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| Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva |
UPDATE, MAY 14, 2020: To its credit, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services objected to the scheme and the sheriff has asked that it be "reconsidered."
You’re doing everything you’re
supposed to do to stay safe during the pandemic: strictly observing social distancing;
only going out when absolutely necessary.
Then there’s a knock at your door.
Of course you’re not going to open the door and put everyone at risk,
are you?
But wait. This time the guy on the
other side of the door is wearing a uniform and a badge and carrying a gun. He’s
a sheriff’s deputy. He wants to do a
“welfare check” to see how the kids are doing.
No one has so much as accused you of abusing or neglecting your children
– but the Sheriff’s office decided, after consulting with the local child
welfare agency, that you just might.
Now what do you do? Let him in and
put everyone at higher risk of COVID-19, as this stranger who’s been
who-knows-where-else checks all around the house? Or say no and risk him
deciding that makes you a child abuser - and coming back with a court order to
take the kids? (Or maybe he won’t even wait for the court order.)
Child welfare’s response to
COVID-19 is a microcosm of child welfare in general: It flunks the
balance-of-harms test. And as is often
the case, when much of the country performs badly, Los Angeles County looks
for new ways to perform worse.
All over the country, child
protective services agencies have
been fearmongering – apparently without giving a moment’s thought to the
notion that it
is racist to declare that as soon as mostly white, middle-class “eyes” are
not on overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents
will unleash their savagery upon them in “pandemic” proportions.
But while other states and
localities have confined themselves to urging everyone to spy on their
neighbors and turn them in to hotlines, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva
doesn’t want to wait for hotline calls.
According to a
breathless story in the Los Angeles
Times:
In response to the drop in abuse reports, Villanueva said he is launching a plan “to do welfare checks on our most at-risk kids with patrol personnel.” He said he is working with the Special Victims Unit, the Department of Children and Family Services and other stakeholders to develop a way to identify high-risk minors who may not have contact with their schools and then have patrol deputies do some form of a welfare check.
There is no explanation of how the
Sheriff will decide who is “high risk” – but I’m guessing that there won’t be
many deputies sent to make random checks in Beverly Hills.
It is not clear whether the
Department of Children and Family Services will go along with this scheme – and
they’d probably have to agree for it to work, since they’d be the ones deciding
who is “high risk.” But DCFS director Bobby Cagle has done the usual call-in-anything-and-
everything fearmongering, and his
track record is not encouraging.
[UPDATE, MAY 14, 2020: To his credit, and to my surprise, Cagle objected, telling the Times:
[UPDATE, MAY 14, 2020: To his credit, and to my surprise, Cagle objected, telling the Times:
In the end, DCFS decided that sending a uniformed law enforcement officer to a family’s home without any articulable suspicion of child abuse or neglect would not necessarily improve safety for children. To the contrary, such an action might increase stress on families and children, especially those in already marginalized communities, during one of the most stressful times most have ever experienced.
Other advocates also objected and the sheriff has now asked that the proposal be "reconsidered."
That may have come as a surprise to Richard Winton, the Times, its reporter who has covered the sheriff's scheme. When the sheriff first announced it,] Winton bought the whole party line. In a style more suited to Fox News or the New York Post, Winton wrote that
That may have come as a surprise to Richard Winton, the Times, its reporter who has covered the sheriff's scheme. When the sheriff first announced it,] Winton bought the whole party line. In a style more suited to Fox News or the New York Post, Winton wrote that
Eagle-eyed teachers, doctors, dentists, counselors, coaches — an army of mandated reporters across California — along with security guards, janitors and observant parents typically fill the hotline with reports of suspected child abuse or neglect. Those calls, investigators say, often save lives.
There are a number of problems with this:
● Those “eagle eyed” mandated
reporters are just as likely to be making CYA reports because, as mandated
reporters, they’re afraid to do anything else.
● The “army” is an army of
conscripts. Some of the “soldiers” have realized they’re doing harm, and are calling
for an end to mandatory reporting.
● As for saving lives, that’s
possible. But it’s more likely that mandated reporting has cost even more
lives.
Mandatory reporting was put in
place decades ago with no evidence it would work. By 1998 the National Research Council had
concluded there is, in fact, no evidence it makes children safer. More
recent research suggests it makes children less safe. The research suggests mandatory reporting
deters people from seeking help, deters battered women from reporting their
abuse and overloads the system so child protective services agencies miss more
children in real danger.
He even used the wrong horror stories
The sheriff appears oblivious to
the irony of invoking the names of the
children in two high-profile child abuse tragedies Gabriel Fernandez and
Anthony Avalos. Those deaths had nothing to do with a lack of mandated reports
– they had to do with failure to follow up on the reports, quite possibly
because the system was so overloaded. Nationwide, 97 percent of calls to hotlines
are either screened out, false reports or neglect cases. By overloading systems with all those false
reports and cases that often involve poverty, workers have less time to find
the other three percent.
First, it is clear that the vast majority of reports do not result in state action because a child has been mistreated; there is a lot of noise in reporting. Hunches, vague suspicions, better-safe-than-sorry beliefs, passing the buck to someone else instead of figuring out how to be helpful, anonymous calls and instances of malicious false reporting still require state investigations that cost time and money.
Reducing those types of reports because children are not as casually observed will reduce unnecessary family disruption and trauma and will give investigators more time to scrutinize when children are actually in danger, usually of serious physical or sexual abuse.
Fewer reports based on unsubstantiated feelings and just passing the buck will also mean workers will have to do fewer in-person investigations, leaving them and the families they are investigating less exposed to COVID-19.
So if anything, fewer junk reports
might leave workers more time to find the next Gabriel or the next
Anthony. The retreat of the “army” of
mandated reporters might make children safer.
The sheriff’s own department needs attention …
The Los Angeles Times story describes
Villanueva as someone “who spent years working the streets and is a veteran of
child abuse and neglect investigations.”
But there
may be a bit more to him. Indeed, given his profound concern about violence, Villanueva,
dubbed by Los Angeles Magazine, “The
Donald Trump of LA Law Enforcement,” might want to focus more
closely on his own department.
…and the L.A. Times needs more careful editors
As for the story itself, how does
Winton know if those teachers, dentists and janitors are “eagle eyed” and not simply calling in CYA
reports to protect themselves? Has he
checked their eyesight? Has he watched
the “army” drill and checked their training?
Clearly, the story could have used a better editor; in particular a
certain legendary Los Angeles city editor – literally legendary, since he was a
work of fiction:
The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. In the clip, the lead
that went beyond the facts was for a story about police misconduct. In the L.A. Times, the florid prose is in the service of a worshipful view of “law
enforcement,” whether it’s the sheriff or the so-called “eagle-eyed … army...” (Or, for those who have seen the episode, the Times story combines the prose style of
Rossi with the attitude of Driscoll.)
Bad ideas like Villanueva’s – and the
way they are covered in newspapers like the Times
- are the harvest we’ve reaped from
decades of hype and hysteria persuading us that there is a child abuser under
every bed. COVID-19 makes it all worse.
