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“PATHETIC.”
That’s how Kevin O’Connor describes the response from Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner Jess Dannhauser in The Post last week to accusations that his agency is prioritizing progressive ideology over children’s safety.
O’Connor, a 35-year NYPD veteran who retired two years ago, knows whereof he speaks. His whole career — rising from a school cop in Hell’s Kitchen to the Bronx Juvenile Crime Squad to assistant commissioner for youth strategies — has been devoted to serving the vulnerable kids of this city.
O’Connor tells me, “ACS is a complete disaster. There is no accountability by the administration whatsoever.”
O’Connor points to two developments in particular that have set ACS on its unfortunate path.
First, “they destroyed ACS when they went to Family Assessment.”
The Family Assessment Program (FAP) is, according to the state Office of Children and Family Services, “a non-investigative, family-centered approach to addressing some reports of child maltreatment.”
Rather than take seriously claims of child abuse and neglect, agencies like ACS shift what they see as the less serious problems and then move them onto this more cooperative track.
Unfortunately, many caseworkers have no way of knowing what is serious or not based on a single report, and without a real investigation they may never find out.
Beginning of the end
This shift happened before the Adams administration, and it’s a practice that has been adopted in other jurisdictions as well.
But O’Connor says this move in New York to offer families voluntary services instead of having official investigations with actual consequences for those who failed to comply was the beginning of the end.
The CARES program, instituted by the most recent administration, has pushed an even larger percentage of families into the voluntary services track.
The assumption of the program is that what families mainly need are material resources — housing, assistance with utility bills, access to food — but most families in the system are already receiving public assistance. Their problems generally stem from substance abuse and/or mental illness, as the recent spate of fatalities in families known to ACS demonstrates.
Under FAP, ACS has also been reluctant to use PINS (person in need of supervision) warrants.
Typically, when a parent (often a single mother or grandmother) would find themselves with a kid who was out of control, ACS would get a warrant. Then the NYPD would bring that child in front of a judge who would “put them on notice or mandate services or rules for the child.
The program, says O’Connor, “empowered parents” and allowed them to get their kids under control.
But now ACS’s strategy for dealing with juvenile delinquency is just to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Take, for instance, the Children’s Center, which is designated as a temporary shelter for kids who have been removed from their families. It is not supposed to be a juvenile detention facility, but O’Connor says that ACS is regularly putting kids there who need to be in a secured environment.
The Kips Bay neighborhood where it’s located is traditionally one of the city’s safest, but juvenile robbery rates skyrocket periodically when ACS doesn’t have anywhere else to put young lawbreakers.
And the lack of space is becoming a bigger problem in recent years. Because of the “raise the age” law, more and more adults are taking up space in juvenile facilities — 60% are over 18 in New York’s two facilities, according to O’Connor.
Instead of moving those who are adults into adult jails, though, we have overcrowded and more dangerous juvenile institutions.
ACS used to cooperate with the NYPD, says O’Connor. If the police suspected a child was becoming increasingly out of control and the parents weren’t willing or able to help, the police would ask ACS to get involved. The case could end up in family court, and the kid would be removed if necessary.
Today, says O’Connor, the family is just offered services to work through the issue on their own.
Dismantled protections
Shortly before he retired, three preteen boys raped a 9-year-old girl on the roof of the Taft Houses. The police made the arrest, but the boys’ case was handled in family court.
Now, says O’Connor, the police have no role at all thanks to a change in the law that bars the arrest and prosecution of anyone under 12 for any crime other than homicide.
Today, those boys’ families would simply be offered services by ACS. But what are the parents going to do at that point?
“You think those boys are being raised properly?” O’Connor asks. “We have dismantled the system designed to protect kids.”
And why?
James Osgood was able to get a firsthand view of the ideological pressure that has pushed ACS down this road.
Osgood was the executive officer at the Brooklyn Child Abuse Squad and an investigative consultant supervisor at ACS from 2007 to 2018.
