The Herald vs. the Facts: Fear and loathing at Florida DCF

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Fear and loathing at Florida DCF

Compare the kind of worker the Florida Department of Children and Families fires to the kind it keeps

I’m just catching up with a story from late last year, reported by The Palm Beach Post, that perfectly sums up the dangerous, defensive and arrogant mindset of many child welfare agencies in general and the Florida Department of Children and Families in particular.

Tiffany Sicard left her children, ages six and three, in a car to rush into a CVS pharmacy and pick up a prescription for the younger child. It was 85 degrees outside, but the car windows were partially open, the doors were unlocked and police said the children “did not appear to be in distress.”

That part about “police said” is due to the fact that when Sicard got back to the car, about fifteen minutes after leaving it, the police already were on the scene. They arrested Sicard and charged her with two counts of child neglect.

In some ways, Sicard’s case is similar to those in the searing New York Times story about foster care as the new Jane Crow. One of those ways: Sicard is Black. Indeed, a study found in those rare cases where leaving children in a car leads to tragedy, prosecution is far more likely if the adult who left the children in the car is poor – which means he or she also is proportionately more likely to be African-American.

But here’s where Sicard’s story is different: Her job at the time. Sicard was, heself, a child abuse investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families. So even though the State’s Attorney’s office decided not to pursue the charges, DCF fired her. Because Sicard was not, herself, a perfect parent, DCF declared that “your credibility will be subject to questioning and is of concern.”

DCF’s response also was almost certainly motivated by two other considerations:

● Sicard happened to be assigned to a case that involved a horrific tragedy. She was given the case only after the tragedy, she had no involvement in the failings that led up to it. But just the fact that her name was in some way connected with it may have made her bosses scared.

● Those bosses scare easily. DCF is in the midst of one of the nation’s worst foster-care panics, with leadership that makes its every move based on what the Miami Herald will write next. As is documented in detail in this blog in general (the latest case in point: yesterday’s post about the Florida child abuse hotline) in effect, the Herald is running child welfare in Florida – and it’s run Florida child welfare into the ground.

But what is in some ways even worse than who DCF chose to fire is who DCF chose to keep on.

During the incident involving Sicard, the Post reports, “another DCF employee, Amanda Voice, arrived on the scene and tried to take one of the children,” according to a police report.

Police objected – not because they necessarily opposed separating the child from her mother but because the child was part of the investigation. Voice agreed to leave, but then an officer asked Voice for identification.

According to the police report, Voice replied that because she was a DCF investigator “I don’t have to give you anything.”

Think about that for a moment. If she’s willing to talk that way to the police, imagine how she treats defenseless families.

Since police are not defenseless, Voice was arrested on a charge of obstructing justice. As with Sicard, the charges against Voice were dropped. Unlike Sicard, Voice was not fired.

So to review: One DCF caseworker makes a serious mistake in her own child rearing – but a mistake which, were everyone who did it arrested, would overwhelm our jails and significantly reduce the population on many streets. (Before anyone gets on her or his high horse abut Ms. Sicard’s error, I recommend reading the comment from “LF” that I posted here.) She was fired.

The other caseworker on the other hand, apparently failed to switch from her I-work-for-child-protective-services-so-I-can-treat-people-like-dirt-and-there-nothing-you-can-do-about-it tone to her these-are-cops-I-should-be-polite tone. She was not fired.

UPDATE: A Twitter follower alerts me to the fact Amanda Voice isn't just a caseworker for DCF - she's a supervisor.

Why we're responding to Innocents Lost, and earlier failures at the Herald.

This post was updated on February 19, 2012 and November 12, 2015

This website actually began three years before the publication of the Miami Heraldseries Innocents Lost. That’s because the same distortions and misrepresentations that characterize the Herald series were apparent in earlier reporting as well. So in addition to our in-depth response to Innocents Lost, this website includes detailed analysis of that earlier reporting. This introduction also covers both:

About 15 years ago, the state of Florida was the national example of failure in child welfare. News organizations across the state flocked to Florida after it was revealed that a foster child had been missing for 14 months – and was presumed dead – before the state Department of Children and Families even noticed.

In fact, NCCPR had predicted the collapse of the Florida system in 1999, shortly after Kathleen Kearney, a former Broward County judge, was named to run it.

