Investigate Denver Dept. of Human Services
As an attorney doing a great deal of work in the Denver Juvenile Court, I know and suggest to you that you investigate the following regarding Denver Department of Human Services so-called independent investigation of their child protection practices: 1. The Annie E. Casey Foundation and the other Casey family foundation have been giving DDHS substantial grants over the past few years. Many of DDHS practices which have led to the recent major problems have been suggested or greatly increased over the past six or seven years and relate to these grants. You should ask for the amount of grant money from the Casey foundations to DDHS and copies of the grant proposals and reports before assuming that the investigators are not the initial instigators of the policies they are investigating.
2. The Kempe Center is nominally independent with strong ties to the University of Colorado which supplies the residents in psychiatry who work for Kempe, but many of their programs are either in part or entirely funded by charges for services to children in DDHS custody or to DDHS families. If you include medicare funding, a very high amount of Kempe’s current budget is for children and families referred (and certainly could be unreferred) from DDHS.
3. The relationship between the state DHS and DDHS goes without further details although it would be interesting to determine which and how many of the actual investigators of DDHS assigned to this job are actually past employees of DDHS who were “promoted” to state jobs.
In short an “independent” investigation requires entirely different investigators.
This letter has not been edited.
Any investigation of this nature always turns out to be a whitewash.There have been any number of murdered-child scandals and blue-ribbon investigations of this agency in the past,with the same result.No change whatever.
What really is going on here is that the Department of Human Services that investigates abuse is the same Department of Human Services that pays welfare benefits to teen mothers who would not bear children if the department didn't pay them to.
Since the Department of Human Services does pay for incompetent parentood,there is a never-ending supply of at-risk children needing a never-ending regimen of professional services.Provided at professional rates by the likes of the good folks at the Department of Human Services and the Kempe Center.
Jimminy - I work with teens and young parents and I can honestly tell you that I have never met s single one who had a child in order to collect welfare benefits. In fact, welfare reform has added such regulatory burdens that it is far more feasible for teens to simply drop out of school and attempt to raise their child on a minimum wage salary.
Certainly the recent case of the Midyettes in Boulder suggests that child abuse is not necessarily limited to welfare or parenting teens.
Posted by Michael R on October 6, 2007 07:51 PMMike,speaking as a former colleague,and with all due respect,you most certainly have met very many teen parents who did just that.Probably nearly as many as you have interviewed.
Again,with all due respect,I'd like to point out that you're subtly but most strongly required to believe in the rightness of your agency's cause-they put bread on your table,and we all know that disputing the rightness of that which puts said bread on said table means no more bread,and no more table.
The proof that young women,especially young women of color,will indeed bear a child to (among other things) get money from the government lies in governments' own statistical findings.In the early '90s nine out of ten African-American births in this area were out of wedlock. In 1996, welfare regulations were changed to include a near-absolute requirement that recipients of children's benefits go to school or go to work.The illegitimacy rate in the African-American community began to decrease and is now around 70%.Direct consequence of making single parenthood less profitable.
Now before all you diversityniks start charging up the flamethrowers,may I,again with all due respect,point out that throughout history,those who would destroy a people start with disposing of the men. While we're enlightened enough not to kill every African-American man (just some of them),we've been able to neutralize them by paying African-American women to have children but only if there's no man in the house.
I dealt with Social Service quite a few years ago. It didn't quite turn out the way they wanted. When I asked for records a few years later, they had never heard of me. Hmmmmm.....
Posted by on October 6, 2007 11:36 PMsocial services is run by a bunch of self serving idiots who for some reason think they know what is best for the children. when something happens and points back to them and their lack of professionalism, the first words out of their mouth is that they are over worked and their case load is to big. no its just another shinning example of why we dont want or need the government to run our lives or health care.
Posted by on October 7, 2007 06:20 AMA blue ribbon, I thought, Is a reward for excellence. Tell me, what blue ribbon committee has ever done anything that even approachs excellence, never mind solving any problem they were formed to consider solutions for. And, when they are composed of ploiticians and government employes who were the cause of the problem they are supposed to find solutions for in the first place, is that not kind of like having the fox guard the hen house?
Posted by Allen Campbell on October 7, 2007 09:04 AMMichael R. ,It is interesting you brought up the Midyette case.That case makes me the angriest. Why? Because a family with wealth was allowed to walk out of a hospital after their baby died under mysterious circumstances and not one question from the police or the D.A.'s office,after the autopsy found 48 broken bones and a skull fracture on a 10 week old baby.NOT ONE QUESTION!
