The May numbers are out and they begin to show how the pandemic is affecting things later in the pipeline from investigation to removal. Remember that investigations take about 60 days from intake. Intakes were down 6% in March and 16% in April from their expected numbers based on historical trends. Closures on investigations in May, however, dropped nearly 34% from the expected trend. That suggests investigations may be taking longer to close. Meanwhile, verifications were down 22% from trend, and removals were only 7% below trend.
Having removals come in 7% under the trendline is very normal. It happened in November 2019 and didn’t make headlines. This suggests that the reduction in intakes was more heavily weighted toward low-risk cases that would not have resulted in a removal anyway. DCF only verifies about 15% of calls and only removes about 4-6% children under investigation, so a reduction in frivolous cases is a win for everyone. We need to wait another month to see how the remaining March-April intakes come out.
On the back-end, exits from care are still very low. They were 40% lower than last year and 20% below the trend line. Reunifications and adoptions were both down. Courts should probably set a few rocket docket days to hear the cases that are pending an uncontested reunification, adoption, and guardianship.
Looking ahead, intakes in May dropped about 33% from 2019 levels, or 9.9% below trend. That puts us back to 2010-level numbers, and it’s still too early to say whether that is an anomaly or a new normal.
You can explore the numbers all the way down to the county level using the dashboard.
Here are the statewide details for this month.
Intakes were down about 9.9%. It’s very hard to put that decrease in context because the intake numbers started behaving oddly in mid-2019. The “turn” may have predated the virus, but we’ll only know if this was a dip or a new normal with more time. The numbers for April have been adjusted up to -16.3% (from -26.5% last month) based on the new data. That’s still hurricane levels low.
Investigation closures were down 34%. We are starting to see the pipeline effects of the lockdown. Intakes were low in March, so closures — which take up to 60 days — are predictably low in May. Based on the numbers of intakes in April, closures should be down even more in June.
Verifications were down 22%. Verifications have been steadily decreasing for years. The fact that verifications didn’t drop as much as closures suggests (but definitely doesn’t prove) that the lockdown resulted in a larger percentage of lower risk cases from being called in. It doesn’t fully prove that because we can’t say how the pandemic affected DCF’s perception of what should be verified.
Removals were only down 7%. That’s well within normal ranges for removals. This is the strongest indication yet that the pandemic resulted in fewer low-risk cases being reported — with the same caveat that we don’t know how DCF’s risk analysis changed. Removals per 100 victims went up a little, again suggesting that more low-risk cases were removed from the investigation pool.
There’s been a lot of discussion about homebound children and sexual abuse cases, and sure enough removals were up for sexual abuse (+23%), inadequate housing (+14%), and inadequate supervision (+10%). That could mean more egregious sexual abuse cases or less risk-tolerance from DCF. Removals came in lower than expected for physical abuse (-11%), drug abuse (-7%), and domestic violence (-3%). All of these, however, were within normal ranges, meaning we saw similar ups and downs throughout the last 16 years. The removal of Black children was down 7.7% in May and 22% in April. That April number was very low.
Discharges from care were down 20%. That’s very low. Courts are starting to get back up and running, so this number should go back up over time as cases that were ready to close get put on the docket. Here are the numbers by permanency type: reunifications were down 13%, adoptions were down 13%, and guardianships were flat.
That’s it for now. The full dashboard lets you see the numbers all the way down to the county level.
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