By Andy Newman, The New York Times, Photo by Nora Savosnick for the New York Times, November 22, 2022
New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services must protect children without overpolicing families. A report the agency commissioned says it often fails.
For decades, Black families have complained that the city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, is biased against them.
It turns out that many of the agency’s own employees agree, according to a racial equity audit the agency commissioned but never publicly released.
A draft report, based on a 2020 survey of more than 50 Black and Hispanic frontline caseworkers and agency managers in Brooklyn and the Bronx, along with many parents and advocates, described a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and brown parents” and subjects them to “a different level of scrutiny.”
In New York’s child welfare system, where Black families are seven times as likely as white families to be accused of child maltreatment and 13 times as likely to have their children removed, “race operates as an indicator of risk,” the report concluded.
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