Fixing child protection

Los Angeles County fails to protect children from abuse and neglect because no single person or entity in county government takes responsibility for the problem or has the power to prevent it.

But how can that be? There is a Department of Children and Family Services specifically charged with child protection, and there are dozens of other agencies, programs and policies intended to further the goal.

The Sheriff’s Department and other police agencies, for example, have access to an innovative computer reporting system to let social workers know when they are investigating crimes that could involve child abuse. County health and mental health departments operate a program to evaluate children for signs of mistreatment. And the county has ample data to enable it to focus its attention and resources on the children most at risk of fatal injury.

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But all of those departments, programs and policies too often operate in bureaucratic isolation, with poor communication and coordination. It’s as if several dozen people, each given a piece of a puzzle, went off on their own to ponder what the whole picture might look like if they ever got together. No one sits them down at a table and starts putting the pieces together.

A divided and frustrated Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors formed a Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection this year in the wake of the May death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez of Palmdale to try to figure out why the county keeps failing in its mission. To its credit, the panel made clear from the outset that it would focus on why the puzzle is never completed. It sent the board an interim report Monday.

The report asserts that child injury and death can be minimized immediately — without waiting for reform to take hold at the Department of Children and Family Services and without accepting or rejecting any of several competing philosophies on how often to remove children from their homes — by following specific steps to better integrate and coordinate the work performed by multiple county agencies.

The bad news is that many of those steps require a transformation in county government culture that, although necessary, has eluded elected officials and bureaucrats for years. It’s fine to argue that county government is a mess — it is — but a wholesale reinvention and restructuring is not likely any time soon. The good news is that the commission presents a partial blueprint with achievable steps, including making the district attorney responsible for ensuring that law enforcement agencies comply with their reporting and information-sharing mandates, and pairing public health nurses with social workers investigating cases involving children under 1 year old. Success could show the way toward more effective county performance well beyond child protection.