Police Take Custody of Abuse Probes

Demeaned by her superiors in the Florida Department of Children and Families, feared and despised by families she was trying to help, Marsha Christie wondered if she should continue her 26-year career as a state child abuse investigator. Then opportunity drove up in a white and green police car.

A representative from the Broward County Sheriff’s office was recruiting for a new unit that would take over child dependency investigations from the DCF’s Child Protective Services.

Christie’s choice: Transfer within DCF to another county or apply for a similar job with the sheriff. She chose the sheriff’s office, joining a cutting-edge and controversial experiment that has drawn police agencies into an area where many cops don’t want to go: child protective services.

Willing or not, law-enforcement agencies here and in other states are becoming more involved in child protective investigations. The American Humane Association, which has launched a study of the issue, says 26 states are implementing ways to get the police more involved in investigations of child abuse, neglect and abandonment. Some examples:

-In Detroit, several police agencies have formed a Child Rescue Task Force under the Wayne County Department of Community Justice to assist CPS caseworkers with difficult child removals.
-In Reno, police run a “knock-and-talk” program to check on the welfare of children whose parents move into transient hotels trying to find work. Accompanied by a public health nurse, police officers visit to see if the children need medical help or protection from abuse or neglect.
-In Arkansas, all complaints of child abuse or neglect are first reviewed by the state police, who investigate criminal allegations and send non-criminal matters to Child Protective Services.

While police traditionally investigate crimes against children, only in recent years has law enforcement begun to expand into child protection cases, which rarely result in criminal charges but sometimes lead to children being removed from their parents and placed under court jurisdiction. The trend, which began after years of highly publicized mistakes by CPS caseworkers resulted in the deaths of children, could eventually bring police into contact with millions of more children each year. In 1998, according to partial reports by the states to the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, CPS agencies identified more than 2.2 million abused, neglected or maltreated children, and removed more than 136,000 children from their homes.

“A majority of states are incorporating law enforcement in pretty heavy measure into [child protective] investigations under specific sorts of circumstances, generally involving cases of severe abuse or sexual abuse,” says Vicky Bollenbacher, a researcher with the Colorado-based American Humane Association.

Florida has pushed police involvement in CPS cases far further than other states. Four county sheriff’s offices have taken over all child abuse and neglect investigations from the demoralized DCF. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is in the middle of a far-reaching plan to privatize services for children and families. Many people in the field, including child advocates and officials from private child-care agencies, say the state has basically given up on the DCF and is in the process of “gutting” the agency.

Some observers estimate that by 2003, DCF could be reduced from 27,000 employees to 1,200 — a core group to process payments and monitor the work of a network of “community alliances” that will work with private agencies to provide foster care and other services to needy children. The plan allows police to assume responsibility for child dependency investigations, but does not mandate it.

CPS effectively serves as intake for the child welfare system. CPS caseworkers take reports of maltreated children, investigate, then provide services needed to keep families intact, or petition Juvenile or Family Court to take jurisdiction over the children. CPS caseworkers also remove children from homes in emergency situations or after obtaining court orders.

After CPS gets the children into the system, foster care workers take over; they work to reunite the families or to terminate the parental rights so the children can be adopted.

But many social work professionals are skeptical of giving the police the lead in investigating child abuse and neglect.

Laptops, Not Guns

Chief among their fears is that police officers are more inclined to yank children out of their homes than to work with parents to try to keep families intact. “I have a lot of concern about how they’re going about doing this,” says Linda Spears, director of child protection for the Child Welfare League of America, a D.C.-based trade association of 1,000 public and nonprofit agencies.

“What I see when law enforcement does this alone is that they make what I would call a quick decision that doesn’t reflect the nuances of child abuse or neglect,” Spears says. “Either they walk away because they’re not seeing anything related to their criminal mandate or, more often, they just remove the kids and hand them over to social services.”

But in Broward County, where Sheriff Ken Jenne is known for his political savvy and fund-raising acumen, the Child Protective Investigations (CPI) section is staffed mostly by civilians who wear casual uniforms of khaki pants and polo shirts emblazoned with the sheriff’s logo. They do not carry guns.

