After a recent string of heinous crimes, New Yorkers have rightly demanded that officials address core public safety issues like subway crime and severe mental illness. The city’s child-welfare failures have received less coverage. The most egregious of these are child fatalities in homes where the Administration for Children’s Services was already aware of alleged abuse, neglect, or maltreatment. In 2022, the city saw 39 such cases, nine of which were ruled homicides. While the 2024 data are pending, reports show that several young children known to ACS suffered horrendous deaths over the past year. Despite this grim reality, nothing has changed at the agency, which has largely evaded calls for reform.
Accountability for ACS’s performance starts with its commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, whose performance at ACS mirrors that of Alvin Bragg in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office: he has used his tenure primarily to reduce enforcement while pursuing ideological projects to placate activists. Dannhauser seems to regard as his crowning achievement the expansion of Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement & Support (CARES), a diversion program that the agency describes as “an alternative, non-investigatory child protection response to reports” of child abuse. The agency purportedly uses the program to “partner” with families to help them “develop their own solutions” to their “problems.” ACS claims to use the program only in cases involving “no allegations of serious child abuse,” but it raises the question of what kinds of abuse are deemed mild enough to qualify. It’s also unclear how the agency determines the degree of danger a child faces, given the program’s non-investigatory nature.
ACS and the CARES program have made headlines after several troubling deaths and allegations in recent months. In October, for example, four-year-old Jahmeik Modlin’s death by starvation in Harlem raised questions about the agency’s investigative procedures. Jahmeik’s tragic death, and the emaciated condition of his siblings, led some unnamed ACS caseworkers to speak to the press as whistleblowers, with several talking to NY1 in late October and another writing a New York Post piece in December.
The whistleblowers spotlighted ACS’s penchant for diverting cases to CARES, rather than following traditional investigative procedures. The workers complained about CARES accepting cases in which the adult caretaker is a known drug abuser. Since ACS does not consider drug abuse alone to pose a threat to children, and the agency does not investigate CARES cases, it cannot ascertain whether children in these cases are at risk.
Dannhauser and other defenders of ACS’s policy shifts might argue that the CARES approach is not empirically linked to increases in abuse or neglect. But neither can the commissioner and his allies empirically link diversion and the provision of “services” to improved child welfare.
ACS reportedly maintains, with typical vagueness, that “the majority” of drug-abuse cases face investigation. But the agency has proudly touted how it gives ACS-involved adults “Lock Boxes” in which they can store their “household toxins” out of children’s reach—a program started under the previous commissioner, David Hansell. Further, as Naomi Schaefer Riley has noted, ACS no longer lists an adult’s drug or alcohol abuse as a basis for investigation—a change that came early in the tenure of Dannhauser’s equally woke predecessor. The agency’s leadership is clearly not taking parental drug abuse seriously.
While ACS fiddles with its ideological agenda, poor, mostly minority, children whom the agency exists to protect are dying. In July, five-year-old De’Neil Timberlake was found dead, foaming at the mouth in his Bronx apartment from ingesting methadone, reportedly courtesy of his abusive father, who was known to ACS. In August, four-month-old Ariel Gonzalez fatally ingested cocaine, a death later ruled a homicide by the city’s medical examiner. Earlier this month, two-month-old Mike Nieto Parra’s 2023 ketamine overdose death was also ruled a homicide. These tragedies have come alongside six children dying of malnutrition in New York City over the last four months, according to the New York Post whistleblower.
Even with the whistleblowers’ testimony, the full extent of the troubles within ACS is not known. The agency is opaque, and it is not clear how the CARES program truly functions. We still don’t know how many contacts ACS had with the Modlin family, for example, and there is little publicly available information with which to evaluate the agency’s performance.
Under Dannhauser’s leadership, ACS is leaving too many vulnerable children in jeopardy. The agency needs a leadership change. At a minimum, Mayor Eric Adams should appoint a well-respected and independent commission—not a panel of advocates—to assess the state of the agency and issue a public report on its findings well before the mayoral election campaign kicks into high gear.
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