ACS NEEDS NYPD ATTITUDE

Razzle Dazzle

ACS Needs NYPD Attitude 

By RICHARD STEIER

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes cut to the heart of what went wrong with an Administration for Children's Services Caseworker's handling of the Nixzmary Brown case when he cited Joycelin St. Hill's Dec. 8 encounter with the girl's stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez.

Ms. St. Hill, who was at somewhat of a disadvantage because the supervisor who gave her the case, Orlene Cummings, had not told her of the allegation that Mr. Rodriguez had assaulted his daughter a week earlier, encountered him as he was exiting the family's Brooklyn apartment. He told her that he was leaving and no one else was present and so she should come back the next day.

"Can you imagine how cops would have reacted to that?" Mr. Hynes said Jan. 17, a day before 7-year-old Nixzmary was laid to rest.

Played Her for a Fool

Admittedly, Ms. St. Hill did not carry a badge and gun, the tools that give weight to a police officer's assertion of authority that tends to take precedence over an individual's claim that he has to be somewhere and cannot pause to be interviewed.

But if that difference in the balance of power was enough to explain her letting Mr. Rodriguez go on his way, how could you justify her failure, upon calling the apartment the next day and finding no one home, to muster the full force of the law to gain entry to the apartment and examine the situation?

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow PERPLEXING OMISSIONS: Administration for Children's Services Commissioner John Mattingly lamented that field staff 'gave inadequate attention to clear warning signs of the danger Nixzmary Brown was facing' and failed to gain access to her apartment to better determine whether the 7-year-old was the victim of child abuse. In essence, Mr. Rodriguez had played Ms. Hill for a fool. It's unfathomable that any NYPD officer would allow such disrespect for his or her professionalism as to duck an inquiry once, let alone two days in a row. To some extent, it is a matter of attitude, something that any officer lacking it upon entering the Police Academy would have drilled into them during their training. Police work may be a helping profession, but its practitioners are not intent on showing sympathy or understanding to those whose conduct has attracted their suspicions.

That knowledge was implicit in DA Hynes's call to have the NYPD notified in all future child-abuse cases rather than trusting to the judgment of the staff at ACS.

A day later, ACS Commissioner John Mattingly was asked whether the Caseworker's inability to hold Mr. Rodriguez to account was traceable to a flaw in the agency's guidelines or the Caseworker's own failure to be sufficiently aggressive in performing her duties.

"It's a bit of both, actually," he responded.

He had just announced that disciplinary action would be taken against six employees - three of them supervisors - and that two higher-ranking executives were being demoted as a result of the missteps that left Nixzmary at the mercy of her stepfather, who was indicted on second-degree murder charges by Mr. Hynes's office.

'Poor Investigative Decisions'

"The staff made poor investigative decisions and gave inadequate attention to what were clear warning signs," Mr. Mattingly told reporters crowded into an ACS conference room. "There are standards of practice that need to be met in protective investigations. These standards were not met in this case."

Charles Ensley, the president of Social Service Employees' Union Local 371 of District Council 37, protested the disciplinary actions, ranging from suspensions to potential reprimands, against Ms. St. Hill, Ms. Cummings, supervisor Andrew Bartley, Caseworker Vanessa Rhoden and two employees whose identities have not been reported.

Mr. Ensley, who did not return calls to this newspaper, told other media outlets that the employees were being "scapegoated," adding that "workers will start removing children at the least sign of abuse, and that is not good practice."

It is better, however, to err on the side of caution than to display the indecisiveness and negligence that characterized ACS's handling of Nixzmary's case.

Last May, school employees informed ACS that Nixzmary had missed 47 days of school, prompting a probe into whether her parents were guilty of educational neglect. An unidentified Caseworker, who is among those facing disciplinary action, declared the report to be unfounded even though Nixzmary's mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, admitted the girl had been absent that often. A supervisor, who was suspended along with Ms. St. Hill and Mr. Bartley, agreed to close the case.

On Dec. 1, after school officials called ACS again because of a two-inch gash on Nixzmary's forehead just above a black eye, Ms. Rhoden and her supervisor, Ms. Cummings, went to P.S. 256 accompanied by two Detectives from the NYPD's child protection bureau. On this occasion, Mr. Rodriguez behaved himself, and he, his wife, Nixzmary and several of her siblings said she sustained her injuries when she fell against a piece of wood while playing. One of the children, however, told Ms. Rhoden that her stepfather "did it."

Fell Through Cracks

Ms. Cummings did not communicate that allegation when the case was turned over to Ms. St. Hill four days later. Ms. St. Hill spent two days trying to arrange interviews with family members while being jerked around by Mr. Rodriguez. Rather than follow up further, she then let the case slide.

On Dec. 21, a School Social Worker at P.S. 256, Margarita Cotto, who had taken a particular interest in Nixzary because of her conviction that she was being abused, called ACS and told Mr. Bartley that neither the girl nor her siblings had been in school for the past two weeks. This prompted a call by Ms. St. Hill, but when she discovered the family's phone was disconnected, she did not go to its Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment. A day later, Mr. Bartley discussed obtaining a warrant and getting the police involved, but he didn't follow through, and the following day, Ms. St. Hill went to the apartment and, getting no answer, merely left a note under the family's door.

