Arizona lawmaker says child safety agencies aren’t communicating properly
PHOENIX (AZFamily) — A state lawmaker who is looking into why children are falling through the cracks and into the hands of predators said state agencies that are supposed to be protecting at-risk children are not communicating with each other.
Next month, there will be a stakeholder meeting at the state Capitol, in an effort to identify problems and come up with solutions.
They want to improve communication, make the reporting systems better, and update some of the regulations that group homes have to abide by.
In the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing between agencies. Empower College Prep, the school that murdered 10-year-old Rebekah Baptiste went to in Phoenix, said it called the Department of Child Safety about a dozen times to report abuse. DCS claims the school called five times and that only one was investigated because the rest didn’t meet all the requirements.
Arizona’s Family asked state Sen. Carine Werner, a Republican from Scottsdale, about accountability and the role the state has.
“Well, regarding the 12 calls to DCS by the school, apparently only one of them made the threshold for them to do something, and that has to change,” she said.
There was no straight answer when Werner was asked about lawmakers taking some accountability for kids falling through the cracks in the system.
In the most recent cases, those cracks led to the murder of 3 girls: 14-year-old Emily Pike, 16-year-old Zariah Dodd and Rebekah.
“There’s currently not a sharing of information between the tribes, CPS and DCS, which is one of the goals we hope to attain,” Werner said ahead of the stakeholder meeting.
Werner says there’s a laundry list of flaws in the system she wants to address when she convenes the joint legislative oversight committee on DCS next month.
When asked about the lack of communication between agencies, Werner mentioned Emily, who ran away from a Mesa group home and was later found dismembered in trash bags in the woods north of Globe.
“When the Pike case came up, we saw that there was a huge gap in communication between the tribes and DCS so Emily Pike was horrifically victimized prior to her 911 call which led to her going into DCS care in the group home and DCS at that time did not have any awareness of what her history was so there’s currently not a sharing of information between tribe CPS and DCS.”
Among the problems is how suspected cases of abuse get reported to DCS and which reports warrant investigations.
“Whatever that threshold or protocol was, clearly there’s problems here and whoever is receiving calls and seeing if they were going to investigate missed something big here,” Werner added.
When it comes to group homes, Werner is looking to get more education for workers on sex trafficking and what to look for.
“The other thing is looking at safety. Do they have cameras? Are there alarms on the windows?” Werner said.
Last year, the Legislature passed House Bill 2479 and it was signed into law. It was supposed to tighten child protection policies and improve safety and recovery efforts for missing Arizona children.
The law says DCS is required to submit reports to state lawmakers. Werner says her office has not yet received a report.