They of course lawyered up the minute they walked out of the hospital.What did Mary Lacey do with her gang of "let's find poor Jon Benet's killer at any cost do?NOTHING!
Nothing was done until Bill O'reilly sent his producer to confront Mary Lacey. Then and only then more than a year later was a Grand Jury convened.The Midyettes wealth still served them well. They were charged with 2nd degree murder and of course made bail.
This story though simiilar to the more recent murders of children,they all have one thing in common.
Whether rich or poor in the State of Colorado all child killers and rapist are treated the same .The State does not care about the children of Colorado.
I find it ironic that people will protest murders that supposedly happened by Christopher Columbus,hundreds of years ago,but their is no one speaking out against the rape and murder of children.
I guess they don't vote and in most cases DHS sees one less caseload.Sad for all.
Posted by Can I get an AMEN! on October 7, 2007 09:24 AMAmen - I share your outrage at the suffering of any child and that is the primary reason I have spent my entire working life trying to protect them, I also volunteer 20 hours a month in programs for at-risk families.
My understanding is that the Midyette baby's case was never reported to DSS. No one will ever know what might have happened if his doctor had reported his failure to gain weight.
Jimminy - I will agree that there has been a message sent by society that having a baby was no big deal and that there would be programs available to help them.
The teens I have worked with, by and large, were horny, had sex and woke up one day to find themselves pregnant. Most would tell you that it was an absence of knowledge, money or accessibility to birth control that sealed their fates, not a desire to collect a welfare check.
You might even be surprised to meet many who refuse government services because they want to avoid the stigma of welfare mom.
Posted by Michael R on October 7, 2007 11:19 AMMike-indeed teens are a horny group.The rest of us sure do put a lot of effort into concerning ourselves with their intimate activities,although I'm chagrined to say that if WE want to do anything more than watch,we'll probably need prescription enhancements.
And having dispensed a little rueful humor,I come to my point:Our crew,the Human Services profession, has said that all them teens we so love to watch are competent to choose,and Roe v. Wade backs them up with the force of law.If they're competent,then we cannot now say "Oh,that's all right" and airily accept lame excuses for behavior that in the Grafton and Gallegos situations led to the murder of children.
OF COURSE all of our little clients will tell us that they didn't know about/couldn't access/couldn't afford birth control.They know what Human Services wants to hear.
One of the things Human Services really loves to hear is how they don't know who/where the dad is.Usually he doesn't get found or identified until he has a new girlfriend and stops giving our client money under the table.
I don't doubt that DHS needs an overhaul and improvement. But it should be based on facts and not on wild and emotional diatribe such as we get from Jimminy.
When MIchael R. posted that there will be mistakes made, Jimminy slanderously tried to make that out as excusing the mistakes when, in fact, Michael R. in no way excused the mistakes. To me, that alone labels Jimminy as someone who cannot be trusted to show integrity.
Then, Jimminy posts:
"Because a family with wealth was allowed to walk out of a hospital after their baby died under mysterious circumstances and not one question from the police or the D.A.'s office, after the autopsy found 48 broken bones and a skull fracture on a 10 week old baby. NOT ONE QUESTION!"
From The Daily Camera:
"6 p.m. — Two Boulder police officers arrive at the hospital and are told that the boy suffers from a skull fracture, swelling of the brain and other fractures. When they attempt to talk to the family in the waiting room, the officers are told they are not going to talk and that their attorney is on the way."
The police executed a search warrant of the home a day or two after the death and confiscated a number of items which were inventoried.
Jimminy: "Nothing was done until Bill O'reilly sent his producer to confront Mary Lacey. Then and only then more than a year later was a Grand Jury convened."
From Colorado Media Matters:
"During the December 11 broadcast of their 630 KHOW-AM show, co-hosts Dan Caplis and Craig Silverman joined guest Bill O'Reilly in distorting facts regarding Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy's handling of an investigation into the March 3 death of infant Jason Jay "J.J." Midyette. Inflating his impact in the case, O'Reilly made the dubious claim that "if it wasn't for guys like you, and guys like me, baby Midyette would be in the ground dead and murdered and nothing' would happen" -- an assessment with which Caplis and Silverman agreed. However, according to the Boulder Daily Camera -- which O'Reilly called "a left-wing lunatic asylum" -- a grand jury was convened in early October to investigate the baby's death, a full month before O'Reilly began covering the case. O'Reilly also falsely stated that "last March [Boulder authorities] knew" that the infant had been "murder[ed]," although the Boulder County coroner reportedly did not make that determination until July."
