It is a historical time for our city. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has not chosen heads of departments as his predecessors did. Indeed, a New Yorker with a justice-affected history has been appointed as the new commissioner of the Department of Corrections. Stanley Richards, a formerly incarcerated criminal justice reform advocate, earned an historic appointment as the first person to lead the city’s jail system who has previously served time in it.
The New York City Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) will require a professional with similar foundational insight if NYC’s families are to receive the support they deserve and require. New York City had fallen under federal monitoring beginning in 2015 as a consequence of the disproportionate policing of poor Black and Brown families. In May 2024, the New York Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a report finding that “racism … continues to impact New York’s child welfare system and forms the foundation for how it functions.”
It is against the backdrop of chattel slavery and the prevailing wealth gap that Brown and Black families fail to escape poverty. These families are policed regarding their inability to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Further, Investigators who investigate the poor lack cultural understanding within the paradigm of poverty and render damaging decisions that destroy families, children, as well as communities.
There is a shortage of qualified foster homes. An investigation in 2001 indicated that one-sixth of resource homes fail to pass prerequisite determinants of adequacy. There is also a documented foster care to prison pipeline, a foster care to homelessness pipeline, and a foster care to mental illness pipeline. If the ACS were evaluated as a business, it would be classified as an abject failure lacking meaningful positive statistical outcomes.
In addition, a civil rights lawsuit filed in 2024 challenged the ACS use of “coercive tactics” for warrantless home searches, arguing these practices violate the constitutional rights of families, with a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic families.
Angela Olivia Burton has emerged as a finalist to lead the ACS, one of the largest and most-scrutinized child welfare systems in the country.
Angela is not a bureaucratic insider. She is a public interest attorney, legal scholar, and long-time family defense advocate whose work has centered on constitutional family rights, racial equity, and systemic reform. Her career has included academic leadership roles at the City University of New York School of Law and clinical legal training in children’s rights and family law, as well as advocacy roles focused on reducing unnecessary child welfare investigations. She has been publicly associated with efforts to “narrow the front door” of the child welfare system — reducing surveillance and removals while increasing community-based supports. Supporters view her as a reformer committed to addressing racial disproportionality and due process concerns. Family preservation must be the goal.
ACS is at the intersection of safety, poverty, race, and power. The next commissioner will shape how New York City repairs the inequity that policed families continue to face. Burton’s candidacy underscores a larger national debate: Is child welfare primarily an investigative apparatus, or should it reorient to a model grounded in family preservation rather than agency control? Indeed, very few families ever recover from the broken bonds severed by ACS and agencies like it.
Whatever one’s position, this appointment will not be symbolic. It will define our city’s humanity in a system that affects thousands of Black, Brown, and poor white children and families annually. Leadership know-how, cultural awareness, and legal prowess are what we need. As a New Yorker, I submit that Angela Burton has the skills, historical skin in the game, and documented understanding of what New York City families under court purview endure.
Dr. Adina Lundy is a native of Brownsville Brooklyn and associate director of undergraduate psychology at the University of Rhode Island. She also serves as an expert witness for the Office of the Public Defender, Family Court of Passaic County, N.J.