Illinois's Office of the Inspector General: A real CPS investigative body, or more whitewash?

In Illinois, the "child protective" "services" (CPS) acronym for their CPS racket is "DCFS" for "Department of Child and Protective Services," and the agency charged with overseeing them is called the "Office of the Inspector General" (OIG). They produce an "annual report" which purportedly summarizes all the deaths of children that occurred during the previous year. Of course, these would not include the deaths of missing children about which the report is mostly silent.

But even the admitted numbers are pretty astounding as you can see from this link:

https://www2.illinois.gov/dcfs/aboutus/OIG/Documents/OIG_Annual_Report_2019.pdf

This 300-page report is a treasure trove of information, even if it is incomplete. The meat of it is a series of vignettes covering the deaths of almost hundred children who died this past year and the current disposition of the cases. If you really want to ruin your day, or have a morbid streak, you may want to read some of these sad tales. But the interesting thing to me is that even among those categorized as "homicide" there seems to be very little about what actually was done to case workers who were assigned to these cases.

Here is what, from the OIG's own words, the report is supposed to do/be:

"The Department and its employees, as well as its private agency partners, are responsible for serving some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens: families and children in crisis. Department employees, and its agency partners, are accountable to those families and all citizens of the State. Illinois relies on this office to critically examine and respond to the legitimate concerns of the people of Illinois regarding the treatment of children and families.

We have been tasked with examining child deaths, serious injuries, misconduct, poor performance and violations of policy and laws. We take this obligation, along with our other mandates to make recommendations to advance the Illinois child welfare system very seriously. The report notes areas where more must be done to ensure that children are safe and well, and the system serving them is performing efficiently and effectively, including ongoing issues with youth that are beyond medical necessity in hospital settings, intact family services, and building a system of care that meets the needs of our youth."

On page 8 we get a list of codes for what is supposed to be done to DCFS employees found to have been negligent. The options include everything up to criminal charges, with 27 such cases having been involved. Only 9 of those were actually involving cases where DCFS personnel were actually charged. Three of those charges involved loss of license, but there does not appear that any of the charges resulted in any jail time.

Beneath that, we get a listing of 13 "actions" involving licensure for cases that are still under investigation. Of those, just five licenses were actually revoked, and the rest are/were under some type of review or rejection of that recommendation.

On page 126 we get a chart which summarizes the nearly 2000 deaths of Illinois children that had some connection to Illinois-DCFS so far this century. Of those, only 18 of the 98 deaths this past year were ruled as homicide, while 27 were ruled as "accidental," and the rest a variety of other categories, including "natural death."

(Image courtesy of aclu.il.org.)

On page 129 we get into a section of "general investigations" in which we get into a discussion of a DCFS program that provided bonuses to caseworkers who closed cases "early,"...i.e. before the state-mandated deadline for reviewing and handling cases. This obviously, when connected to cases where those children that had their cases closed early later died from some form of neglect or abuse, was rightfully condemned:

"In December 2016, the Area Administrator of the Field Office offered a one-time award of a $100 gift card to whichever investigator could close the most cases in January 2017. There were, in fact, various types of incentive programs for early closure of cases throughout the State at that time.

One county had instituted the Blue Star Program, which tracked and congratulated investigators for closures. In 2016, the Central Region challenged investigators to close 12 investigations per month. Those investigators who completed 12 investigations were incentivized with food parties or public acknowledgment. One team supervisor rewarded investigators for closing cases by temporarily removing them from assignment rotation (penalizing those who did not close enough cases with even higher caseloads). In the Southern Region, three different supervisors provided gift cards for closure."

(Courtesy of amiablyme.wordpress.com.)

Yea...not a good look for the agency at all, when those kids subsequently suffered injuries or death. These programs are being eliminated, obviously, but it's pretty astounding that it took until 2018 for somebody to figure out such "incentives" were not exactly a public relations coup.

We may revisit this report in future articles, because there truly is a lot of interesting (and somewhat embarrassing) information in here about DCFS-Illinois's operations and results. But again, there is nothing much about all the kids that went missing while in custody, and we do have a government entity here "overseeing" another, and that is always a questionable method for getting at the truth of any situation related to the mega-bureaucracies that run our states these days.

While I'm glad there is an audit, of sorts, being done here, I would be interested in knowing how much taxpayer money was spent on this, why there are so few charges being preferred in cases of obvious criminality on the part of DCFS employees, and how many children are NOT included in this report (or potentially included) simply because DCFS-Illinois can no longer find them.

A REAL AUDIT would answer those questions and would realize, a priori, that those are the types of things that really would and should interest Illinois taxpayers.