There are “systemic problems” with the emergency unit of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, a Department of Investigation report, released Thursday, found.
The DOI investigated the ACS’s handling of allegations of abuse of 3-year-old Jaden Jordan, of Gravesend, Brooklyn, who was allegedly beaten into a coma by his mom’s boyfriend in November.
The ACS had received a tip about the alleged abuse of Jaden on Saturday, Nov. 26, but he wasn’t found until Monday, Nov. 28, when it was too late to save him. He died days later at the hospital.
The ACS’s Emergency Children’s Services, or the unit that handles cases on weekends, overnight and on holidays, said it was given the wrong address in the tip, and the correct address was not found until Monday.
The DOI found that the unit “had access to databases that would have provided the correct address for Jaden as early as Saturday, November 26th,” but the ECS workers “are not adequately trained in how to perform those database checks.”
“DOI found there was inadequate staffing, case practice, supervision, and training within the unit,” the report said. The department concluded that if the tip had been given during normal business hours, staff of the ACS’s Applications Unit would have used multiple databases and found the correct address.
According to the report, the ACS admitted that while the “ECS is understaffed during nights, weekends and holidays, those hours receive an extremely high volume of investigations, 70% of which are high priority.”
The agency has agreed to conduct training on database searches, the DOI said.
“As a result of this investigation, DOI has issued a series of recommendations to ACS, including that ACS should report all allegations of ongoing criminal conduct to the NYPD immediately upon receiving them,” the report says.
