“Child welfare” and racism: Children’s Rights steps up

For the first time in its history, the group uses litigation to take on racism, needless surveillance and wrongful removal.  It’s not a full-scale lawsuit, but it’s a good start 

From Children's Rights' page discussing their civil rights complaint in Minnesota

Last week, in a post about the landmark lawsuit against the New York City family police agency for its abuses of children and families during investigations, I noted that Ira Lustbader, litigation director at Children’s Rights said “now is the time” for such litigation.  I pointed out that in its entire history, Children’s Rights had never brought such litigation, insisted it couldn’t be done, and sometimes even stood in the way of such efforts.  So I asked a question: 

Since you say “now is the time,” Ira, and now that other lawyers have shown you how it’s done, when are you going to start bringing lawsuits like this? 

I’ve got to admit, he came up with a good answer.  

It’s not a full-scale class-action lawsuit,  but it’s a good start:  Children’s Rights is representing the Minneapolis NAACP in a formal complaint to the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights. The Complaint alleges that the two largest counties in Minnesota, Hennepin and Ramsey, engage in systematic, rampant, racially biased needless investigation and surveillance of families and needless removal of children. 

In recent years, CR has done excellent public policy work – but it’s stuck to the same stale litigation that rarely did any good and often did real harm.  But this time, the policy arm and the litigation arm of the organization worked together.  And this time, they’ve brought good litigation in the right place at the right time. 

The right place 

Minnesota has a particularly ugly record when it comes to family policing.  Year after year the state tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  The NAACP/CR Complaint reveals how much of that is driven by racial bias.  For example, in Minnesota Black children are twice as likely to be thrown into foster care as white children.  Biracial or multiracial children are seven times more likely than white children to be torn from their families. 

Minnesota’s record of racial disparity in investigations and foster care is worse than the national average, and the disparities in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties are worse than the state average.  

The right time 

Although Minnesota’s dismal record dates back decades, a key part of the reason things remain so awful is the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  Once, it was a source of some of the nation’s most insightful commentary on these issues.  But more recently it has descended to what the legendary journalist David Simon calls “Pulitzer sniffing.”    

Twice in recent years, the Star Tribune has exploited horror stories in an apparent effort to set off foster-care panics, sharp sudden increases in the number of children taken from their homes. The first time they succeeded.  But now they’re having a harder time.  Lawmakers are catching on to the fact that the deluge of false reports, trivial cases and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases encouraged by the Star Tribune actually contributes to the horror stories.  Even the Star Tribune quoted Kelis Houston, an NAACP committee leader and founder of the family advocacy group Village Arms, when she told a legislative committee:

"The worst thing Minnesota can do is keep doubling down on its failed approach," said Houston, adding that tragedies continue to occur because caseworkers are overwhelmed by "trivial cases." 

A Complaint like this can only reinforce lawmakers’ skepticism and help them understand what’s really needed to keep children safe. 

Three key causes 

The Complaint zeros in on three likely contributors to Minnesota’s dismal record:

 ● Structured Decision-Making.  This system of questionnaires filled out by investigators is essentially predictive analytics without the computers.  Reports in three states have linked SDM to increased removals of children, and analyses in Washington State and Michigan found racial bias in the SDM questionnaires. The Minnesota Complaint cites additional scholarly critiques of SDM, and offers these specific examples from the SDM Safety Assessment and Family Risk Assessment questionnaires in Minnesota. It’s relevant everywhere since SDM is so widely used. 

From the complaint: 

The SDM SA’s consideration of a caregiver’s inability to meet the child’s immediate needs for food/shelter, lack of water or utilities, and deeming space heaters for heat as unsafe, are characteristics that are proxies for both race and socioeconomic status. Minnesota’s use of these factors to support a child’s removal and/or ongoing separation due to alleged neglect discriminately and disproportionately impacts Black families who are overrepresented in Minnesota’s child welfare system for neglect-related allegations. 

Similarly, the SDM FRA’s consideration of prior assigned reports (even if not substantiated), prior CPS history (even if not substantiated), and whether either caregiver was abused as a child, are proxies for race and socioeconomic status and discriminatorily and disproportionately impact Black families in Minnesota, and in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, who experience child welfare system involvement more frequently, and are more likely to score higher under those categories. 

The specific inclusion of unsubstantiated reports and CPS histories directs the weighting of known discriminatory and disproportionate practices against Black families, as these categories by their very terms did not involve finding safety considerations justifying investigation and/or removal. 

