The answer, says Gelles, is algorithms. Just as insurance companies use them to predict risk, there are ways to measure the risk for a child remaining in a home where there’s evidence of abuse.
NYP: “I do not know who to blame, but I do want people to be held accountable . . . Talk is cheap. We need some actual action.”
That was the Rev. Mark V.C. Taylor of the Church of the Open Door in Brooklyn delivering the eulogy last week at the funeral of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins.
Zymere, who allegedly was beaten to death by his mother and her boyfriend in September, is only the latest in a long string of children who have been failed by the adults around them and then by the Administration for Children’s Services.
No one has publicly revealed the extent of the involvement of ACS with the boy, but as far back as April, he was interviewed about various injuries by the police, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and child services. As Mayor de Blasio said, “I think what I can safely say is that there were warning signs.” No kidding.
But there might be a solution: Big Data.
According to Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, “Even the state-of-the-art assessment tools being used in New York are no better at predicting risk for a child than if you flipped a coin.” Gelles says social workers using “clinical judgment” and their own “expertise” to determine which children should be removed from their homes is “simply inadequate.”
His book “Out of Harm’s Way: Creating an Effective Child Welfare System,” will be released in the spring, and it’s the result of decades studying the problems with these bureaucracies. He has observations the mayor and his advisers should heed.
First, child-welfare agencies are confused about who their “clients” are. They think they’re supposed to be serving parents, not children. So when parents have drug problems, for instance, they try to get the parents into drug-treatment programs.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not their job. Their job is keeping kids away from parents whose judgment is impaired by drugs.
Second, Gelles argues the agencies charged with maintaining children’s safety are often “siloed” — child services, the police, the District Attorney’s Office and the schools often have very little sense of how much contact the other agencies have had with a child. So it’s hard to determine even the number and severity of the incidents a particular child experiences.
Finally, Gelles notes the failure of existing policy. In the aftermath of high-profile failures, the state has instituted harsher punishment for abusers and established an abuse-reporting hotline. There’s also often a cry for more money and staffers and smaller caseloads for workers. But Gelles has seen no evidence these work.
The answer, says Gelles, is algorithms. Just as insurance companies use them to predict risk, there are ways to measure the risk for a child remaining in a home where there’s evidence of abuse. For instance, he says, social workers tend to underestimate the added risk of the presence of a mother’s boyfriend in the home. MORE
Bad idea. I’m all in favor of finding some way to keep adults from brutalizing kids, but this isn’t a good way to go about it.
Yes, data mining and big data are very powerful and useful tools but they mainly look for correlations and calculate probabilities. (I know what I’m talking about. I retire recently from managing petabyte data collections for the world’s largest payment card company. You know who it is without me actually typing out the name. We’re talking about 150 million or more transactions per day – and that’s just US and Canada – and keeping multiple years online. I worked for a decision sciences team of data wranglers (reporting to me), PhD statisticians and mathematicians, and senior database marketing people. So, yeah, I know something about this stuff.)
The difference here is that this data and number crunching will generate reports that ignorant and stupid govt bureaucrats and functionaries will not understand but will act on with the force of law, guns and everything. This will be disastrous because as sure as HRC is the spawn of Satan, the people with guns will treat these probabilities as certainties with the inevitable violent and tragic outcomes. Bad, bad plan.
This sure sounds like the beginnings of the storylines of the movies “Minority Report” and “Brazil” in the making.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Can you PLEEEEEASE bring back the edit function?
I think it’s more of a common sense thing. If mom is shacking up with someone other than the baby’s daddy, and mom has been known to be a willing participant in every guy she meets beating her ass- maybe the kid isn’t safe in that house til mom gets her shit together. That’s mom’s fault and no amount of money you throw at her or the system is going to help her until she decides she gets her mind right. The baby shouldn’t be with her if she’s going to let herself be a punching bag. Because when the big punching bag isn’t around, they usually go after the mini-punching bag.
But anyway, Greetings From Yonkers- Whatchu think?
Ahhh but I’m forgetting the most important thing. Not the child, but the fact that we’re supposed to treat freaks, dindu nuffins, Dindu Naffeens, and 3 same sex parent families like minor gods and forget common sense.
I’m reminded of how many times the MVA, IRS, etc. used their super computers and supercalifragilistic algorithms to screw up my data always ending up telling me it was my fault. That’s what scares me of child services trying this.
Think of the poor dad whose 13 year old daughter thinks she is getting back at him for not letting her go out with the 17 year old boy by telling her teacher daddy molested her.
Uncle Al, Spot on.
Your assessment has a high degree of accuracy and scope.
Lazlo is but a lowly Insurance Adjuster. But I have been appraised of the concept of the Law of Large Numbers.
It works for trends in human behavior toward inanimate objects, but not how they treat their offspring.
How about this.
Take all the money we were going to spread around on foreign aid to bastard countries, money for stupid ass studies (like whether fat lesbians are happier than skinny ones, or why dogs make eye contact when they crap), all the money they were using to bail out corporations, and quintuple the child protective services.
Hire. I mean Hire, not ‘financially reimburse’ thousands of Foster families to provide stable environments.
Bring back some version the public stocks (put the stocks in a controlled outside area with game cameras)
Feed the worst offenders to alligators
Thank you, Lazlo. Good ideas all, except I kinda like alligators. Not that I want one to jump up and curl up in my lap while I’m reading a good book, but from a nice distance they’re admirable. Can we feed the worst offenders to coral snakes and turkey vultures?
How many illegals have dumped their kids off at shelters or were separated from the parents because of assholetry? We have enough natural born assholes without importing a bunch of foreign ones, TYVM.
Uncle Al you are wise beyond measure. But coral snakes do not eat much.
If Obama is going to import all these Syrians and Africans, who can say no to some Hyena packs or some of those African wild dogs?
Low overhead, and no intrusion of vehicles and onlookers into our precious wetlands.
Then there’s ants. I have always been a fan of ants.
Lazlo, nothing scares African imports. They eat what you just described. lol
Ahhh but the ants… Them sumbitches get everywhere. Good call.
There is a lot to be said about wolverines and honey badgers. They get hungry too.
More good ideas, Lazlo! I didn’t actually expect the coral snakes to eat much but they can be counted on to, so to speak, get the ball rolling for the TVs. And “dogs” made me think of “hogs” and a very satisfactory solution used by the protagonists in John Ross’s magnificent Unintended Consequences. And it appeals to my inner child molester molester to feed such pigs to pigs. The Syrians and most Africans won’t help there of course, but who needs ’em?
The Syrians can go back, the Africans can go live with the Indians on the Reservation. I go through there all the time and they have room.
You guys are right. We should use American animals. There is no job that an American Animal won’t do.