Only 67 kids have been removed on Christmas Day in Florida (since 2007)

A video of a child being forcibly removed from his mother has been in the news lately. It’s brutal to watch. A group of police officers and security guards yank at the one-year-old while another swings a taser wildly around the room at anyone who gets too close. The woman is on the floor. Her sin is apparently trespassing, i.e,. sitting on the floor instead of standing when there were no seats available in the four-hour line. The charges are later dropped because she was trespassing at a government office (to extend daycare for her child) where people are actually allowed to be, and people sit on the floor in airports all the time and nobody rips their kids from them. The harm’s already done to the child, though. Nobody in the crowd intervenes — they don’t want to get arrested, shot, or lose their place in line — but they document it for the world to see.

(For added absurdity and likely thanks to the word “baby” in the title, the video I watched was preambled with an ad for Zales’s Enchanted Disney collaboration wherein a rich-looking white lady finds a diamond ring on a table, puts it on, and imagines she’s become a Disney Princess®. She has no idea whose ring it even is, but it’s hers now (hey she deserves it). Nobody arrests her for theft and wrestles her baby out of her arms. She does not spend a few nights in jail for having the audacity of self-worth. She, in fact, lives happily ever after.)

Children are removed from their parents every day, and it frequently looks just like that video. It is traumatic for everyone (especially the child) and is supposed to be only for very exigent reasons. In Florida, we know that anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 kids enter the foster care system each month. The video got me thinking about when those removals happen.

I had a lot of assumptions. I’ve heard that removals go up around the holidays, and that they go down in the summers when kids are home. I felt sure that fewer removals would happen on the weekends, but also that there should be no reason for that because kids would be in more danger when not in school. Removals are supposed to happen when they are unavoidable, not when they are convenient to the investigator.

And I thought: how many kids are actually removed on Christmas? That would be horrible. 

As part of a project we are working on, our office came into possession of the entire Florida DCF placement database (anonymized and unforgivably massive). This database includes the removal dates and details of 280,839 kids going back to some who entered care in the 1980s. Looking only at the removals from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2017, we have data on 156,357 kids. Some of those kids came into care multiple times, so the time period covers 181,799 removals. (Caveat: as with all real-world records, the data is only as good as it is. Given the large numbers here, it is reasonable to assume that errors are evenly spread out and not biased in any given direction.)

How many of those removals were on a holiday?

Since we have the dates for all the removals, it isn’t hard to count them. On a normal, non-holiday day, the average number of removals is about 46. For Christmas, the average is six. For Thanksgiving, it’s eight. Only 67 kids were removed on Christmas Day in Florida from 2007-2017.

There are a few takeaways there. First, holidays seem to suppress removal numbers, at least on the day of the holiday itself. The only holiday that appears above average is Columbus Day; but, with year-to-year variations, it — along with President’s Day and New Year’s Eve — is not statistically different than a normal non-holiday. There is no holiday where more kids are removed than average (though there are periods of the year when removals are up, discussed below).

So what about the theory that more kids are removed around the holidays? If you thought (like I did) that there would be a giant spike in removals before or after, say, Christmas — well, there isn’t. In fact, removals bump up slightly and then start dropping off around the week before Christmas (a.k.a. now). The slight bump isn’t enough to call a correction. A glance at DCF’s dashboard on investigations shows that Decembers are usually high points for closing investigations during the year, so these numbers are even more pronounced. Removals don’t pick up again until January when school is back in session.

Here is the year-round chart. This confirms that removals go down in the Summer and rise again in the new school year. If you thought sentimentality was what kept DCF from removing kids on Christmas, think again. You see similar holiday drops on the 4th of July and Veterans Day. The dips would be more pronounced for MLK Day, Labor Day and Memorial Day, except those holidays don’t happen on the same calendar day each year. Kids don’t get removed on holidays because investigators are on vacation.

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So that’s the question: if only 15 kids had to be removed on the 4th of July, why did 48 have to be removed on the 7th of July? 

What about the weekends?

On average only 14 kids per day were removed on Saturdays and Sundays. The highest day of the week for removals was Thursday — probably because court is held one day after a removal and nobody wants to go to court on a Saturday, for sure. At 14 removals per day, the weekend was on par with the 4th of July.

And, while we’re at it, what about time of day? Kids get removed during business hours. The later in the day, the higher the number of removals.  Below you can see three distinct peaks in the following hours: 9:00am, 1:00pm, and 5:00pm. Only 416 kids in this dataset were removed in the 6:00am hour. Maybe children are safer before dawn? (Those 5,580 kids removed at midnight include entries without a valid date — i.e., “00:00:00”. Don’t read into that spike.) I’m not including a graph because it’s messy, but if you look at the whole week the highest rates of removals happened during the 5:00pm hour on Thursdays. No surprise.

So removals happen all the time, except holidays, weekends, and usually not outside of business hours. And they especially happen when investigators first get to work, after lunch, and right before they go home for the day. Something feels very wrong about that. It’s as if “risk” is also a product of convenience, which is not how child protection is supposed to work.

If the averages hold, around six (and up to twelve) kids will be removed on Christmas Day this year. Let those removals be necessary and kind.


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