Kearney’s approach to child welfare could be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run. During her first year as DCF Secretary, the number of children torn from their homes soared by 50 percent, the worst statewide“foster care panic”we’ve ever seen. And entries into foster care stayed at this obscenely high level for seven years.

NCCPR issued report after report on Florida’s failure. And ultimately those reports, and other factors had an impact.

A new governor, Charlie Crist, brought in new leadership. First Bob Butterworth and then George Sheldon reversed course and embraced safe proven approaches to keeping families together.Independent outside evaluations found that the reforms improved child safety.And during 2009 and 2010, the two years when Florida took away the fewest children since 1998, deaths of children previously known to DCF plummeted by nearly half.

In 2011, we noted that if anything, there is a need for more such reform. Even in 2010, Florida’s statewide rate of removal still was abovethe national average, and significantly above the rate in states that take, proportionately, far fewer children – including Alabama which the Heralditself says should be a model for Florida. So the notion that, during the Butterworth and Sheldon years, some kind of pendulum had swung too far toward preserving families was a myth.

But ever since Butterworth and Sheldon changed course, opponents – what we have come to call the “Kearney DCF-in-exile” - waited for a horror story in an attempt to discredit the reforms. There’s no literal organization by that name, of course. There are no secret handshakes or clandestine meetings. They’re just a bunch of people who either worked for Kearney or supported her policies; people who believe the destruction of all those families somehow made children safer – notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that it did nothing of the sort.

They found an eager ally in Carol Marbin Miller, the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat for The Miami Herald. Miller is a skilled and tenacious journalist. She’s as good at poring over documents as she is at ingratiating herself with sources and colleagues. She’s mastered the art of making everyone feel she is their friend. Indeed, her ability to make people want to like her also makes it hazardous for anyone to criticize her, since she has so many friends among Florida journalists.

But somewhere along the line Miller went from reporter to advocate – becoming a de facto spokeswoman for the “Kearney DCF-in-exile.” In her stories in 2011, she did exactly what she did in Innocents Lost: She distorted data, took information out of context, got time frames wrong, and systematically left out facts that contradicted her point of view.

That kind of reporting endangers children. In 2011 we wrote that it risked setting off another foster care panic, a huge sudden spike in needless removals of children from their homes. And that, of course is what happened – twice. There was a spike in removals in 2011 and then, just when things had gotten back to normal, Innocents Lost set off a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

Not only does this do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also overloads workers so they have less time to find children in real danger and are prone to take shortcuts.

Indeed, that first foster-care panic, under Kearney, may well have contributed to a key failure in the very case that made headlines in 2011, the death of Nubia Barahona, something made clear by the far superior reporting ofThe Palm Beach Post.

The fact that the child who died a hideous death, and her brother, who nearly suffered the same fate, allegedly are victims of a foster father who had adopted them didn’t matter. In a front-page story on February 27, 2011, Miller soon exploited the tragedy to attack reforms that have successfully reduced foster care and improved child safety in Florida; something she’d already tried to do late in 2009. In retrospect, it’s clear that this February 27, 2011 story was, in effect, the template for Innocents Lost

For a short time, it worked. During the first month after Miller's shoddy reporting, entries into foster care soared. But other media didn't buy the snake oil Miller was selling. Virtually every major news organization in Florida has been to this site. Their reporting set the record straight.

Sadly, as of December, 2011, entries into care were up about 13 percent compared with the same period in 2010. That's largely because of poor leadership from the DCF Secretary at the time.

Sadder still, it was just after things calmed down that Carol Marbin Miller and her colleagues engaged in the same kind of shoddy reporting, on a massive scale, and produced Innocents Lost. As we noted above, that started a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

On this website we attempt to set the record straight. This site includes:

● Our full response to Innocents Lost

●Key facts.

●An overview if the distortions and omissions in the 2011Herald story.

●The fatality data theHerald left out then and now.
●The errors line-by-line: Excerpts from the 2011 story with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal.
● The real roots of tragedy in the Barahona case.
● The trouble with “Kearney lite”.
● In search of solutions.

Pages

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Fear and loathing at Florida DCF

Compare the kind of worker the Florida Department of Children and Families fires to the kind it keeps