Meet Some Of The Children Who Died In Los Angeles Because The City's Child Protection System Is Broken

Between 2008 and 2011, more than seventy children who passed through the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services have died due to child abuse or neglect. Many of the lives and deaths of these children have been rigorously documented by Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf and by the paper’s invaluable Homicide Report blog.
Spurred at last into action by the death in 2013 of a third-grade boy, Gabriel Fernandez, who was tortured to death by his mother and her boyfriend in Palmdale despite at least six child abuse claims logged against the boy’s mother with DCFS, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors assembled a Blue Ribbon Commission to come up with a series of sweeping reforms for the child welfare agency. Preliminary recommendations coming out of the Commission at the end of December included hiring hundreds more social workers, yanking up the standards of training, and constructing a cross-agency database so social workers could more adequately check medical and criminal files of foster parents. There was even mention of a child welfare czar, a single public administrator anointed with the power to impose reforms across agencies. County Supervisors assured the media and public that they were prepared to implement wide scale changes.
And then at a meeting of the Board of Supervisors, it seems as if the urgency—and money—to take on the Commission’s “life-saving” reforms has dried up. The Commission’s calls for immediate action on their preliminary recommendations were met with phrases like “cost neutrality” and “economic feasibility” and “doing what is being recommended with existing resources.” Ultimately, the board only approved one of the Commission’s initial recommendations: to install a member of law enforcement at local DCFS offices to expedite background searches for emergency placement foster parents. They said they’d wait for a final report in April to consider the rest. The Commission, in turn, explained that the recommendations would not be changing for the final report.
Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas endorsed the Commission’s recommendation to have a nurse attend DCFS house visits that involve infants. And then the board voted against the motion, until further fiscal analysis could be made.
READ MORE:http://www.theawl.com/2014/02/meet-some-of-the-children-who-died-in-los-angeles-because-the-citys-child-protection-system-is-broken