Still, this may be the best-equipped CPS team in the country. With the help of state grants, the Broward sheriff’s office bought a fleet of Dodge Neons that CPI investigators can take home, laptop computers with wireless modems for investigators to complete paperwork outside of the office, combination cell phone-radios, flashlights, and Polaroid cameras to document injuries to children.

While police traditionally investigate crimes against children, only in recent years has law enforcement begun to expand into child protection cases, which rarely result in criminal charges but sometimes lead to children being removed from their parents and placed under court jurisdiction.

Besides the equipment, Jenne has brought modern police techniques to the job. One significant innovation is an analysis unit that takes each report of child maltreatment and checks all names and addresses through various law enforcement computer systems. A criminal background report is prepared and placed in the file before a CPI investigator is assigned. In most states, CPS investigators must do their own background checks and wait at least two days for a criminal record check from a local police agency.

Jenne has also forged agreements with other law enforcement agencies in Broward to accompany CPI investigators when they visit a family for the first time, and on subsequent visits that the investigator feels might be risky; this provides security and reinforces the point that this work is serious. (In Michigan, a CPS investigator, Lisa Putman, was alone when she was murdered in May 1998 by two clients. Most stores there are now encouraged to request police help when they feel threatened.) It is no accident that such innovations occurred in Florida; the child protection system was open for new ideas, because it had sunk so low.

A Broken System

The Florida child welfare system had been under attack for years, reaching a low point in the horrific November 1998 battering death of 6-year-old Kayla McKean at the hands of her father despite several reports to the DCF about her abuse. That same year, a Broward County grand jury released a laundry list of DCF problems. And a group of lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of abused children who were being neglected by the overburdened DCF. A consent decree was forged, but the state has not achieved all the necessary reforms, says Howard Talenfeld, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers.

The staff felt the frustration and pressure that is common in CPS agencies around the country. “They wouldn’t give you the tools. They wouldn’t give you what you needed to do the job,” says abuse investigator Christie. And DCF managers always looked for someone else to blame when a crisis erupted, she says. “Scapegoating was always a problem, finding someone to damn and fire.”

Jenne saw that Broward’s child-protection system was broken and no one seemed to know how to fix it. State Attorney General Robert Butterworth, a friend of a former law partner, asked if he would consider taking over CPS in Broward, as had been done in smaller counties like Pasco, Pinellas and Manatee. Jenne’s staff commanders suggested that he stay out of it; Jenne felt compelled to jump in.

“The question was, if not us, then who?” Jenne says. “We were reluctant participants, but everyone else was running away from the issue.” Jenne’s Child Protective Investigative section began with five sworn officers and openings for about 50 civilians. Many of the former DCF investigators in Broward applied for jobs with the sheriff’s office, but Jenne says only 13 were hired because most were unable to pass the department’s stringent hiring guidelines, including drug, polygraph and mental/personality tests, and criminal background checks.

Some applicants from DCF were screened out because they admitted to past illegal drug abuse or lied about it during a polygraph test. Recalls Jenne, “One person wrote down that he only uses marijuana in the evenings.”

The sheriff’s office began phasing in the CPI section in July 1999 and completely took over the county’s child protective investigations in January 2000. Jenne quickly learned one reason that the DCF wasn’t able to do the job: a serious lack of resources, including money and equipment.

Jenne set his initial $4 million budget based on an average of 650 monthly reports of child maltreatment made in 1998. But in 1999, the state’s child-protection laws changed in the wake of the Kayla McKean case and the Legislature increased the categories of mandated reporters — professionals required to report any suspected cases of child abuse or neglect. The state’s new Child Protection Act also required investigators to respond to every complaint made to the child abuse hotline. Previously, DCF had screened out at least one-third of the reports without opening a formal investigation.

Statewide, the numbers of complaints to the hotline grew to 180,000 calls in 2000 —59,000 reports more than the previous year. In Broward, one of the state’s largest counties, reports of child maltreatment grew to over 1,000 a month.