From The Daily Camera:
"Prosecutors badgered and belittled witnesses during the Midyette grand jury proceedings because they had little evidence, says a defense attorney, and now Alex Midyette wants a judge to review the transcripts to determine if the Boulder County District Attorney's Office's conduct warrants a dismissal of the case.
"Basically, the prosecution, lacking any credible evidence to indict the defendant, set upon a mission of character assassination," wrote Paul McCormick, Alex Midyette's attorney, in a motion filed in Boulder County District Court late Friday."
The article about the case at http://www.crimelibrary.com/news/original/1006/2601_mydette_death2.html goes into some detail about the difficulty of proving a child abuse case such as this. It's not talking about "proving" the case in the newspaper, or in a forum such as this, but in a court of law.
I expect there are other relevant facts that might shed more light on the handling of the case by the police and DA but I submit that the above are sufficient to label Jimminy's handling of it as grossly unreliable.
Jimminy is one of those posters who does emotional diatribe rather than reasoned posting. For example, you would think from his posts that everyone in the DHS is a bad, bad person who wants to pay poor women to have babies and who has no concern for children who are abused. No fair and mature person would accept such accusations as anything other than irresponsible vitriol.
Uhh,Truth, check the posts.You're attributing Can I Get An AMEN's statements to me. I share a great many of C.I.G.A.A's sentiments,but your misattributions as well as your ad hominem attacks on me personally more or less put a charge of double-ought in your foot and kinda compromise the credibility of what you're trying to say to all the nice folks on this blog.
And in the interest of repairing any confusion you might have intended to create,I should say that I personally saw many times over many years every single dirty little deed I've commented upon,and many more besides.
If my sarcasm and ridicule offends you,pal,then I consider THAT a few minutes work well done.If someone else begins to question the motives of those mandated to help the poor and the black and red and brown but who enrich the educated and the white and the gay-themselves,that is,then I am twice blessed.
i agree they need to do better,i have 3 grandchildren ,that were stolen from michigan,and are being put thru all kinds of bad things and protective services doesnt see anything wrong.they need to open ther eyes.my son wants his kids returned to michigan,as ther mother dumped them at the grandmothers and has mental problems.and the grandmother caused the problems.
Posted by AL.RABIDEAU on October 8, 2007 03:18 AMMy apologies to you, Jimminy, for my goof and for wrongly attributing to you the misinformation provided by Amen.
While I don't doubt that DHS needs reforming and improving, you too often sound like a rabid evangelical on the warpath with such nonsense as inferring there is a conspiracy to get rid of the black race by first keeping the men out of the picture and your claim that black women have babies in order to profit financially. I don't doubt that welfare payments and other benefits play a part in the terrible illegitimacy picture, but it makes no sense to claim that the mother is driven by the profit motive. The average welfare mother with several kids in tow is hardly profiting from those kids. Then, you put all single mothers in the same "bad apple" category, completely ignoring, for example, single mothers who are widowed or whose mate or husband beat her. The black illegitimacy rate is indeed terrible, something that needs no exaggeration, so why do you need to inflate that from 70% to 90% in the early nineties?
"The good news from the federal government's preliminary birthrate data for 2002 is that the black illegitimacy rate has not only stopped getting worse, but it is now in a gradual decline. Last year, 68.0 percent of the black women who had babies were unmarried, down from 68.4 percent in 2001. The peak was 70.4 percent in 1994."
While your goal of wanting to improve DHS is certainly a good one, your way of trying to get there through the use of broadsides and misinformation is not a good one.
Truth,Getting your information from The Boulder Daily Camera and Media Matters has already shown you to be a far left liberal who doesn't care what the facts are because Media matters and The Boulder newspaper says so.
So we have two wealthy parents who bring their baby to a hostpital for treatment of whatever . It is determined in a preliminary finding the child had at least a skull fracture and other fractures. ( They just don't make crib bumpers like they used to ,I guess )
After a autopsy it was found that the baby had 48 fractures and a major skull fracture caused by a very hard blow to the head.
( Damn those crib mobiles)
The parents lawyered up,when the police were called. ( How dare the hospital call the police! We are rich and have lawyers! )
O'Reilly brought up this baby's death a few months after it happened.( Darn that O'Reilly bringing up the death of a baby with 48 bone fractures and a skull fracture! ) Doesn't he know your not supposed to question anything that happens in Boulder.
