Thursday, July 7, 2016

More children forced to pay the price of panic

The Tampa Bay Times had a story this week about how so many children are being taken away in Hillsborough County that some had to spend a night or two sleeping in offices:

In the story, Lorita Shirley, operations manager for Eckerd Kids, the private agency that runs foster care in the county, says one of the reasons is:

…a spike in the number of children being taken into care that month used up available beds, she said. Typically, about 140 children a month are removed from their families because of concerns for their safety and placed with relatives, foster parents or in group homes, Shirley said. In May, that number went up to 195, a surge of almost 40 percent.

But actually, it’s even worse.

In the 12 months before Innocents Lost was published in March, 2014, 1,265 children were taken from their parents in Hillsborogh County.  During the same 12 month period, ending in February 2016, the figure skyrocketed to 1,592.  And that was before the recent “surge.”

Right now, the rate of removal in Hillsborough County is far above the statewide average – and that average has gone up significantly since Innocents Lost.

In other words, in part because of high-profile tragedies in the county, Hillsborough County has had a panic on top of the statewide foster-care panic.

The story also provided an official excuse for the spike in removals;

The decision to remove children from their families in Hillsborough is made by the Child Protective Investigative Division, a unit of the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office. Capt. Jim Bradford said there has been no change in the criteria they use when deciding to remove a child. The increase in May is a result of more calls coming in on the Florida Abuse Hotline, he said.

Foster-care panics often prompt a surge in calls, but a greater percentage of those calls tend to be false reports – not because of malice, but because people urged over and over to report anything and everything tend to do just that.  That means hotlines need to be more discerning about which calls they pass on for investigation and investigators need to be more discerning about which calls really require removing a child from the home.

Neither is happening in Florida.

Once again, there is no evidence that this additional suffering inflicted on children by the Miami Herald’s shoddy journalism and the response by state and local officials has done anything to make children safer.

Once again, all that suffering is for nothing – except the greater glory of the Miami Herald and the desire by public and private agency officials to protect themselves from the wrath of the Herald – and the Tampa Bay Times, which encouraged the panic in an editorial in January.