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| Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are among the sponsors of a "yuuuuge" coronavirus relief package that includes many good provisions - but also up to $500 million more to police poor communities of color - but of course it's not called policing. |
This post has been updated to discuss the newly-released text of one of the alternatives to the bill cosponsored by Senators Warren and Sanders.
In times
like these, as we finally are forced to come face-to-face with what
overpolicing does to impoverished communities of color, who in the world would
want to spend even more money on such policing?
Some of the
most liberal members of Congress, that’s who. People such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), along with 16
other Democratic senators.
Other Democrats are sponsoring a separate bill that is better. That bill apparently gives child protective services new money to spend on real prevention or on policing or on both. Unfortunately, it's not hard to guess what most child protective services agencies will choose.
Other Democrats are sponsoring a separate bill that is better. That bill apparently gives child protective services new money to spend on real prevention or on policing or on both. Unfortunately, it's not hard to guess what most child protective services agencies will choose.
This is happening because of a fundamental failure among my fellow white liberals: the failure to
face up to the fact that child protective services agencies are a police force
– and their power to oppress individual families, and entire communities of
color, is as great, if not greater, than that of the police who wear blue
uniforms.
CPS
investigators have more power than police. Effectively, they can enter homes and stripsearch
children without a warrant. Say
no, and they can come back with the police and even break down the
door. Even when the entry is
less drastic, the terror of the investigation is something a child may never
forget. More than half of Black children will endure such terror during their
childhoods. That’s best case. Worst case: the CPS caseworker takes away
the children on-the-spot without so much as asking a judge first.
Almost always,
the trauma is inflicted on all these children for nothing – the report was false. In most remaining cases the alleged problem
is neglect – which often
means poverty.
The child welfare, foster, and family court system (“the foster system”) is thus a major site of policing, control, and punishment of poor Black women, starting at conception.
Many
white liberals have been blind to this. They persist in
thinking of CPS agencies as benevolent helpers.
In Black communities they know better. As Kendra Hurley wrote in Citylab:
Some parents living in neighborhoods with historically high rates of child welfare investigations say the dramatic dip in maltreatment reports [due to COVID-19] feels more like the pollution lifting — a much-needed respite from the intense and relentless surveillance of low-income moms, and especially those who are black and Latinx. …
One parent told [family advocate Joyce McMillan]: “They’re not opening my refrigerator. They’re not opening my dresser drawers. They’re not strip-searching my children and they’re not asking me to take their clothes off for the camera, because that would be child pornography.”
"Poor people are usually constantly inspected by all these agencies,” [one mother] said. “Now there is kind of a peacefulness.”
But this isn’t
new. In a rare examination of this other police force in 2017, The New
York Times documented case after case of bias in the system, calling
foster care the new “Jane Crow.”
One other problem with the child
welfare surveillance state: It hasn’t stopped child abuse.
On the contrary, workers are so overloadded
with false allegations and cases in which family poverty is confused with
neglect that they have no time to investigate any case properly – and that is
almost always the real reasons for the extremely rare horror stories that make
headlines. At the same time, if poor
people need help, they must seek it from people mandated to turn them in to the
child abuse police. That, of course, makes them reluctant so seek such help.
The child welfare surveillance
state, with its take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare makes all
children less safe.
What the bill would do
Yet now,
even as many on the Left say we should “defund the police,” some of America’s most
liberal senators are pushing the federal government to spend up to $500 million
more on the child abuse police. The
$500 million is part of a bill that also includes another $1 billion in child
welfare spending that is problematic because of the funding stream that must be tapped in
order to get it.
All of this
money is a small part of a
yuuuuge spending bill - $430 billion in all - to cope with the effects the effects of COVID-19. Of that amount, I, and I suspect most other liberals, would probably favor the way the sponsors propose to spend at least $428.5 billion. That’s because none of that money goes to furthering the overpolicing of poor communities.
