At least ten children on the city's radar died in the three months leading up to the beating death of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins, according to the preliminary findings of a forthcoming report from Comptroller Scott Stringer. A vocal critic of Mayor de Blasio, Stringer publicized his initial findings on the heels of city and state reports on Zymere's case, which revealed lax oversight and poor communication at each level of command within the Administration for Children's Services.
These ten cases were among 38 child deaths reported to the ACS for investigation between July 1st and September 25th of this year, according to Stringer's office. The comptroller requested this ACS data as part of a follow-up to a July audit which found ACS to be performing lax investigations. Ten cases jumped out because Stringer found that the city had fielded at least four maltreatment or abuse complaints for each of them.
"The data... starkly illustrates ACS's persistent lack of progress in meeting its own targets for how these investigations are conducted, supervised, and managed," Stringer wrote in a December 21st letter to the agency.
Testifying before the City Council last week, Deputy Mayor Herminia Palacio described Zymere's case as anomalous. "This represented an unusual perfect storm of human errors," she said.
But Stringer said troubling patterns emerged from the 3,692 high-priority ACS cases opened between July and September. In 68 percent of them, Stringer found, ACS didn't write up a risk-assessment profile for the child within the required 40 days. In about a quarter of the cases, ACS didn't make "face-to-face" contact with the child within one day of a case being opened. And about 72 percent of cases were closed without the required number of sign-offs from a case manager.
In the hours since Stringer's latest findings went public, ACS and City Hall have come down strongly against them, particularly the death statistics. "It's no surprise that ACS data was cherry-picked to support a simplified and largely inaccurate conclusion," said Mayoral Spokeswoman Aja Worthy-Davis. "This report contains many inaccuracies— such as a base misunderstanding of child protective review protocols and legal rules regarding risk-assessment."
According to ACS, the data supplied to the Comptroller indicated 33 deaths, not 38. Within that total, the city said, four of the deaths occurred prior to 2014. Out of the remaining 29, 15 were children who had no prior case history with ACS when their deaths were reported. The city said that the majority of the 14 children who died while on ACS radar did not die of abuse or neglect: six allegedly died because of unsafe sleeping conditions, three due to illness, one in a fire, one "accidental." Three of the causes are as yet unknown.
In a statement this afternoon, Stringer spokesman Tyrone Stevens noted that ACS's criticisms of the report did not extend to the allegations of slow case assessment and lax communication between case workers and their superiors.
"The response from City Hall is disappointing—especially since this is ACS's own data provided by the agency to our office," Stevens said. "Their focus should be on embracing these preliminary findings and coming up with a management plan to tackle these critical issues."
A report released by the Department of Investigation in May alleged that ACS had consistently failed to investigate and report child abuse and maintain accurate records. The report also found that ACS often took more than a month to investigate child abuse allegations.
ACS Commissioner Gladys Carrión resigned this month, after three years in the post. In addition to Zymere's case, her administration also recently came under fire following the beating death of 3-year-old Jaden Jordan.
Mayor de Blasio announced the firing of three employees directly involved in Zymere's case last week, and the suspension and demotion of six others. ACS will also hire an independent monitor to be instated in January who will issue monthly reports on ACS procedure—a direct order from the state Office of Children and Family Services.
"The recent Comptroller's report misconstrues the significant strides we are making toward strengthening all processes for keeping children safe," an ACS spokesperson said.
[Update 5:50 p.m.]: Mayoral spokesman Eric Phillips responded to the latest ACS comments, calling the report "completely bogus."
"The report does more to intentionally mislead the public than it does to help protect children," he said.
