DCF Admits It Broke Policy

DCF Admits It Broke Policy
Brass Knew Abuse Reports Unchecked

February 7, 2004
By COLIN POITRAS, Courant Staff Writer

State child protection officials admitted Friday that they knew three
years ago that workers were violating agency policy by allowing some
complaints of abuse and neglect to go unchecked.

But it wasn't until investigators began looking into the death of a
New London toddler a few months ago that the practice of "screening
out" complaints was stopped once and for all. By that time, hundreds
of reports involving children at risk had been set aside.

One of the primary reasons for the delay, according to a top official,
was that the Department of Children and Families' computer system was
unable to accommodate the kind of tracking system officials wanted to
monitor how the decisions not to investigate certain cases were being
made.

While agency officials said most of the ignored reports appeared to be
duplicate complaints of existing cases, the state's child advocate,
Jeanne Milstein, said she isn't convinced that children didn't suffer
as a result of the agency's failure to follow its own rules.

"A policy is only as good as the practice that results," Milstein
said. "You can't do enough to protect children. We're talking about
children's lives here."

The Department of Children and Families' regional offices failed to
investigate about 800 reports of abuse and neglect that were made to
the agency's hotline from March 2000 to March 2001, according to
figures released Friday. Officials said those complaints were just a
fraction of the 28,821 complaints that were investigated during that
time.

All complaints regarding child abuse or neglect are managed by the
agency hotline. Complaints accepted for investigation are passed down
to the regional offices and assigned to available workers. The
decisions not to investigate certain complaints were made by regional
supervisors even though a policy written in 1993 mandates that all
complaints accepted by the hotline be checked, officials said.

A federal court official monitoring the DCF in early 2001 raised
concerns about the 1 to 3 percent of all complaints that were being
administratively screened out. Deputy Commissioner James Carr said
Friday that agency officials had numerous discussions and meetings
about the issue at that time and although several changes were
suggested, none was enacted.

"Over the years, we've wrestled with this topic," Carr said. "We had
policy meetings, group forums ... with the different regions; we knew
it had to be done in a consistent manner. It's a very complex
question."

Carr said the mere fact that the issue was raised and widely discussed
led to a dramatic decrease in the number of complaints being closed
without investigation.

Milstein and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal raised the issue
again last September. The agency conducted a review to see how
pervasive the problem was. According to figures released Friday, 11 of
the agency's 14 regional offices halted the screening-out process
entirely.

Of the three offices that continued to do it, two offices failed to
investigate a total of 26 complaints over a five-month period between
September 2003 and last month, when Commissioner Darlene Dunbar
ordered the practice stopped. A third office reported that it also
screened out cases but did not keep any records of how many complaints
went ignored.

Of the 26 known complaints that were not investigated, agency
officials said 22 of them involved cases that were already open and
being actively investigated. Of the four remaining complaints, in one
case the department had just completed an investigation of the same
complaint from another person, officials said. There was no prior
agency involvement in the other three complaints and officials are
conducting a full review to see what went wrong.

The issue was thrust to the forefront in recent weeks following the
death of Alquan White in New London. In that case, a local hospital
worker reported to the DCF in 1998 that Alquan was at risk after he
showed up at a local hospital suffering from pneumonia when he was 6
weeks old.

A DCF regional office worker made a follow up call to the hospital
and, based on that interview, decided not to investigate. Authorities
believe that about two years later Alquan, then nearly 3, was fatally
"manhandled" by his father. Police discovered Alquan's decomposed body
when they arrested his father on an unrelated matter on Dec. 28, 2003.

Milstein said the fact that the screen-out problem was allowed to
persist for years and that some offices failed to keep accurate data
reflects an ongoing management crisis at the DCF where sloppy
supervision, poor communication and a lack of accountability have led
to children being hurt.

With the agency in the process of shifting more responsibility to the
regional offices, Milstein is worried that those problems will only
get worse.

"We found that to be a consistent problem with DCF," Milstein said.
"By not keeping good data on cases, children fall through the cracks.
Alquan is not the only child who has died and I worry about other kids
who may be at risk."
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