What goes on in Boulder ,Stays in Boulder,right?
Getting information from george Soros's Media Matters? How low can you go?
Posted by Can I get an AMEN! on October 8, 2007 11:58 AMGee, for a minute there, Amen, I thought maybe you were going to try to show that what I stated as facts were wrong. Not so, Instead of attacking the message you degenerate into your common sewer tactic of giving, not any facts, but only your own worthless opinion about the messenger.
What difference does it make what the source of my information is as long as the information is correct? Answer: None
If you claim I am wrong to say that the police didn't come to the hospital and try to question the parents but they refused to be questioned, what is your authority for that?
If you claim that I am wrong to say that the grand jury was convened in early October, what is your authority?
The reason you don't attack the facts I stated is that, despite your having misrepresented what happened, you know those facts are true. Your problem is that you don't have the guts to acknowledge that what you posted is BS.
While they won't interest you because you are interested only in ranting and raving and not the facts, others might be interested in how the police responded after the parents refused to talk to them, as taken from their press release:
"The Louisville police officer on the scene placed an emergency protective hold on teh infant and transferred custody of the child to the Boulder County Department of Social Services. Because of the severity of his injuries, the child was taken to Children's Hospital in Denver. At Children's Hospital, the child was examined and placed on life support."
"On the night of February 24, Louisville police officers conducted a search of the Midyette's home in Louisville. Computers, medical records, personal papers and marijuana paraphrenalia were seized under the warrant. Between February 24 and March 3, police officers executed search warrants for additional medical records at Boulder Community Hospital and from the Midyette family's physican."
I've no doubt that there are many cases in which the police and prosecutors give special treatment to people because of their prominence and wealth. And you get really excited about claiming that happened here. The trouble is that the facts don't support you. But people of your ilk aren't interested in the facts, only in the opportunity to rant.
In case you missed it, the Midyettes have been indicted for child abuse. It took a lot of hard work and research to reach that point, none of which was done by your hero in waiting, O'Reilly. Could the indictment have come earlier? Neither of us are in a position to know with any certainty. And in the long run it doesn't make much difference if justice can prevail at the end.
Who was it that put that gigantic chip on your shoulder that has made you such an embittered person?
Posted by Truth on October 8, 2007 01:54 PMOne more question Truth since you obviously think you are smarter than everyone else because you can cut and paste "facts" from questionable sources.
How is your granddaughter's 5th grade math coming?
My 5th grader is already in the past middle of the book.If your so smart why isn't she?
Posted by Can I get an AMEN! on October 8, 2007 05:23 PMNice to hear from you, Joseph. Some time try to post a fact or two instead of your sick opinions. And thanks for letting me know that I am on the right path with my posts. Now go get your prozac refilled.
Posted by Truth on October 8, 2007 06:40 PMAmen, you are one sick cookie, and I'm not talking physical ailments. And you once again show your lack of guts by trying to change the subject rather than own up to the misinformation you posted as facts. God, you go all over the place to evade the truth. I just wonder what the technical term is for your mental condition.
Posted by Truth on October 8, 2007 06:52 PM(Un) Truth, got slapped again and dribbled a half erect response. Someday the fool will realize just what a court jester he is. By the way Untruth, Joseph stated a lot of acknowledged facts about your work on this board -- you're just too stupid to realize it.
Posted by on October 8, 2007 06:53 PMY'all might save a little of that righteous wrath for the people doing the abusing. And for the rest of us too,because nobody wants to get involved with the police.We can barely get it together enough to call Human Services.As I explained in detail on the other child abuse thread,those people aren't cops,and have neither the legal standing nor the aptitude to do what the police do. If you see child abuse treat it like a crime(because it IS) and get law enforcement involved.That is what 911 is for.
Posted by Jimminy on October 8, 2007 10:19 PMTruth does not need to apologize to me(although he did it very nicely) or anyone here.What he,and I,and everyone else who speaks on these blogs does need to keep in mind is that we have the opportunity to attack problems.We CAN attack people but I'm not sure doing that has much more than entertainment value.
Posted by Jimminy on October 9, 2007 12:29 AMTruth, You want to know why I have a huge chip on my shoulder?
I'ts because of people like you who don't care that our children in this country are being abused,kidnapped and held as sex slaves,preyed on while on the internet,sexually abused by people that are supposed to be trusted,raped by mother's boyfriends, starved to death, beaten to death,kidnapped by non-custodial parents and murdered,murder by their parents,some are found alive,most stranger kidnappings end up in death.