The SDM FRA’s consideration of a household with three or more children as a maltreatment-predicting characteristic also serves as a proxy for race and has a discriminatory and disproportionate impact on Black families who are more likely to have three or more children. 

● Misuse of “emergency” removal power.  You know how family police agencies love to say “We don’t decide if a child is removed from the home, a court has to approve everything we do”?

It’s a lie. 

In every state, the police and/or the family police have the power to remove children from their homes on the spot without so much as calling a judge.  In Minnesota the power rests with law enforcement – and they abuse it constantly. All law enforcement officers need to do is think that a child’s “health or welfare is being endangered by the child’s ‘surroundings or conditions,’” or “reasonably believes” that such health or safety “will be” endangered. 

So it’s no wonder that, as the Complaint points out, between 2014 and 2019 half of all removals of children in Hennepin County took place that way.  In Ramsey County, it was 78%.  

● Lack of services to help families.  When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  Like most places, the Minnesota family police have quick and easy access to tearing apart families – everything else is in short supply.  So children and families get hammered. 

The complaint calls on the Office of Civil Rights to launch a full investigation into the state’s “discriminatory actions.”  The office should do that.  In fact, they should do more.  In addition to looking at the enormous bias against Black families in Minnesota, they also should examine what data suggest is even more enormous bias against Native American families.  No need to wait for another Complaint! 

As for Children’s Rights, for the first time in decades, I’m looking forward to seeing what their litigation arm might do next. 

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.

L.A.’s vulnerable kids caught in the middle as the “elephants” of analytics fight

“When elephants fight,” the proverb goes, “the grass gets hurt.”

As Los Angeles deals with the aftermath of another child abuse tragedy, the death of Yonatan Aguilar, the debate over how to fix the system is devolving into a fight between two of the field’s “elephants.”

They’re fighting over which of two flawed, racially biased approaches to trying to predict which children are in danger should predominate in the biggest child welfare “market” in the country.

They’re being egged on by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors – or as this particular governing body should properly be known, simply “The B.S.” The B.S. is doing what it always does about child welfare issues: micromanage and grandstand.

The entire shameful spectacle only diverts attention from the problem that’s been at the root of Los Angeles’ child welfare crisis for decades: a take-the-child-and-run mentality that does enormous harm to children needlessly taken. It also so overloads caseworkers that they can’t do a thorough investigation of any case, no matter what decision-making tool they use.

Los Angeles takes away children at double the rate of New York City and triple the rate of Chicago. That didn’t save Yonatan Aguilar, Gabriel Fernandez or the many who came before. Of course, New York and Chicago also have horrifying cases involving deaths of children “known to the system.” But does anyone really believe that Los Angeles children are twice as safe from abuse as children in New York City and three times as safe as children in Chicago?

On the contrary, the take-the-child-and-run approach makes all children less safe.

The more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. So they make even more mistakes in all directions. That’s almost always the real reason for the tragedies that make headlines. But instead of getting to the heart of the problem, the supervisors are obsessing over whether to replace one flawed system of risk assessment with another.

Two Flawed Models of Risk Assessment

Right now, Los Angeles caseworkers use an approach called “Structured Decision Making.” They fill out questionnaires that rate families, then feed the results into a computer that supposedly tells the caseworkers how high the risk is in the families.

But a study in Michigan found that while SDM has a veneer of objectivity, many of the determinations workers make are highly subjective. The Michigan study also found that risk factors that appear to be race neutral are anything but. Simply being a young parent is deemed a risk. So is being a single parent. Black parents are more likely to be young and more likely to be single.

Other “risk factors” are self-reinforcing. A child is rated at higher risk if there have been previous reports of maltreatment. But, precisely because of poverty, which is easily confused with “neglect, ” and because of racial bias, poor black families are more likely to be subjects of such reports.

So it’s no wonder officials at the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) suggested in 2007 that SDM contributed o a rapid increase in children taken from their parents in Los Angeles County. DCFS has acknowledged that the racial disparity in the Los Angeles system has increased since SDM began.

An evaluation by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy found that using SDM may have increased racial bias in child removals in that state.

SDM’s competitor is “predictive analytics,” which is essentially SDM on steroids. The analytics software uses demographic factors to compute alleged risk. It’s being touted by, among others, SAS, a giant software firm which points to its own analysis of its own test as evidence that it works.

But the test also found that 95 percent of the time, when the software predicted a catastrophe if the child was not taken away, the software was wrong. And, like SDM, predictive analytics has a major racial bias problem.

Both SDM and predictive analytics amount to the same thing: computerized racial profiling.

