How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.”

Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t do that. But at last, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

Seventeen years after we first raised the issue, an ugly little practice that leads to hundreds of needless foster care placements in Kansas every year finally is getting some attention – though far from all of the attention it deserves. 

The Kansas Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that may slightly reduce the number of times this practice is invoked – but it still allows the family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, to keep such placements “off the books” – so no one will know how many children really are taken from their homes in Kansas each year. 

The practice is known as placing children in “police protective custody.” It’s a special Kansas twist on the ugly practice of “hidden foster care.” What Kansas allows is so awful that it earns the state a special note in the narrative for the NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index. 

After decades, it appears that DCF finally has leadership that is concerned about the practice and how it leads to the needless removal of children. They supported the modest reforms.  But they’re still sticking to the disingenuous claim that these placements are not foster care. 

Why are police protective custody placements not foster care? Because, DCF says, they’re police protective custody placements, that’s why! 

And no wonder: 

In a foster care placement, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

In a police protective custody placement, on the other hand, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

See the difference?  

Well, actually there is that one difference. When the police take the child (hence the term “police protective custody”) and the child is returned home at or before the first court hearing – which can be as much as six days later – DCF pretends it never happened!  In other words, when Kansas tells the public, and the federal government, how many children were torn from their homes and placed elsewhere by force of law, they don’t count police protective custody placements. 

How many such placements are there? No one knows for sure, but apparently quite a lot – so many that it can take the rate of removal in Kansas from outrageous all the way to obscene. Even worse, it appears that a significant proportion of these placements involve dumping children into the worst, most traumatic form of placement of all – institutionalizing them in parking place “shelters.”   

Officially, in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, Kansas consigned 3,096 children to the chaos of foster care – that made the rate of removal in Kansas well over double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (DCF gives a lower figure for 2024, but the number nationwide also probably has declined, so it’s unlikely Kansas’ relative position has changed.)

But in March, DCF finally released some figures on police protective custody placements. While not precise, they suggest that anywhere from 979 to 1,076 children were taken into police protective custody and then “thrown back” – much the worse for the experience – before the first hearing, and so would never be counted in official figures.  (A link to DCF’s figures and an explanation of the estimate can be found at the end of this post. If anyone wants to suggest an alternative figure, I’d be glad to take a look.) 

National Average   Kansas1         Kansas2

1=Rate-of-removal based on officially acknowledged entries.
2=Rate-of-removal based on likely real number of entries (including 979 PPC placements)

Using the low-end estimate, that would mean Kansas really took away 4,075 children in 2022. That would make the rate of removal in Kansas more than triple the national average and the fourth highest in the country. 

The practice goes back a long way 

We first discovered the practice in 2007, while working on our report about Kansas child welfare. We discovered it when it was referenced in passing in an op-ed column written by the public official who, then as now, might be Kansas’ foremost proponent of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That would be Ron Paschal, then as now the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). His op-ed hinted that the number was huge, but offered no specifics. 

Just as in 2007, the most extreme use of police protective custody placements is still in the Wichita area. In that region, it appears that more than half of all entries into care were police protective custody cases in which the children were returned to family within six days. 

The excuse for hiding all these placements 

Although DCF has more concern about these placements now than it did in 2007, it still uses the same excuse now as then for failing to report them as entries to the public or to the federal government: It’s not foster care because DCF doesn’t have custody of the children – the police do. In other words: Sure, they’re in exactly the same places and subject to exactly the same control as if DCF had them, but hey, so what? That’s our technicality and we’re sticking to it! 

At best DCF is exploiting a loophole in federal regulations concerning what must be reported as an entry into foster care, at worst they may not be following those regulations. 

Those regulations do not say a child has to be in the custody of a given agency to be counted as in foster care.  Rather, the state family police agency must have “responsibility for placement and care of the child.”  In the case of Kansas police protective custody placements, children may be placed in foster homes group homes or institutions that are licensed and overseen by DCF. That sure sounds like responsibility for placement and care.  But, in fairness to DCF, when we asked the federal Administration for Children and Families about this in 2007, they were just fine with letting Kansas do this and looking the other way. That may be in part because if Kansas doesn’t call a case foster care, the federal government doesn’t have to pick up part of the tab for that case. 

So maybe DCF can get away with it legally – ethically it’s a shameful misrepresentation of the full scope of the extent to which Kansas destroys families.

Six-day placements are almost never necessary 

The new data also tell us something else: In nearly 1,000 cases – and maybe more – a Kansas law enforcement officer decided that something was happening to a child that was so awful it required tearing that child from everyone she or he knows and loves and throwing that child in with strangers – at worst dumping them into an institution. And yet, that child could be returned, typically to the home from which she or he was taken, within six days. 

A sadistic, brutal parent out to beat and torture a child does not suddenly reform in six days.  Neither does a parent who’s been deliberately starving a child. In these sorts of extremely rare cases, the problem is not likely to be remedied in six days.  Where the danger is not severe and immediate, odds are there are things that can be done without taking away the child. Here’s a good example, from next door in Missouri, of a police officer who understands that.  

But Ron Paschal doesn’t understand that. In legislative testimony, he cited horrible situations supposedly requiring police protective custody, and declared in written testimony that when the child then is returned home from this supposedly impossibly horrible situation within six days “THIS IS AN INDICATION THAT [POLICE PROTECTIVE CUSTODY] WAS SUCCESSFUL.” (Capitals in original(!)) 

That’s like saying that kidnapping a child does the child no harm, and even declaring success, if the child is rescued in a few days.  I think most people – especially the children in question – would consider it far better not to be kidnapped in the first place.  And make no mistake, particularly for a young child, the trauma is every bit as great as a kidnapping – no matter how “short” the time in foster care – oops, sorry, I mean “police protective custody.” 

If anything, Paschal suggests Kansas still isn’t tearing apart enough families.  He cites claims that child abuse is underreported, and the fact that his position has popular support – as evidenced by viewer comments on a television station website. 

This is a longstanding belief on Paschal’s part. You can read more about him in NCCPR’s 2007 report on Kansas child welfare. 

One other thing about police protective custody placements. They don’t always end with a return to the birth parents. Sometimes they end with an informal arrangement to place the child in the home of a relative – in other words, the classic version of hidden foster care. So Kansas’ special version of hidden foster care – police protective custody placements – probably increases the number of classically hidden placements. 

______________

How we estimated the number of unreported foster care entries in Kansas. 

In written testimony to the Kansas Legislature, Deputy DCF Secretary Tanya Keys includes several tables on Page 5. One of those tables puts the total number of Police Protective Custody (PPC) placements in 2024 at 2,509.  Another table states that of all the children Kansas officially admits they put in foster care in 2024, 1,433 of them started off as PPC placements. So if 1,433 out of 2,509 PPC placements ultimately became officially recognized foster-care placements, that leaves 1,076 that did not. That would be 1,076 children taken from their families but never officially counted as foster care placements. 

But the number might not be that high. In an email, Keys explained that's because the 1,433 figure is actually an estimate, extrapolating from various data sources. (By the way, however much I disagree with the agency, Keys sure works hard – she answered my emails on a Sunday night.) 

But there’s an alternative, simpler way to estimate: The Kansas Reflector reports that during a legislative hearing 

Keys said, the Kansas Department of Corrections reported 39% of children dropped off at juvenile facilities last fiscal year by law enforcement officers across the state were subsequently released to a family member. 

“Forty percent of those children are returned to a parent or relative. That’s their placement outcome after a juvenile intake an assessment worker is alongside that family,” Keys said. 

That would be 979, and that more conservative figure is the one I’ve used to estimate the real rate of removal in Kansas.