On Jan. 11, six weeks after the call to ACS from her school that had triggered the renewed investigation, Nixzmary died in her apartment, allegedly the victim of repeated sexual abuse, physical torture, and starvation before her stepfather delivered the fatal blow to her head.

It was a shocking, sickening death, and one of those that could have been prevented if the ACS officials involved had performed their jobs properly.

Although it drew comparisons to the murder of 6-year-old Lisa Steinberg at the hands of her adoptive father two decades ago, Mayor Bloomberg resisted the urge to reprise Ed Koch's line at the time that the accused "should be boiled in oil," and Mr. Mattingly measured his words and actions carefully in discussing his agency's failures.

ACS will be guided by two basic principles, he said, in dealing with cases where the agency knows of potential child abuse: "Are the children safe now? Are we sure we have been able to get into every home we needed to get into?"

'Incredibly Tough Job'

He reminded reporters of the difficulty of the jobs performed by Caseworkers and their supervisors in dealing with hostile and sometimes violent parents, often in neighborhoods that are among the city's most crime-riddled. Their jobs, he said, require them to go into "buildings that many of us would not be comfortable going into. They will be threatened, they will be physically assaulted. This work is incredibly difficult and hard to accomplish all of the time."

He called the training that Caseworkers receive "some of the best I've ever seen in the country," but said ACS was conducting a refresher course on "safety and risk issues" to be considered in deciding whether a child or children should be removed from a home based on evidence of abuse.

In the cases of the workers facing discipline, he indicated, all of them had committed actions that fell outside the category of a reasonable decision that simply didn't turn out well.

"There is a line that is being crossed between when people make honest mistakes and when people do not perform basic practice that's required," Mr. Mattingly said. Later he would add pointedly, "We did not see to it that we got into that home."

Higher-Ups Demoted

Rather than confine punishment to those in the field and their immediate supervisors, he stripped Sharon McDougall of her role as Acting Deputy Commissioner of Child Protection and Assistant Commissioner Olivia Brown of her responsibility for overseeing ACS field offices in three boroughs, instead confining her to administrative duties.

"It is not enough to simply look toward the front line and say the front line is at fault," Mr. Mattingly said. Executive Deputy Commissioner Zeinab Chahine will resume her old duties as the head of the Division of Child Protection while Mr. Mattingly absorbs some of her administrative chores. Gilbert Taylor was promoted from Assistant Commissioner to Associate Commissioner in that division, and Associate Commissioner Jennifer Marino Rojas will oversee the ACS Child Safety Task Force.

Even with those changes at the top, Mr. Mattingly said the ideal situation would be to have greater coordination with the NYPD in responding to allegations of possible child abuse. Part of the agency's "basic working protocols," he said, is to call the local police precinct any time Caseworkers are barred from entering a home where abuse has been reported to be occurring.

Assault Law Inadequate

The morning after the ACS press conference, Mr. Hynes joined with his Staten Island counterpart, Danny Donovan, and two Queens legislators, Serphin Maltese and Nettie Mayersohn, in proposing a bill that would increase the maximum charge for killing a child to first-degree murder, which carries a top penalty of life imprisonment without parole.

Cesar Rodriguez's previous brush with the law suggested that maybe it would be more effective to revisit how the penal law defines assault.

As Daily News columnist Michael Daly reported last week, in March 2003 Mr. Rodriguez, after bumping into an employee who worked in the same building in Manhattan, got into an argument with him that escalated when he shoved the man into a phone kiosk, struck him with the phone's receiver, punched him repeatedly, and then menaced him with a box-cutter.

Despite the viciousness of the assault, it did not rise to a felony level, and because it was his first known criminal offense, Mr. Rodriguez was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of harassment. The penalty was two days of community service and a $50 fine, and he ducked both sanctions.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, Barbara Thompson, cited the state Penal Code's definition of assault that rises to the felony level in explaining why Mr. Rodriguez's case was not handled more severely. The statute defines felony assault as "physical injury which creates a substantial risk of death, or which causes death or serious and protracted disfigurement, protracted impairment of health or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily organ."

As Ms. Thompson put it, "You need real injury, which thank God [the victim] didn't suffer; he suffered cuts and bruises."

Free Ride for a Bully

The net result, however, was what amounted to a freebie for a man whose reaction to a minor incident foreshadowed his later willingness to turn the brutal bullying up several notches against a little girl.

Mr. Mattingly emphasized that other city agencies, from the Police and Fire Departments to the schools and the Health and Hospitals Corporation, share some responsibility for detecting signs of child abuse and dealing with them.

But as surely as there will be depraved monsters like Mr. Rodriguez to defy all notions of humanity, and enablers like Ms. Santiago who are so weak that they will allow their children to be victimized, ACS must be ready as the first line of defense. Its staffers cannot afford to be passive in the name of avoiding confrontations.

Mr. Ensley expressed concern that the suspensions would "cause a ripple throughout this agency."

If it took the disciplinary actions rather than Nixzmary's death itself to produce that effect, then maybe child protective staff at ACS should re-evaluate whether they are prepared to do what's necessary to safeguard their clients.

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