It appears there’s a significant effort to protect reputations at the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) according to a recent investigation.
The Department of Investigation’s new report highlights how ACS has consistently withheld crucial documents from New York’s oversight agency. The document, titled “Access Denied: Challenges to DOI’s Oversight of the Child Welfare System,” reveals that the department has faced repeated barriers in probing allegations of misconduct and sexual abuse by caseworkers. Moreover, they have been denied access to records concerning ACS’s interactions with families of children who later died.
One illustrative case is that of Brian Santiago and his mother, who were discovered deceased in their apartment in August 2024.
According to The Post, Brian’s mother had been under investigation by ACS and at one point had her son temporarily removed from her care. Tragically, before she died, her special-needs son, who relied on a feeding tube, was likely left to starve to death.
Per The Post, Brian’s mother was “investigated by the ACS and even had her son temporarily removed from her care at some point before she died, leaving her special-needs boy, who used a feeding tube, to likely starve to death.”
This seems like a case that would have been important for DOI to investigate, but the agency says it “has been unable to assess whether those earlier interactions could have led to interventions that may have saved Brian’s life.”
It also can’t review the case of 5-year-old De’Neil Timberlake, who died the month before Brian, after ingesting his father’s methadone.
The NYPD told news outlets that the family had a long history of child neglect cases. What was done in those investigations? We may never know.
In 2023, there were 45 fatalities with prior ACS involvement, but DOI could only see the records in 25 of the cases.
Why can’t the Department of Investigations, um, investigate?
State law prohibits DOI from accessing two categories of records. The first are those where reports of child abuse were investigated and determined to be unfounded.
To understand the insanity of this policy, let’s compare it to law enforcement.
Let’s say police were searching for a murderer and they questioned the perpetrator, but he lied and they never checked his alibi.
Later, when he was apprehended committing other crimes, the public wanted to know why the police hadn’t nabbed him earlier.
But since the police didn’t conclude anything from the initial interview, no one could access any information about the failed initial investigation.
Similarly, if ACS fails to notice clear signs of abuse and neglect and determines that an accusation is unfounded and then that child winds up dead, wouldn’t we want to know where ACS went wrong and whether there were red flags they missed?
This policy actually rewards incompetence or willful blindness.
The second category of fatality records DOI can’t access involve those where ACS determines a case to be “low risk” and diverts it from an official investigation and into a non-investigatory process, called Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement & Support, merely to assess the family’s “concerns and needs.”
Since CARES was launched city-wide in 2020, it has continually expanded to the point where it now accounts for 25% of cases.
Are all these families really at low risk?
Parents engaged in illegal drug use and/or criminal activity can be diverted into CARES.
And many families who seem to be merely impoverished or in need city services in fact might be suffering from addiction or severe mental illness.
It would be good to find out whether we are underestimating the risk in these families, but thanks to this ridiculous policy, we will never know.
Even in cases where DOI is notified, the agency is not getting complete information because of these loopholes.
In 2025, DOI was notified of 18 child fatalities where ACS had prior involvement with the family, but DOI couldn’t get the complete history in 17 of those cases.
In 2024, it was 13 out of 16, and in 2023, 19 out of 25.
DOI is also charged with investigating cases where ACS workers have actually been accused of criminal wrongdoing.
Between 2023 and 2026, for instance, DOI received complaints regarding sexual misconduct of ACS workers toward minors on their caseload.
When DOI requested access to the records of those workers to find out whether they had victimized other children, the state Office of Children and Family Services refused.
OCFS cited the victims’ privacy. But OCFS never even asked the victims. It simply determined that “privacy interests should outweigh an investigation into the crimes allegedly committed against them.”
Because OCFS and ACS frequently work together, there is a clear conflict of interest when OCFS is the gatekeeper of ACS records.
The public should be outraged about the lack of transparency.
Fixing these problems can only be accomplished through state legislation.
Unfortunately, the see-no-evil approach to child welfare is pervasive across the state and city’s leadership class.
The same attitude has produced a ban on the anonymous reporting of abuse, discourages teachers from telling ACS about maltreatment, pretends parental drug addiction and criminal activity are harmless and even insists that investigating abuse is just structural racism.
It’s time to out the abusers and the bureaucrats who cover for them.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