Jenne, a former state senator, used his contacts in the Legislature to increase the state subsidy for his CPI section to $5.6 million in 1999, then to $10 million in 2000. He now has a staff of nearly 100.

Impact

It is unclear whether more children are being placed in foster homes because of the sheriff’s takeover of child protective investigations. Placements have risen, but state law has mandated removal of children under certain conditions, and the sheriff’s office is investigating the cases more thoroughly than they were investigated in the past.

Robert Barker, a Houston-based independent social services consultant who has been helping Florida implement privatization, says CPI Director George Atkinson “has a good attitude about running a balanced kind of program. He hired a number of social workers, and my sense is that it has not taken on what I would normally fear: more of a law-enforcement bent, where you see every neglect and abuse situation as a crime to be prosecuted rather than an opportunity to appropriately help families stay together.”

Dale Ross, chief judge of Broward County Circuit Court, says the sheriff’s dependency cases are more thoroughly investigated than cases were with the DCF. “The professionalism of the work has been raised,” Ross says. “Judges feel much more confident and have a greater degree of reliability on the results of the investigations.” A report on the state’s CPS system released last month by a Florida legislature oversight office found that the four sheriff’s offices doing CPS work were performing marginally better than the state CPS agency in two areas: the percentage of alleged victims seen within 24 hours of a maltreatment report, and the percentage of cases closed within 30 days. But the report, by the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, said the sheriff’s office spent $654.29 per investigation, 39 percent more than the CPS.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Children’s Policy, Practice and Research is evaluating the Broward County experiment. The research is being led by sociologist Richard Gelles, a well-known critic of the nation’s child protection system and its emphasis on family reunification.

Gelles says it is too early to draw firm conclusions on whether the sheriff’s CPI section is protecting children better than the DCF did. But, he says, “You can’t help but be impressed by the entire organization and professionalism of the enterprise. ... The uniforms, the cars, the computers, the modems, are more than simply technological artifacts — they denote a seriousness of purpose.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the D.C.-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, says the key is whether police will get enough resources to do the job.

He cited the recent death of two-year- old Joshua Saccone in West Palm Beach, which led to the firing of six CPS investigators in Palm Beach County. The family had lived in Broward County, and the Broward sheriff’s child protection section got the first report from the state child abuse hotline about the family. But the Broward investigator only spoke to the boy’s mother by phone, and never met with the boy or his father. “When you overwhelm the sheriff’s office, they make the same mistakes as the Child Protective Services office,” Wexler says.

Skepticism Remains

Not all Florida sheriff’s offices are enthused about taking on child dependency work. Captain Jerry Eggleston of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office says many issues would have to be settled before Sarasota does what Broward did.

“Foremost among them,” he says, is money. “The governor here in Florida is basically trying to push things to the local level. This [child protection investigations] right now is being funded by the state, and it would have to be picked up at the local level. In our county, I’d say that’s about $1 million to $1.5 million a year.”

Child abuse investigator Christie, hired in July 1999, reserves judgment about the performance of the sheriff’s office, a caution borne of feeling misled before. “It was all about the numbers” at DCF, she says. “They just wanted the cases closed,” and even falsified records to bring them into compliance with state guidelines.

One clearly positive impact of the change, she says, is that she gets more respect out in the field: “People look you in the eye instead of spitting on you. There’s respect for the sheriff’s office doing the job.”

She also says the sheriff’s office doesn’t look for scapegoats, but does hold people accountable for doing a thorough job. “I feel that basically I’m going to have the backing if a case blows up,” she says. “When problems exist, management looks at the problem, takes responsibility and tries to resolve the problem from the sheriff all the way down.”

So even this long-time skeptic of official government talk about improving child safety says, “I’m beginning to believe that what they’re telling me is true.”

Sidebar:

Police Take Custody of Abuse Probes: Broward County At A Glance

Kresnak, Jack. "Police Take Custody of Abuse Probes." Youth Today, April 2001, p. 1.