My chip on my shoulder will stay there until we stop letting sex offenders out of prison over and over to abuse another child over and over.
We can stop the majority of sexual abuse on children by not letting sex offenders out for extremely long periods of time.Until we take sentencing guidelines out of the hands of judges who believe in restorative justice our children will never be safe.
Colorado is one of 8 states who still has not passed Jessica's Law. It will put a sex offender of a child age 12 and under, in prison 25 years to life. No parole until 25 years is served.First offense.
You write letters and can research statistics.Put that to good use and join me in a letter writing campaign to get our legislature to pass Jessica's law.
This state has over 9,000 registered sex offender's out in our neighborhoods.That is 9,000 too many. These slime are constantly looking for new victims.. They get out of their short prison sentences and do it over and over until they get caught.How many victims does it take to put these slime away for good?
It's just not men anymore abusing our children sexually. A grandmother in S, Colorado was sentenced to 40 years probation for making her 2 under the age of 10 grandchildren perform sex acts on each other and she sold them on the Internet! Probation!
These children that are being raped and sold over the Internet are going to be sexually abused for the rest of their lives,already adding to the trauma of the original abuse.
I have taken care of kids since I was 17 and decided that I would love and protect as many as I could. I took care of all kinds of children from all different backgrounds,rich and poor.All of them should be treated equally in the eyes of the law.One gets killed by parents or whoever , the person responsible is charged with murder.Not 2nd degree,not manslaughter,not negligent homocide,or whatever the D.A. can come up with to excuse this murder away.
If you kill a child you should be charged with 1st degree murder. That child cannot fight back.
The first thing is the citizen's of Colorado have to start getting angry at the way our children are used and abused in this state. We are a magnet for child sexual predators because we have lenient laws.So the offenders move here where there is the least amount of resistence,the laws don't protect the children,the citizens don't care,the parents think it will never happen to their child,light sentences the list can go on and on.
How about people who have children or not , start getting our legislature to toughen the laws in Colorado so the sexual predators don't continue to turn it into their playground?
The chip on my shoulder will stay there until our society puts the safety and welfare of our children first.Until the murderer's,rapists,kidnappers and Internet predators are put away for 25 years to life,not 25 days and probation.
Stop making excuses for people who murder children.Start doing something to change our laws to protect children and stop attacking me because I am sick of our children being murdered and dumped like a piece of trash on the highway and no one gives a damn. Well I do!
Posted by Can I get an AMEN! on October 9, 2007 08:43 AM"If you kill a child you should be charged with 1st degree murder. That child cannot fight back."
AMEN!!!Posted by Joseph S on October 9, 2007 12:26 PM
"If you kill a child you should be charged with 1st degree murder. That child cannot fight back."
No -- they should be violently executed by the exact same method they used in killing the child, except a little bit slower...let them savor their skills from the receiving end.
Posted by on October 9, 2007 12:36 PMThere is ample documentation of a great many hideous ways of taking a human life,and very probably a whole lot of grisly footage that never sees the light of day.
I think we can assume that someone treated as 12:36 recommends would be restrained and could not fight back while being tortured to death.I'm not sure how doing that carries us to the moral high ground,although Al-Qaeda's treatment of Daniel Pearle may have given them insights along those lines that they might share with us.
Although government very subtly justifies its right to excercise divine powers,those who act on behalf of the people have so far been unable to resurrect the dead. If they were to gain that capability,we might see any number of creative but rather bloodcurdling Department of Corrections methodologies.
12:36. Yes they should be executed! However The State Of Colorado doesn't even have enough guts to do that even in the worst crimes imaginable. I don't know how many people are on death row.
I've been in Colorado for 13 years and have yet to see one carried out.
Does anyone know , When the last execution was carried out in Colorado?
Does anyone know when the D.A. plans on charging Neveah's Mother ,who confessed and her sex offender boyfriend?
If they are not gone by now ,I;d be surprised.
I find it a little fishy that a few days before Neveah's death ,I read in the news that the state need millions of dollars to upgrade it's criminal labs and police facility's.
Do you think perhap Nevaeh's case is being held up intentionally to make their point that they need more money for labs and facility's?
Could they be using Niveah to prove their point?
Posted by Can I get an AMEN! on October 10, 2007 07:48 AMCIGAA-you could be right.I do remember my boss at Human Services saying "We're not accountable to the taxpayers".
Posted by Jimminy on October 10, 2007 08:56 PM