County Transfers Child-Dependency Reins : Counsel Will Seek to Improve Legal Services for Abused, Neglected

The curtain was raised on a new era in the legal representation of abused children in San Diego County on Monday with the formal transfer of responsibility from the district attorney to the county counsel.

The changeover means that more lawyers will be available to handle the growing number of cases in which abused or neglected children must be removed from their homes. In addition, only lawyers with experience or a demonstrated commitment to helping children will be selected for the 20-person staff that will eventually handle the caseload. In the district attorney’s system, lawyers were often rotated among departments, regardless of their personal interests.

“Today has really been a day I’ve been waiting to see happen,” said County Counsel Lloyd Harmon Jr. “Now we can see the fruits of all this work starting to grow.”

Wary at First

Harmon said he was wary when Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller first told him more than a year ago that he intended to stop handling the county’s juvenile dependency unit because the workload was straining his office’s resources. But now, Harmon said, “I’m gladly accepting it.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a good change to the system, and the Board of Supervisors has given me adequate staffing to do it right.”

The county Board of Supervisors voted June 13 to grant $1.5 million to the county counsel’s office to pave the way for the transition. Although that was considerably less than the $3.2 million Harmon had requested, the money made it possible for a top-notch staff to be assembled, he said.

Attorneys hired for the county counsel’s child-dependency division will have starting salaries of about $50,000 a year, contrasted with an approximate starting salary of $37,000 at the district attorney’s office. Upper-level supervisors in the county counsel’s dependency office will earn about $90,000.

Some of the attorneys who had already been handling child-dependency cases for the district attorney will move to the county counsel staff, but most of the new staff was culled from private law firms or from county counsel offices in other counties.

“Most of them have some dependency or juvenile court experience,” Harmon said. “All had some commitment and interest in being in dependency law. That was real important to me.”

Three Weeks of Training

About half of the newly hired lawyers will began a three-week training period Monday and will start to work with the current district attorney’s staff in court near the end of the month. Harmon said he expects that the transition will be complete by early January.

Carlos Armour, head of the district attorney’s office in Juvenile Court, said he too is looking forward to the transition. The district attorney’s responsibility at Juvenile Court will be cut back to the handling of delinquency cases only, which should ease the workload on the existing prosecutors, he said.

“I have seven attorneys doing this work right now,” Armour said. The county counsel attorneys “are going to be much better staffed than we are and can spend more time on cases and review them more thoroughly.”

“The work we did was very, very good . . . but the caseload was so heavy and increasing at such a rate it was just impossible to handle without endangering the welfare of the very people the system is supposed to protect,” Armour said.

When the change was announced, Armour said, he sensed some resistance from the Juvenile Court judges. “Some of the judges were reluctant to have us leave. They were very comfortable with us in court, and they didn’t think the county counsel could gear up and take responsibility.

“But the Board of Supervisors recognized the importance in this area of protecting children and really came through and funded this unit very adequately. Once that happened, I think the concerns of people were laid to rest.”

Problem Has Grown

Although the county counsel’s office handles child-dependency cases in most California counties, the duty has fallen to the district attorney’s office here for the past 20 years. Before 1970, children who were removed from their homes were represented by social service workers, but the problem was not nearly as pervasive then as it is now, according to Harmon.

Last year the county removed about 3,700 children from their homes because of neglect, physical or sexual abuse or other factors that made the homes dangerous for the children. This year the county Social Services Department estimates it will remove more than 5,000 youngsters.

The county’s 9-year-old Child Abuse Hotline received 82,720 calls last year, 63,146 of which were investigated by the Social Services Department--up 16.6% from last year, when 54,154 such calls were investigated.

Children who are removed from their families are first taken to the Hillcrest Receiving Home, then transferred to a foster home, unless another relative can take the child or unless the abuser is removed from the family home. The county has 1,709 foster homes in operation, caring for more than 5,000 children.

The drastic increase in child abuse cases is attribuatable to many factors, according to Lloyd Patterson, a spokesman for the Social Services Department. Foremost, he said, laws have changed in recent years to require mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse cases from more people, including teachers and doctors, so a higher percentage of cases are being detected.

Drugs and Alcohol

Another factor is the sheer population increase in the county. But perhaps the most insidious factor is the dramatic rise in drug and alcohol abuse in an area that has been dubbed the methamphetamine capital of the world.

“There is an increase in abuse, and a lot of it is probably related to drug and alcohol abuse,” Patterson said. “Sometimes parents who could normally deal with a child lose control when they’re under the influence.”

Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Napoleon Jones said he has witnessed a similar phenomenon from the bench. “Aside from just normal growth, we’re the center of a lot of societal problems,” he said. “There is a lot of addictive behavior on the increase, which also impacts the children.”

Jones said the entire juvenile dependency system suffers from an enormous caseload, which will be remedied only when more social workers and judges are hired.

The Social Services Department has 673 social workers in the Children’s Services Division, a 19% increase from last year, but is still overburdened, according to Patterson.

“It’s the same old thing. You never have enough tools to get the job done,” he said.