Miracle in Pinellas County! Child abuse suddenly plummets by 50%! (Unless there’s some OTHER reason the sheriff suddenly found a way to stop taking away so many kids)

 

The rate at which children were torn from their homes in large Florida counties
where sheriff's offices are in charge of child abuse investigations.
  Note that even if Pinellas County has now cut removals in half,
it's still above the state average and well above Broward County.

Hey, remember when the Sheriff of Pinellas County, Florida, Bob Gualtieri, whose office is responsible for child abuse investigations in the county, insisted that his officers never, ever needlessly take children from their homes?  Remember how he said his officers followed a Florida Department of Children and Families framework for investigations “to a T”?   Remember how he insisted on this even though Pinellas tears apart families at one of the highest rates in Florida, even when rates of child poverty are factored in? 

Less than two months ago, he said this to the Florida news site Florida Politics 

“We will always make the decision that is in the best interest of the children, regardless of what others may want, and that includes removing them from harmful situations when required. All of our removal decisions are reviewed by a judge and routinely upheld. We will continue to act to protect vulnerable children.” 

Later, Gualtieri bragged about refusing requests from the former “lead agency” running foster care in the county, Eckerd Connects, to please stop taking so many kids.  And he did all this knowing that Eckerd was placing the children in situations so horrible that Gualtieri himself was launching a criminal investigation. 

But then, the miracle:  As Florida Politics reports, according to a press release from the Florida Department of Children and Families, thanks to the brilliant leadership of the Florida Department of Children and Families (bet you didn’t see that coming) in just two months they’ve cut the number of children taken from their families in Pinellas and neighboring Pasco County by 50%! 

There are two possible explanations for this: Either all of a sudden, child abuse in these counties declined by half  -- or, month-after-month year-after-year until now, the Sheriffs tore apart families needlessly, Eckerd was complicit and DCF turned a blind eye. 

If the data are correct, it is a small, encouraging first step - though it would still mean Pinellas County is tearing apart families at a rate above the state average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  

DCF Secretary Shevaun Harris deserves credit for being the first person in that job since George Sheldon to at least have the courage to admit that wrongful removal is a problem and take some steps to deal with it.  (We’ll see if she still has that kind of courage when the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times come after her – as they will the next time there’s a high-profile death of a child “known to the system” in these counties.) 

But it’s not nearly enough.  The DCF press release is not a testament to sudden success but to horrifying long-term failure – by Eckerd Connects, by the sheriffs and by DCF itself. 

Think of what that press release really means: Hundreds, perhaps thousands of children needlessly traumatized, possibly for life, after being taken from everyone they know and love due to Gualtieri’s knee-jerk take-the-child-and-run approach and the failure of others in the system to stop it.  Many of those children were taken from homes that were safe or could have been made safe only to be abused in foster care.  Others were placed in conditions so horrible that, as noted above, Gualtieri himself has launched a criminal investigation. 

Gualtieri may claim that it was only all of a sudden that other agencies gave him alternatives to taking away all those children.  The press release seems to suggest as much – thanks to the magnificent leadership of DCF, of course.   But Gualtieri is also the one who demands no excuses from others.  As he put it when talking about Eckerd: “You don’t whine about it. … You figure out a way to make it happen." So why didn’t he take the initiative and build the necessary infrastructure of prevention to “make it happen”?  Why didn’t he show the same leadership as his counterpart in  Broward County, where the sheriff understood the problem and did something about it.  Broward tears apart significantly fewer children than Pinellas or Pasco. 

As for DCF, it effectively admits that poverty was confused with neglect in the part of the press release in which it brags that it 

Launched a direct referral process to Hope Florida – A Pathway to Prosperity and Care Navigation for the Sheriff’s Offices, providing assistance to 272 families who faced economic barriers in open child dependency cases. 

There should be no such thing as “economic barriers in … child dependency cases” because poverty is not neglect.  And again, why did Gualtieri and his counterpart in Pasco County wait for DCF – why didn’t they do this themselves? 

A failure of the judiciary 

The press release also illustrates the failure of the Florida judiciary.  Recall how Gualtieri justified his take-the-child-and-run approach by saying what bad family policing agencies always say: 

All of our removal decisions are reviewed by a judge and routinely upheld. 

Yet now we know that, at least half the time, those decisions almost certainly were wrong.  This further illustrates the need for Florida judges to start wielding gavels instead of rubber stamps – and it illustrates the urgent need for Florida to institute the model of high-quality family defense that has allowed other communities to dramatically reduce needless foster care with no compromise of safety. 

A failure of journalism 

And finally, there is another factor: journalistic malpractice by the most powerful media organization in the region, the Tampa Bay Times. 

Imagine how much better off hundreds of children would be now had the Times news side not ignored or downplayed the issue of wrongful removal.  How many children would have been spared the hideous conditions of Eckerd “care” had the Times editorial board, under former Editorial Page Editor Tim Nickens, crusaded to reduce entries into foster care instead of to increase them?  (By the way, Nickens also cited the fact that the judges kept rubber-stamping removals as some kind of proof they were justified.) 

