The Aniya Garrett case...CPS NEVER really punishes their own.
This is a very sad case of a little girl who was murdered by her mother and new boyfriend after the father's desperate pleas for intervention from "Child Protective" "Services" (CPS) fell on deaf ears..over and over, and over again. This isn't really a re-hashing of the sad details. There are dozens of related stories about the case itself linked at the bottom of the article I am citing.
(Aniya Garrett's killer. Image courtesy of cleveland.com.)
Here is an excerpt:
This article is going to focus briefly on the results and responses to this case. Here is an excerpt from the link above:
"The Department of Children and Family Services on Friday announced the following changes following the death of 4-year-old Aniya Day Garrett. A panel of local and national child welfare experts made the following recommendations:
A> Strengthen investigative skills with added law enforcement expertise.
B> Include entire family in case evaluation and investigation with interviews with mothers, fathers and children.
C> Balance parental rights and child safety need, with latter being the first priority.
D> Strengthen relationships with neighborhood collaboratives with case assignments related to neighborhood connections.
E> Strengthen quality assurance function within DCFS.
Before the panel’s report, Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish announced the following changes:
A> Assign a Deputy Sheriff to assist with investigations.
B> Engage in a community Listening Tour at six locations across the county.
C> Create a Complaint Manager program for both DCFS and JFS.
D> Hire more licensed social workers.
E> Create a new community advisory committee and provide regular input to DCFS."
This case occurred in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which is Cleveland...i.e. a very densely populated area, with lots of low income folks. I would like to draw your attention to the FIRST item on both lists. I am harping, I know, but this is precisely my greatest complaint against current CPS procedure. They put poorly-educated, newly-hired case workers with little or no investigative skills, and no common sense into situations where their decisions can result in life or death for children, and havoc or calm for families.
I found it amusing that, in this case, both the professional groups looking at the case and making recommendations agreed that the first step must be to get a real investigator involved. My argument has been that a REAL INVESTIGATOR is all that is needed, and that the REAL COURTS are sufficient to deal with sad situations like this where real abuse has occurred, or when reports are made. CPS is simply redundant, un-Constitutional, horribly expensive and totally unnecessary.
I also scanned through the other articles looking for what, if anything, was done to punish the caseworkers or the agencies for acting, essentially, as accessories to murder. I mean, they KEPT this child, forcibly, in a very dangerous situation, ignored the child's pleas for help (who repeatedly told teachers and others that her mother was hitting her) and ignored the desperate father-- who was busy trying to move mountains to get custody because he knew the real score-- and sided with the MOTHER (which is very typical) when she was the true danger in this situation. I note there is nothing there about balancing father's rights with mother's, although they did give lip service to involving the whole family in such decisions.
(Aniya's daddy could not force anyone at CPS to listen. Image courtesy of youtube. I could find no indication that anybody at CPS was directly punished. This is inexcusable, and I want to just mention how typical this is, also, of all levels of government. Government has grown to such monstrous size and been given such monstrous powers, that they never seem to punish their own when it is deserved. The mantra seems to be to never admit guilt, but to always claim that it is the taxpayers' fault for not giving them enough money and power. You can even see that in the lists above...hire more of the same type oif incompetent failures who have created this particular crisis in the first place, so we can create more crises, that, in turn, create more such crises. This will then, of course, "require" the hiring of more and more of these people, and on, and on, and on the spiral of insanity goes.
You all know the classic definition of insanity, right?...."To keep doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results."
I am at the point where I just say "the definition of insanity is CPS."
Can I get an "Amen" out there?
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