Legal Services NYC (LSNYC) has issued a new report that highlights a concerning trend: child abuse investigations by NYC’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) often target low-income Black and Latino women.
“Even ACS knows that they disproportionately investigate Latinos and Black folks,” states Washcarina Martinez Alonzo, a Legal Services attorney and co-author of the report, “The Far-Reaching Impact of ACS’s Discriminatory Investigations on Women of Color and Survivors of Gender-Based Violence.”
“For us,” Martinez Alonzo said, “it was really about drawing a line between those investigations and poverty –– the cycle of poverty.”
The report depicts ACS as focusing on Black and Latino families that live in high-crime/low-income neighborhoods. Targeting is the best way to describe their actions, Martinez Alonzo told the AmNews, because “I think, as a person who’s from the Bronx –– I grew up between the Bronx and Harlem –– it does feel like a target. As a native New Yorker and as an attorney who tries to use their words carefully, I would point to that target of like over-investigating or disproportionate involvement, all happening in the same neighborhood.”
Residents in areas like Harlem, the Bronx, North Staten Island, East Brooklyn, and South Queens frequently have to deal with stop-and-frisk policies, witness domestic and gender-based violence, and see people suffering from substance abuse issues. These are incidents that bring large numbers of police officers to their neighborhoods. And a persistent police presence also attracts other state authorities who end up monitoring how residents function.
The report’s authors connect a lot of the violence in these cases to poverty, writing: “ACS investigations involve poverty in the form of a lack of medical care, inadequate food/clothing/shelter, or malnutrition (i.e., neglect)… This disproportionality keeps people from attaining meaningful work, perpetuating the circumstances that may have brought about the investigation in the first place.” When low-income parents are accused of child abuse, it can affect their employment opportunities. Many workers in the care industry live in low-income neighborhoods, and care workers will lose their jobs when they have abuse claims on their records.
Racial disparities in child abuse reporting persist
Martinez Alonzo, along with co-authors Caitlin Goldman, Esq., and C.C., produced their report utilizing ACS data from some 114,602 investigations closed between January 1, 2020, and July 31, 2022. ACS routinely receives tips regarding child abuse cases and issues reports to determine those accusations as “indicated” (suggestive of abuse) or “unfounded.”
LSNYC’s report notes that ACS found 38,182 (or 33 %) of its 114,602 investigations were indicated but only moved forward with neglect petitions in 8 % of the cases. In the two and a half years after Jan. 1, 2020, 28 % of all ACS investigations were flagged for domestic violence, totaling 31,849 cases.
Statistics from 2024, provided to this newspaper by ACS, show that racial disparities in child abuse reporting persist. However, an ACS spokesperson says it has “dramatically reduced the total number of families experiencing an indicated investigation (down more than 40% over the last 7 years). This means that the total number of families impacted by the child welfare system through investigations, as well as deeper engagement through supervision and foster care, has reduced.”
The agency said in a statement: “ACS is committed to building a safer, more just, and equitable New York City for children and families. Through methods like decreasing unnecessary child welfare involvement and promoting supportive services that better stabilize families, we work to reduce both racial disparities within the child welfare system and the number of families unnecessarily impacted by the child welfare system.
“We are reviewing the [LSNYC] report and will continue to listen, learn, and evolve our critical work to uplift New York’s children.”
LSNYC’s report aligns with several recent findings from other organizations. The New School’s Center for NYC Affairs wrote in 2019 that “Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side, which have among the lowest child poverty rates and proportions of Black and Latino residents of the city’s 59 community districts, had fewer than 10 investigations per 1000 children. Hunts Point, Morrisania, and Mott Haven, with among the highest child poverty rates and concentrations of Black and Latino residents in the city, each had more than 70 investigations per 1000 children.” In 2023, a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union declared that ACS data “exposes the alarming extent to which racism is baked into every stage of a family regulation case.” And last year, New York’s Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted that “Black children are more likely than other children to be removed from their families, and are also less likely to be reunified with their families. … The New York State Bar Association found that when it comes to Black children and children of color, ‘reasonable efforts’ to preserve and unify families are not applied, creating further disproportionalities.
“ACS removes Black children from their families almost twice as often as Latino or white children.”
All facts. And the devastating effect that it has on Black families is irreparable and destructive. Families are never given true resources to engage themselves in society and it is stigmatized for life. It (the Black family) becomes a target for the ills society brings to these communities. They never fully recovered and most times the cycle continues with the children in the Black family. The racial overtones still exist as it has done in slavery. Until the systemic barriers are removed, society will continue to see devastating effects within the Black community.
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