“Their priorities are keeping the family together,” he tells me in no uncertain terms. “I’ve been to meetings where caseworkers were discouraged from removing children of color because removed children are at greater risk for being involved in the system as adults.”
Shortly after the riots in Ferguson, Mo., Osgood says, ACS hosted a guest speaker from that city who said the fact that black children are removed to foster care at higher rates is actually the reason for the higher rates of black incarceration.
And then the speaker told the assembled ACS employees that “more white children should be removed introduced into the system to even out the black/white population in prisons.”
As Osgood said, “you can’t make this up.”
Osgood was told before the meeting “to be quiet.”
‘Mind-boggling’
O’Connor finds the idea that ACS is making policies that prioritize keeping black children in dangerous homes because of racism to be “mind-boggling.”
He wonders: “Does anyone care that a black child was murdered?”
He says that he has worked his entire career in minority communities. He just attended the wake of a mother who lost two boys to gun violence. “Do you think I care what color their skin is?” he added.
Osgood was among the first hired by ACS as part of a partnership with the NYPD. And while most of the caseworkers they worked alongside appreciated them, the managers did not.
He often spoke to caseworkers to help them understand how to ask the right questions, how to tell whether family members were lying, and how to stay safe in dangerous situations.
“I had over 20 years of experience,” Osgood said. “I could walk into an apartment right away and tell what was going on.”
He and his colleagues also did database and background checks about families being investigated. As former members of the NYPD, they were able to access information about families that caseworkers may not have. For instance, if a child had previously reported abuse but then recanted, that would be in a police record, but ACS would have no knowledge of it. The caseworkers wanted these partnerships, but management was less keen on them.
Osgood says that since COVID, these investigative consultants work from home 40% of the time, doing background checks and other desk work instead of helping out in the field where they are most needed.
His former colleagues at ACS, meanwhile, “are overworked,” he says.
They are “trying not to open cases,” because that will only add to the load. They are “burnt out after two or three years,” partly because they don’t feel like they are making a difference.
He tells them to become police officers instead. “You can do a lot more good as police officers. You can go into the special victims unit,” he would advise them.
The NYPD priorities are keeping kids safe but at ACS “the priorities are keeping the family together.”
Indeed, as O’Connor notes, ACS seems intent on ignoring possible signs of trouble. He marveled at the recent report on chronic absenteeism in New York City public schools, with more than a third of students — or roughly 300,000 — absent for 10 or more days in a school year.
“That’s supposed to be an ACS case after 10 days,” he said.
As it happens, ACS has been discouraging teachers from reporting students to the agency. It has bragged about a reduction in calls coming from schools to the state Central Register. Since COVID, truancy has become all but ignored by both the Department of Education and ACS.
In response to The Post, ACS disputed these points, saying it provides support to prevent burnout, and that it handled 6,711 allegations of “educational neglect” in 2024.
“In this administration, we are focused on getting it right — for all children and families — regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, or LGBTQAI+ status,” an ACS spokesperson said. “When children are at imminent risk, we will take action and place them in foster care. When there are services and supports available to mitigate risk or give families the help they need, we will provide it.”
No accountability
O’Connor recalls an incident under former Commissioner Gladys Carrión’s tenure where a school finally called after a 6-year-old girl had not showed up to school for 14 days. He and a fellow officer knocked down the family’s door and found her in the closet beaten to death. Maybe they could have helped if someone called sooner.
What happens to all of the children who die of abuse or neglect?
O’Connor says that ACS is using privacy laws to cover up the problems: “It gives everyone a get-out-jail-free card.”
As for the recent announcement by Dannhauser that ACS has convened a “multidisciplinary panel” to examine these fatality cases (which still won’t release the results to the public), O’Connor says it is “the definition of lunacy.”
“They keep doing the same thing over and over. When programs that they say will help vulnerable groups don’t help them, they just double down,” he said.
When, O’Connor wonders, “will they just admit it doesn’t work?”
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she helped to found Lives Cut Short. She is the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.”
English (US)