And again, will DCF Secretary Harris have the guts to stand up to the Times, and the Miami Herald, when they come after her?

The column the Tampa Bay Times doesn’t want you to see

One of the dangers from all the cutbacks and consolidations sweeping through the newspaper industry is that it becomes that much easier to monopolize the marketplace of ideas.

So in Florida, there is far less room now to get a word of dissent in edgewise than there was just a decade ago.

The only papers in Florida still big enough to cover child welfare on a regular basis are the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times.

In 2008, the papers combined their statehouse bureaus – and state government is, of course, the source of much child welfare news. 

Then the Times republished Innocents Lost.  And ever since, the Times editorial page has marched in lockstep with the failed thesis behind that series, declaring in a January 2016 editorial “when it doubt, take the child.”

When I tried to get in a few hundred words of dissent at that time, it was disappointing that I got no response from Herald editorial page editor Tim Nickens or perspective editor Jim Verhulst.

Then in May, the Times bought out and shut down another possible venue for dissent -  the Tampa Tribune. That newspaper tended to be more amenable to sharing a wide variety of viewpoints on child welfare with readers. 

Last month, after the Times reported that, in Hillsborough County, so many children are being torn from their homes that they sometimes have to sleep in offices, I updated the column and tried again. Still no response. If the Times has published dissent from some other source that says too many children are removed needlessly, criticizes Innocents Lost, and calls for less use of foster care, I haven’t seen it.

I was reminded of the Times’ no dissent approach when I saw this story about a tragic child death in Tampa – the kind of death the Florida foster care panic was supposed to prevent, or at least reduce. In fact, in 2015, such deaths increased.

The Times is, of course, entirely within its rights to advocate for a position and ignore dissenting voices. As A.J. Liebling famously said “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” – and NCCPR doesn’t own one.

But we do have this blog.  So here’s the column.  You can decide for yourself if it was so utterly beyond the pale that the Times was right to be sure its readers never were exposed to it:

“When in doubt, take the child” is formula for more tragedy

            It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

            Nowhere is that more apparent than in Florida child welfare.

            In 1998, the headlines were about a little girl named Kayla McKean.  Just two months after Kayla’s death, Kathleen Kearney was named to run the Florida Department of Children and Families.  Her mantra: When in doubt, take the child.  The number of children torn from their families skyrocketed – increasing by 50 percent in a single year.  With no place to put all those children, some slept in offices.  And because the system was so overloaded, deaths of children “known-to-the-system” increased.

            In 2014 came Innocents Lost, the series of stories in the Miami Herald and the Times about children who died after their cases were known-to-the-system.  The Legislature said, in effect, when in doubt, take the child.  Once again the number of children taken from their parents is soaring.  And once again, deaths of children known-to-the-system have increased.

            Yet in January, in the wake of its reporting on another tragedy, the death of Phoebe Jonchuck, the Times told us the answer is “When in doubt, take the child” [Editorial, Jan. 15].

            Authorities listened.  Hillsborough County is taking children at a rate even higher than the state average.  And once again, children have slept in offices.

            It’s not some bizarre coincidence that this approach never works.  It’s a misreading of the problem.

            We look at a case where a child died, and it turns out the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.  So we think, Aha! There must be a “bias toward family preservation.”  But there is no such bias, and there never has been.  Florida consistently has taken away children at a rate at or above the national average, far above the rate in systems that have been nationally-recognized as models for keeping children safe – systems like Alabama, the very state Innocents Lost said Florida should emulate.

            The real reason for tragedies such as the death of Phoebe Jonchuk almost always is more frustrating, more mundane and harder to fix.  Children die when undertrained, underprepared caseworkers are overloaded with too many cases. They can’t investigate any case properly.  So even as they take more children needlessly, they also miss more children in real danger.  Despite being one of the primary proponents of the take-the-child-and-run approach, even Maj. Connie Shingledecker, who is in charge of child abuse investigations in Manatee County blamed this overload for a death on her watch.

            In contrast, the only time independent evaluators ever concluded that Florida children actually were getting safer was when Bob Butterworth and then Geroge Sheldon ran DCF.  They moved to curb needless removal of children – not because of some “bias” but because it’s the only answer that works.

            “When in doubt, take the child” is one of those fear-fueled, feel-good responses to tragedy – like “Carpet bomb our enemies” or “Ban all Muslims.”  But all of those strategies do enormous collateral damage to innocents.

In the case of child welfare:

● When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates.  For a young enough child it’s an experience akin to a kidnapping.  Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished.  The emotional trauma can last a lifetime. 

So it’s no wonder that two massive studies involving more than 15,000 typical cases – not the horror stories – found that children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

● That harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one.  The majority are.  But multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.  So when we say “when in doubt, take the child” we’re really saying “take the child and roll the dice.”

And then there’s that other collateral damage: a system so overwhelmed that workers overlook children like Phoebe Jonchuck.

            None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents.  But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. 

Every time Florida tries upping the dose, it backfires.

            Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.  NCCPR’s full response to Innocents Lost is available here: http://bit.ly/1ZKzYCg