But up to $500
million would be spent, via the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act
(CAPTA), to “support child welfare workers in preventing, investigating, and treating child abuse and neglect …” This $500 million is specifically targeted
toward the child abuse police, the investigators who exercise the vast powers
described above. The way they “treat” child abuse often is by tearing apart
families or placing them under onerous, harmful surveillance.
But that’s
not the only problem. These funds are funneled through the
worst part of a bad law, Title I of CAPTA. CAPTA was, literally, designed to avoid
facing up to the issues of racial and class bias that permeate child
welfare.
CAPTA
codifies everything wrong with
America’s approach to child welfare. CAPTA encourages the failed system
of mandatory
reporting. CAPTA encourages the use of
Court-Appointed Special Advocates, a program that studies have found to be a
failure, and which entrenches
racial and class bias in
child welfare. CAPTA encourages blacklists of alleged child abusers that are
far too easy to get on and far too hard to get off – causing enormous
additional hardships for impoverished families.
And
CAPTA encourages laws and policies that terrorize pregnant women away from
seeking prenatal care, and inflict needless foster care on children during
precisely the time in their lives those need their families most – their
infancy (The Senate bill also
includes another $1 billion via Title II of CAPTA, which has less onerous
requirements.)
That’s why
groups such as Movement for Family Power call
for repealing CAPTA.
The only thing that has
prevented CAPTA from having an even more devastating impact on communities of
color is the simple fact that there is not much money in it, so there is not
much incentive for states to knuckle under to its mandates. But now, two of the most prominent liberals
in the Senate propose to bulk up funding for an odious law that leaders of
color want repealed.
How did this happen?
Neither Warren nor Sanders
specializes in child welfare issues, and the child welfare component is a tiny
part of a much larger spending bill. And,
as noted above, many on the Left – the white
Left, at least, can’t get their heads around the idea that child protective
services is a police force. Odds are these
senators’ staffers saw that the usual liberal child welfare establishment
groups, like the Child Welfare League of America, are for it, so that was good
enough for them.
But that is no longer good
enough. A predominantly white liberal
child welfare establishment have built a system on a foundation
of racial and class bias. (They’ve had plenty of help from an assortment
of white conservatives, such as Newt “bring back the orphanage” Gingrich, and
Naomi Schaefer Riley, who crusades
to tear apart more families from her perch at the American Enterprise
Institute.) No United States Senator
should sign on to any child welfare legislation until they’ve actually listened
to the communities upon which the full force of that legislation will be
inflicted.
Better alternatives
In the short run, here’s what
Sanders, Warren and the other Democrats who have co-sponsored this bill could
do to genuinely protect vulnerable children:
● Take the $1.5 billion and move
it out of CAPTA and into programs that ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty,
such as increasing the amount allotted in the bill for child care and providing
serious support for housing, which is barely mentioned in the current bill.
A good model can be found in legislation sponsored by two
Republicans, Alaska Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and two
conservative Democrats, Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) Their bill helps to provide what poor families really need in COVID-19 relief
to keep kids safe from child abuse and out of foster care: Emergency housing
aid, transportation and childcare.
● Four other Democrats also
have a bill that would be better – though there’s a catch. Actual language is not yet available, but it
appears that a
key provision of the bill would give
child welfare agencies $2 billion they could spend either on good things – like
transportation, housing and utility payments and/or further policing poor
people of color, and destroying their families forever. That’s because this
money also could be spent “to expand adoption promotion and support services,
or to hire, train and support caseworkers to conduct safe in-person home and
remote visits, including the purchase of personal protective equipment and
technology.” [UPDATE, JULY 14, 2020: The bill language is now available and the news is pretty good. For starters, none of the money is funneled through CAPTA. And the bill says that states "shall expend significant portions of the funds" on a variety of child welfare services almost all of which range from harmless to beneficial, so relatively little would go to the policing functions of child welfare. However, the bill puts very little emphasis on keeping families together and it implies that if children are placed in kinship foster care with relatives, somehow that is not foster care. It is.]
