The decision by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) to allow at least seven now-deceased minority children to remain in the custody of “abusive and neglectful parents” is “starting to look awfully racist,” wrote the New York Post’s editorial board Monday.
In a scathing editorial, the board chronicled its exposé of the city agency charged with protecting children from abuse and neglect, but somehow – under the banner of “social justice,” leaving them time and again in the custody of parents whose alleged actions were apparently ignored in order to avoid “unnecessary separation.”
The Post’s editors recapped some of the shocking and tragic details:
- Despite a prior visit from ACS employees – alleged by neighbors to have “walked away after knocking” – 4-year-old Promise Cotton was found “trapped with the corpses of her dead brother and mother, who had an open case for child neglect.” As the Post reported about the family in April, “[c]oncerned relatives finally checked on the family,” finding 4-year-old Promise “alone, starving and in horrid condition on her mother’s bed — as bugs crawled over her dead family.”
- The parents of 4-year-old Jahmeik Modlin allegedly starved him to death, though ACS visited the home twice during the past four years.
- The mother of 6-year-old Jalayah Eason allegedly hung her daughter from the ceiling by her wrists and then beat her to death. During a previous home visit, the mother reportedly “told an ACS worker that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder but was not being treated. ACS did nothing.”
“Yes, we know: It’s somehow now ‘progressive’ to let these kids die at the hands of abusive and neglectful parents,” the editors scoffed. “[I]n that view, removing the children from the high-risk homes is the racist move.”
As reported in the Post in December, a whistleblower accused ACS and city officials of “deprioritizing” investigations into child abuse, citing a sense of “compassion and social justice.”
“ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser has vowed to reduce them — instead channeling 70% of cases into a family-led, non-investigative track called Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement & Support [CARES],” the report noted. It explained, however, that CARES “is meant for ‘low safety and low risk’ cases,” adding, “determining risk without an investigation is guesswork.”
Despite the reporting of these devastating cases, New York City Mayor Eric Adams is “unapologetically defending” ACS, claiming the agency has “saved thousands of lives,” the Post reported last month.
“Does he just not understand that ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser is so bent on avoiding ‘unnecessary separation’ that his caseworkers now flinch from even clearly necessary ones?” the editorial board asked.
“Pulling kids out of dangerous homes isn’t racist; believing nonwhite parents can’t be expected to properly care for their children is,” the editors added.
Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” wrote in May 2023 that, in Jalayah’s tragic case, there were other multiple “warning signs” of the danger in her home, among them:
- An “upstairs neighbor who heard the child ‘screaming for her dear life’ and yelling, ‘Stop, stop, stop!’”
- Jalayah’s 8-year-old brother “told a classmate that his mother was ‘whipping him, slapping him.’”
- The school “reported long stretches of absences by the brother, that he was regularly picked up more than an hour late from school, that he wore the same clothes each day and smelled like urine.”
- Her brother “came to school with a bruised and swollen face and told a teacher his mother had punched and kicked him for drinking out of the sink.”
Doubting ACS’ reported response that “this tragedy is in part the result of an agency that is stretched too thin,” Riley observed in an opinion piece at the Post that the New York Times reported caseworkers in Jalayah’s neighborhood “have an average load of 12.5 cases, ACS said — about 17 percent higher than the citywide average.”
“Never mind that the average caseload nationwide is between 24 and 31 children,” Riley countered. “Or that it is well beneath the Child Welfare League of America recommendation of 15 children per social worker.”
The number of deaths among children whose families had been previously reported to ACS jumped from 49 to 52 between 2008 and 2020, she continued, despite a decreasing caseload per ACS staffer.
Riley identified two narratives influencing the agency’s “deliberate decisions” to keep children in unsafe homes.
“The first is that ACS is racist,” she wrote. “Activists argue the reason black children are placed in foster care more often is structural bias in the system. They want to abolish child protective services the same way they want to defund the police.”
“The other narrative is that families are investigated and children are removed from their homes simply because of poverty, and claiming a parent is engaging in neglect is really the same as just saying she’s poor,” the author continued. Nevertheless, “[w]hile it is true families involved in the child welfare system are disproportionately poor, correlation is not causation.”
Research shows case files citing neglect frequently note issues as well with substance use, domestic violence, and mental illness, she explained.
“It is time for the agency to stop taking its cues from activists driven by progressive ideology and start putting the safety of children first,” Riley urged.