NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 15, 2025

● The family policing system in Philadelphia tears apart families at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. In an extraordinary three-part series, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks at how that city’s system destroys children in the name of saving them – and what can be done about it. Part One deals with widespread abuse in foster care. Part Three compares Philadelphia to the state-run system in neighboring New Jersey, which has improved child safety while dramatically reducing the number of families it tears apart.

But most extraordinary – and perhaps most significant for a national audience - may be part two.  It is the best examination I’ve seen by any news organization into the horrors of “hidden foster care.”  Be sure to read it to the end.

The revelations all were shocking enough to prompt the City Council to plan public hearings.

● Not that we’d ever say we told you so, but NCCPR first wrote about the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds as a family policing slush fund in 2010. ProPublica did a superb story about it in 2021. So it’s good to see, as The Imprint reports, that the Government Accountability Office is getting into the act.

● Here’s another media myth from news organizations in West Virginia: the claim that the Child Removal Capital of America underspends on child welfare. On the contrary, it spends at a rate above, possibly far above, the national average – but it wastes the money on needless foster care.  I have a blog post about it.

● In an earlier post about West Virginia, I discussed dreadful legislation – sponsored by a lawmaker who’s also a white middle-class foster parent – that would make it easier, yes, easier, to keep foster children apart from their siblings. I hope he reads this commentary in The Imprint by a former foster youth describing what that did to her.

● There may be better news from the legislature in Maine. After years of retreating from reform, lawmakers may be reconsidering. As the Maine Morning Star reports, they’re looking at legislation to make it more difficult to confuse poverty with neglect.

● The Observer, in Sacramento, Calif., begins a multi-part series on the racial bias that pervades family policing. 

● And speaking of racial bias, MindSite News reports that 

Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder, which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a new report released this month.

“I often say ODD greases the school-to-prison pipeline,” Dr. Rupi Legha, a Los Angeles-based child and adolescent psychiatrist, told MindSite News. “It becomes a way to shove kids quicker. They’re going to slip and fall a lot more and it’s going to go a lot faster.” 

Of course, this also has implications for which foster children wind up trapped in “residential treatment” – and what happens to them when they’re there. 

● The New York Times has a story about the horrifying implications of Elon Musk’s attempt to gather all the information the federal government has on us into one giant database. Why is that here? Because if you happen to be an impoverished family in Pittsburgh subjected to a call alleging child neglect – it’s already happening to you.  And in that case, The New York Times ran an article (by a white, middle-class foster parent) praising it to the skies! 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● KSDK-TV, St. Louis reports: 

A Lincoln County woman is facing multiple charges after police said she assaulted and abandoned a teenage girl for whom she was supposed to be caring. … 

[The foster mother] collects exotic animals,[Lincoln County Prosecutor Mike] Wood said, and they're investigating allegations that she traded the girl in exchange for a monkey. 

● NBC6 South Florida reports that 

A man has been sentenced to two life sentences in a Miami-Dade human trafficking case involving a child who was in foster care and an adult, prosecutors said. 

And finally,

 ● File this story from The Imprint under “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”