We start off this week with updates on two stories illustrating the biases and double standards of family policing:
● The Albany Times Union has more about an Upstate New York case in which it appears the family police agency went out of its way to ignore warning signs about abuse in a foster home – to the point of firing a case aide allegedly because she repeatedly tried to alert them. Now the child is dead. And it all happened in a case where removing the child may have been unnecessary and, after the removal, relatives seeking custody were turned aside in favor of strangers.
● Remember that case in Tennessee in which children were torn from their parents after a traffic stop – essentially because the parents were Driving While Black? The parents are suing and now, Tennessee Lookout reports, a judge has ruled the caseworkers are not covered by immunity.
And speaking of double standards:
● Determining if a child fatality is due to neglect or an accident is more subjective than it may seem. I often use a hypothetical about a toddler who unlatches the back door early one Saturday morning, wanders into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? If it’s the pool behind a McMansion it’s likely to be ruled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park, it’s more likely to be neglect.
And this is no hypothetical: As the Topeka Capital-Journal reports, if it’s a foster parent’s backyard fish pond, it’s an accident. Or, as the county sheriff put it in an earlier story: “We can’t be with them (children) all the time. That’s just part of parenting and growing up. It just takes a split second for something to happen.”
● Think you know all of the insane financial incentives that
encourage the needless separation of children from their families? Wanna
bet? Allow Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan to
introduce you to another one, in this essay for The Imprint, excerpted from
his article in the current Family Justice Journal.
● WIFR-TV reports that Illinois is launching what it says is “the nation’s largest guaranteed income pilot program for families involved in the child welfare system.”
● LAist reports on efforts to train mandatory reporters in Los Angeles on a change in California law that modestly narrows the definition of neglect. But even if the training is good – and that’s a big if – it doesn’t change the fact that there still are penalties for failing to report, so even mandatory reporters who may know better still may well make a CYA report.
