Watch out, Mr. Mayor: The city Administration for Children’s Services embrace of woke ideology is all too likely to bring headlines about dead black and Hispanic kids on ACS’s hands — and thus on yours.
As Naomi Riley revealed in Sunday’s Post, an ACS whistleblower warns that Commissioner Jess Dannhauser has removed a host of factors from the list of issues that automatically initiate an investigation, including parental substance abuse, drug-related activity and criminality.
In the name of racial equity, he’s reorienting the agency away from removing kids from their parents and homes, supposedly to focus on “a much narrower set of young people who are really in danger,” Dannhauser told state lawmakers last month.
That is, keeping families intact matters more than any risk of continuing danger to a child.
Crucially, an unreleased 2022 ACS report, based on a survey of ACS workers, parents and “advocates” described the agency as a “predatory system” targeting black and brown parents, allegedly “subjected to a different level of scrutiny” than white families.
Sorry: Self-appointed “advocates” typically focus on ideology at the expense of the very people they claim to care about.
Yes, ACS data shows that black families are seven times more likely than white families to be accused of child maltreatment — but also that black children residing with parents charged with abuse are about seven times more likely to be killed than kids in white and Asian homes.
Sadly, the “equity” crowd ignores the second half of that picture.
Former ACS Commissioner David Hansell, the caring technocrat who righted ACS after the disastrous tenure of Gladys Carríon, argued that the agency “has an obligation to assess child safety and children have a right to be free from abuse or maltreatment.”
Exactly: The time to intervene to protect abused children is today, because tomorrow will be too late.
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