Switching from one to the other will only contribute to another spike in needless entries into foster care, doing enormous harm to the children who are needlessly taken. It will also further overwhelm caseworkers, making it even more likely that they’ll miss the next Yonatan Aguilar.

If that happens, the members of “The B.S.” will surely race to express their “shock” and “outrage” before the television cameras. And the cycle will begin all over again.

The elephants are fighting, but this time it’s not grass that’s getting hurt – it’s innocent children.

Foster care in Los Angeles: NOW he tells us: The frustrating, mundane causes of DCFS failure

After years of trying to whip Southern California into a frenzy about some kind of Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy, after a failed effort to scapegoat a waiver from federal funding restrictions and, of course, after doing enormous harm to children by setting off a foster-care panic, Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf finally noticed: According to a Therolf story published on July 18 about an investigation commissioned by the county Board of Supervisors, the real reasons children “known to the system” sometimes die typically are things like buying the wrong computers so workers can’t get the information they need, or not being able to get the best people to work the toughest jobs. 

These are the real horror stories – children dying for reasons that are even more tragic because they are so mundane.

But when there’s no Grand Unifying Theory there’s no quick fix.  When workers know the Times is ready to scapegoat them if they leave any child home and something goes wrong, it’s one more disincentive to stay in the toughest jobs.   And when the real problems involve overloaded workers, setting off a foster-care panic makes everything worse.  That can be seen in another recent Therolf story, about children sleeping in an office building.

Therolf blamed it on

“ a chronic shortage of foster homes throughout the United States as fewer families prove willing or able to care for the most difficult-to-handle children.”

The problem is not “a chronic shortage of foster parents.”  If that were true, then children would be warehoused in office buildings throughout the United States all the time.  They aren’t.

It is happening in Los Angeles now because the Times’ hype-and-hysteria-filled “reporting” falsely scapegoating efforts to keep families together whenever a  child dies has derailed efforts to curb needless removal of children.  With caseworkers terrified of landing on the front page if they leave any child home and something goes wrong, they tear apart more families needlessly.  There are plenty of children who are not abused until DCFS takes them away.  The problem isn’t too few foster parents, it’s too many foster children.  (For details see our report on Los Angeles child welfare.)

When children have been warehoused in office buildings in other cities, and it has happened several times over the years, it’s almost always in the wake of foster-care panics, just like the one the Times started in Los Angeles.

So while many people share responsibility for all the suffering this has caused to children and their families, Garett Therolf and his editors at the Los Angeles Times rank high on that list.

COMPUTERIZED RACIAL PROFILING

Just as disturbing is this conclusion from the report to the Supervisors concerning a series of  checklists known as “Structured Decision Making” (SDM).  The report to the supervisors also found that

 child welfare officials need to reexamine the use of a computer program called Structured Decision Making, which is designed to measure a child's risk of maltreatment. Currently, the report said, the program is used "improperly or not at all."

The Supervisors do indeed need to reexamine its use – but not to use it even more.  Rather it needs to be reexamined for racial bias.

 In Los Angeles, caseworkers use the checklists to assess the functioning of a family.  They add up the score and they’re supposed to transmit the information to a computer.  The computer, not the caseworker, then decides if the child is supposed to be removed.  Or as the headline on a Therolf story in 2009 put it: “How computers call the shots for L.A. County children in peril; Social workers feed in data on suspected abuse and neglect, and a decision pops out.” 

While it was not the intent either of DCFS or the creators of SDM, when used this way, SDM turns into what amounts to computerized racial profiling.

This is discussed in detail in material we released at a news conference in Los Angeles in 2009 (See Page 17).  At the time DCFS itself acknowledged that SDM may have contributed both to an increase in removals of children from the home and an increase in racial disproportionality – that is, removal of minority children from their homes at a rate greater than their representation in the general population.

But the problem isn’t limited to Los Angeles.  One of the best reports on racial bias in child welfare in any state, the Michigan Race Equity Review found profound bias in SDM in that state.

And this year, an evaluation by the respected Washington State Institute for Public Policy found that using SDM may have increased racial bias in child removals in that state – though the researchers caution other factors also may have been at play.

In response, the people who came up with SDM – and peddle it to child welfare systems all over the country and internationally - have the same standard answers: If a finding is unfavorable to SDM, the researchers got it wrong or the people using SDM didn’t use it right.

But if SDM is that hard to use then that, in itself, is a problem. Its use should be suspended until its proponents can prove they have a model that isn’t biased against minorities – and which is within the capabilities of child welfare systems to use correctly.