risk assessment

The last calendar year of the ‘10s has come and gone, and the fields of child welfare and juvenile justice move on to a new decade. For the past two weeks, The Imprint has counted down some of our top storylines from 2019.

A new bill introduced by Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) last month would establish a pilot program to test the use of predictive analytics in identifying and protecting children who are at risk of maltreatment.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) is pushing legislation that would make several changes to the state’s juvenile justice policies and spending plans, including limitations on the use of detention and increased resources for rural parts of the state.

For New York’s Administration of Children Services (ACS), retired law enforcement officers have been working in-house since 2007 to advise their roughly 1,700 caseworkers. Today, the ACS will announce that these former cops are getting a broader child welfare beat that includes assessing the risk brought on by new adults moving into households served by the agency.

“Our responsibility is to create foresight about the changing nature of risk before anything goes wrong.”  – David Woods David Woods, one of the pioneers of safety science as applied today in industries such as nuclear power, airlines and health care, offers a critical insight into what continues to be missing from risk and safety analyses in child protective services (CPS).

Today, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors will vote on a motion that would bring a rarely heard from, but critically important, group of investigative attorneys under the Office of Child Protection’s control.

I read with great interest Daniel Heimpel’s column, Yonatan’s Death Spurs Deep Look at How L.A. Gauges Child Abuse Risk. Yonatan Aguilar had been the subject of four prior reports to DCFS through 2012.

Three years after a group of researchers sought to evaluate the research base of differential response programs, the effectiveness of the much-debated program has been revisited in a special edition of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) Advisor.

The ZipRisk Project, spearheaded by the Texas Association for the Protection of Children (TexProtects), is an interactive online map that sorts the state’s zip codes by levels of risk for child maltreatment and neglect.