Cost of a False Alarm: CEO Remarks
On Monday, November 10th, The Children’s Agenda was proud to stand with our partners at Hope585 to announce the release of a new report Cost of A False Alarm, which explores the costs of unfounded calls to Child Protective Services to both families and Monroe County, as well as potential reforms. Below are CEO Larry Marx’s remarks from the event.
Monroe County’s Department of Human Services plays a pivotal role in supporting thousands of our community’s children and families.
Their support of families is both under-funded and under-staffed. It is therefore all the more important that we must prioritize scarce funding and scarce staff time to where it can do the most good.
Families experiencing poverty need tangible economic support, like housing assistance, child care subsidies, and access to healthy food.
Meanwhile, the CPS system has needed substantial reform for a very long time. We know that there is over-reporting of non-serious incidents called neglect, and likely under-reporting of serious incidents of physical and sexual abuse.
Today, Hope585 has done our community a tremendous service by informing all of us of the cost of responding to false alarms. We can think of dozens of better ways the County could be spending $13 million misdirected each year on unsubstantiated investigations of neglect to support the underlying and unaddressed needs of the families involved, including:
- Establishing an $8 million dollar child care contingency fund for when state funding to the County runs out next year,
- Supplementing the emergency food system to help families in crisis now without their SNAP benefits,
- Supplementing our emergency shelter system and expanding vouchers to stabilize housing security for families with children.
And at the same time, we must prevent unnecessary trauma inflicted on families when a CPS report is received and investigated.
Many families live in fear of what can be a surveillance and policing system that risks taking their children away: so fearful, in fact, that they often avoid asking for the help they need to overcome emergencies and economic hardships since asking for help might trigger a CPS investigation.
As Hope585 shows in this report, out of 6,768 CPS investigations in 2024, 76% proved to be unfounded.
And we know that child poverty is often mistaken for child neglect, and nearly every CPS report in Monroe County (96.6%) in 2024 included at least one allegation of child neglect or deprivation of necessities.
The first line of defense, our default response for scarce funding and staff time has to be mandatory supporting of families, rather than mandatory reporting of families suspected of the nebulous meaning of neglect.
Monroe County must find ways to limit harmful and unnecessary Child Protective Services investigations and take the first steps for greater transparency of data, to ensure that the community is engaged in how to do the most good to meet families’ needs, rather than surveil and police families living in poverty.
Although Monroe County does not have the authority to make many substantive changes to child welfare policy – that has to happen at the state or federal levels – Monroe County can be a better partner in sharing information.
Monroe County lags behind other jurisdictions in New York State when it comes to child welfare data transparency. New York City in particular provides far more detailed and timely information to the community about how children and families interact with the child welfare system.
At present, the only source of publicly available data on Monroe County’s handling of Child Protective Services investigations is from the NYS Office of Children and Family Services. But State data takes time to be compiled and released, making it often 2 years out of date.
Monroe County does not release the child welfare data they send to the State to our community, unlike NYC which produces monthly flash reports through the Administration for Children’s Services.
Monroe County needs to create the same kinds of monthly disclosure reports of child welfare data as in New York City and other cities elsewhere around the country. With access to this detailed and timely information, the community will be able to carefully monitor progress in reducing unfounded investigations, and target limited funding and staff time to where it can do the most good.
We can’t reform what we don’t understand.
We can’t engage the community in seeking greater family justice without the necessary information.
And we can’t move to a system of mandatory supporting of families without first understanding the ongoing costs of false alarms.
The Children’s Agenda fully supports reducing the number of unsubstantiated investigations, and call on the County to help us understand the full scope of how investigations are impacting our local families.
To view press coverage of the event, please visit:
Report: Monroe Co. spent $14M in 2024 on unfounded calls to CPS – The Children’s Agenda
Larry Marx is CEO at The Children’s Agenda.
