My sister in law has had the unfortunate privilege of dealing with the Child Welfare System in the wake of its current probe into its own malfeasance . In this situation her 9-month old toddler was injured when she pulled herself onto a object that toppled over on her. The head injury became life-threatening and the baby was rushed from a nearby inadequately functioning emergency room at TriCity in Lakewood (where they failed to stabilize her head after a the head unjury) to the pediatric care center at Long Beach Memorial Hospital.

The baby underwent surgery and has remained in Pediatric ICU as mother and father diligently watched over her. Then came the overzealous social worker who took the remaining three children, without due process and without filing a report.  Her actions were counter intuitive since 1)they went  against the statements of the surgeon who stated that there was no evidence of abuse during the operation and 2) the kids were with family members at the time.

This social worker (when I get her name I will surely publicize it)  tried to get the children into foster care as quickly as possible although members of the family were available to care for the children. When we followed up with the social worker she lied and directed us to another social worker (here’s where the conspiracy begins) who posed as the first worker’s supervisor. She wasn’t. It was a lie.

That’s when I began to put some thing together. Having grown up in New York and seen the system be scammed and scam people I recognized these actions for what there were.  A Kickback Scam.

Corrupt social workers rely on the fears and the ignorance of vulnerable parents to slip children into the system quickly and quietly. When the children are placed with a foster parent the parent receives up to $700 per child — in this case there were three children. The foster parent then offers a kick back of $1000+ per month to the originating social worker. Remember, these are the people who are being paid by taxpayer dollars to protect our children.

Once the child is in the system the social worker receives a kick-back from the  foster care parent and never has to deal with the child’s parents again. The social worker can then stall the parents into perpetuity with misdirection and force the parents to obtain a lawyer to plead their case. As you know, it is much harder to get a child out of the system than it is to get them into the system.

We were lucky. We got the kids back after only a day and they were “assigned” to their aunt and grandmother. The social worker “apologized” to the mother and began filling out a proper report. Police officers were dispatched to investigate again a second time because the first social worker botched the paperwork. For the second time the police officers reported no evidence of abuse. The Police officers even went so far as to say that they recognize the signs of abusive parents and my sister and brother-in-law didn’t fit the bill.

However, after we retained a lawyer things changed. A detective by the name of Marlene Vega from the Special Victims Bureau of the Sheriff’s department out of Whittier, CA requested that the parents take a polygraph test. The lawyer advised us not to take it for obvious reasons, the most important being that the social workers and the detectives didn’t seem to be interested in the truth, only in doctoring evidence to prove abuse.

Vega promptly went into a tirade. As a last ditch effort to coerce the parents into taking the polygraph test — against their lawyer’s recommendation, Detective Vega took the kids away and placed them into foster care the night before their court appearance. Why not wait and let the judge decide? It was a gross misuse of power to which Detective Vega claimed, “I have the right to do it.” So instead of the three children being in the comfort of family they are spending another night in an already tainted foster care system.

The day of the court case Vega LIED to the judge several times. Not small lies, they were blatant bold-faced lies. She lied so much so that even though the judge admitted that he would be inclined to believe Vega he asked to speak with the children himself. So the kids have to spend another night away from their family

My trust in the system is tainted. This unfortunate experience is a true testament to the economic separation of justice.  The California Child Welfare system and the police department is in dire need or reform from the inside out. Switching from one extreme, negligence, to another extreme, fraud and over zealousness, is not the way to change. The truth must be sought from the beginning. However it seems that the fallibility of humans overpowers the search for justice speaking to the necessity of having a legal advocate at the beginning of any potential legal issue.