the Fox News of Child Welfare has insisted it’s the largest in the United States.  The story citing the combined in-home and foster care numbers – published only a month after the Chronicle corrected the earlier story - seemed to be Heimpel’s way of doubling down.

That only made him doubly wrong.

It may not be true that everything’s bigger in Texas, but the child welfare system is.

Table #1: Sources:

Texas and Florida: Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, 2016: http://bit.ly/2Oq5uBY (Impoverished child data average the figures for 2014, 2015 and 2016); Los Angeles: Bureau of the Census, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, 2016: http://bit.ly/2AVRSwj

Table #2 Definitions and sources:

 CPS investigations are for the most recent 12 month period for which data are available; the other categories are snapshots of the number of children receiving services on the indicated date. 

Definition of in-home services: Texas: Children receiving Family Preservation Services, August 31, 2017; Florida: Children receiving in-home services and family support services, April 30, 2018; Los Angeles: Defined as “In-home Services” mostly “Family Maintenance Services,” August 31, 2017  Dates are the same for number of children in foster care.

Sources:

Florida: Florida Department of Children and Families, Out of Home care and In-home services, DCF dashboard: http://bit.ly/2KG56N3 Children in CPS investigations: Office Of Child Welfare, 2017 Annual Performance Report, Fiscal Year 2016-2017 http://bit.ly/2OWV8u3; Texas: Department of Family and Protective Services, DFPS Data Book: http://bit.ly/2ATQF8K; Los Angeles County: Department of Children and Family Services, Out of Home care and In-home services: Child Welfare Services Data Monthly Fact Sheet, August – 2017 http://bit.ly/2vRv0rN CPS investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project http://bit.ly/2nozJNO   

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.