Q- Aren't you just a disgruntled ex employee?
A- I worked for Administration for Children's Services for more than ten years, eight of those years as a child protective investigator in their Emergency Children's Services. Because my work was thorough and I was a dedicated employee I was among the minority granted a merit pay raise. I was a worker who could be called upon to go into the field in order to correct the blunders of others, and I did that several times.
I had myself convinced that I could do some good from "inside the system" and in a sense sometimes I did help individuals in my casework, more often though, the system was going to do what it does best- mess things up - with me or without me. The system is designed to do what it does.
I was assigned as a one worker "Instant Response Team" unit and worked as such for around two years, going to the most difficult cases, working along with detectives of the Special victims and Sex Abuse squads of the NYPD. Ultimately I decided that I should be in a "regular unit" and so I went to work under Mr. Adegbola. He is not a good supervisor, though he is a nice guy. I reached a point where I simply was not going to harm other people just because Adegbola couldn't understand what was going on in some cases. Also I was at loggerheads with Mr. Vargas especially after he idiotically ordered me to transport sex abuse and domestic violence victims in one case back to the man who had them terrorized from a shelter where I had brought them. I refused an offer to be put aside once again and be given autonomy in my work. I felt that I was not the problem, and I wasn't! ultimately the management had the Department of investigations take the hard drive from my workstation and lo and behold, they say they found unauthorized emails and Internet contacts. (As virtually the entire municipal workforce that has access to computers would have.) Out of disgust after ACS Commissioner John Mattingly (not to be confused with Don Mattingly who posted from a blog of mine some very damaging information about ACS) emailed me to my home and told me that he did not want me to take advantage of his "open door" policyI resigned and took my pension, since I had signed up for an early retirement package upon my entry into ACS. I left them on my 60th birthday and presently I am happily a yellow taxicab driver on the night shift in NYC (see my blog TAXI NIGHTS).
Q- It's very extreme of you Mr. Weixel to tell people not to call reports against parents to ACS, isn't it?
A- It isn't extreme at all. After all our city and nation survived for many years without anything that looked like Administration for Children's Services. The fact is the only thing ACS ultimately does to "protect" "maltreated" children is to destroy their families, traumatize them and prepare them for a life of institutionalization.
God Is Love. We need to love each other and take care of each other, and not turn to moronic government programs that are proven to to work. (For the record- fire departments work, they put out fires and save lives, homes and workplaces from destruction, public housing works, it provides decent housing to millions of people, food stamps work, they provide food to millions of people including rookie NYPD officers by the way.) - I'm talking about idiotic interventions into the lives of free and autonomous human beings, typified by what is called Child Welfare or Child Protective Services, and includes foster care and subzidized adoption.
ACS functions on a level of incompetency, disregard for human and civil rights and impunity that are hard to match. This blog focuses on one manager in their Emergency Children's Services department, but the truth is, he might not even be the worse that they have, he's just the worse that I had occasion to work with. Did you know that after the Nixzmary fiasco (read my blog ACS MUST BE STOPPED to be filled in about Nixzmary) they fired or demoted to civil service rank ten managers? (The managers at ACS are not civil service employees and they are not unionized. They have their jobs at the pleasure of Mayor Bloomberg.)
Now if these managers were worse than Vargas that would be something! It would be quite an indictment of the system in which they had become managers and functioned as managers to begin with. I suspect however that they were not particularly worse than Vargas, but that once word came down from John Mattingly that some managers needed to be purged they got rid of ten who aren't sociable, or are the wrong ethnicity, for their particular office, or who are too serious, or who authorized "too much overtime." Whether they were worse than Vargas or not it's a sign of just how terribly run the agency is. When you make a child maltreatment report you are handing a family over to these kinds of people. Can your conscience allow that?
Q- But what about the abused children. Child Abuse is real, Weixel.
A- Yes, it is real. It is found everywhere, isn't it, including and especially in foster homes and group homes. Most ACS cases are not "abuse" cases. Most ACS cases (the majority of which have no supporting evidence according to ACS) are called "maltreatment" cases. These can be matters of "dirty homes" or old fashioned discipline, the kind that has existed for thousands of years in Judeo/Christian/Islamic cultures and that I suspect a vast majority of readers of this blog themselves know of first hand. Personally I don't agree with "physical discipline" but I do not see a legitimate government function to be destroying families and locking up parents who believe in what the majority believes in.
Q- Did you say Locking up parents?
A- Yes, good parents, you bet I did. Non white inner city parents get locked up for hitting their children with belts, for the kinds of things that do not result in incarceration in New York City's predominantly white neighboring counties.
Q- But what about abuse cases? Real abuse.
A- First of all even these cases are often blown out of proportion and the majority of them are found to have no supporting evidence. I remember vividly a case of a girl who had definitely been violated according to an emergency room doctor. Police went into action and brought all her siblings into a hospital to be examined. The child was taken out of her home. The next day the hospital's child abuse expert ruled that there had been no abuse. This sort of thing happens, and happens often. But yes, there is abuse. When someone actually abuses another person that criminal should be prosecuted, no? If the criminal is removed from the home the children involved do not have to be removed.
Communities are important. A corrupt and idiotic government agency cannot replace a community. Frankly during a time when I was coming to realize that God is real I was moved to see a church pastor, and congregants come down to a police station house to volunteer themselves and their homes to keep some children out of the horrendous foster care system. It occurred to me that most if not all of the single mothers caught up in the system and their children being violated by The State, need to be in a church, a mosque or a synagogue or community organization (formal or informal) that can function this way. - In this case a police Sergeant decided (not me or my boss) that the child in question had to go to a juvenile detention facility "pending investigation" (imagine that in a country where we claim to uphold rule of law and presumption of innocence!) This child- a boy, a black child, was a barely articulate, most likely mentally delayed and not "tough" non "streetwise" and he was going to Spofford because a police sergeant wouldn't allow his community to handle or even participate in handling a family problem, which this case really was! In this case a retarded boy might have been molesting another child in his home. Instead of bringing help, the system brought charges that their poor overwhelmed overburdened guardian was negletcful! All the children were traumatized rather than helped. Congregants offered to take each child or any child into their homes and they were refused and rebuffed by the order of a police sergeant!
Don Mattingly Is Not John Mattingly
Click here to see how New York Yankee baseball great Don Mattingly made that clear.
I'd like to spend less time driving a taxi and more time fighting the evils that CPS inflicts in the name of protecting children. Help by buying posters from this site.
