Kids Often Overlooked in Police Raids

When Torrance police raided a house during a drug bust last summer, officers found nine children living in squalor amid suspected drug-dealing and gang activity.

But it wasn’t as if no one was keeping an eye on the kids. Most of them were foster children under the care of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, which failed to notice problems in the home even as police conducted months of surveillance.

On the morning of the raid, the lack of communication between police and the child welfare agency meant that no social workers were on hand to comfort children who had just seen some of their caretakers arrested. Police officers, who had not expected to find so many children, were left tending to them outside the house for hours.

The incident exposed other breakdowns within the foster-care system. The agency’s casework was so sloppy that, despite routine visits by two social workers, neither flagged any safety or hygiene problems in the overcrowded house, according to a confidential DCFS report obtained by The Times. One social worker said that she had not known how many children lived there and was not aware that a fellow social worker was assigned to oversee some of them.

“Clearly, we missed some things,” said David Sanders, director of the Department of Children and Family Services. “To end up with children that we’re responsible for being in that environment is horrendous.... I don’t want these things to keep happening over and over again.”

Among the reforms Sanders is trying to institute are higher standards for foster homes and more frequent visits by better-trained social workers, a long-haul effort for an agency that has resisted change for decades.

Other fixes are likely to be quicker. Now, prompted in part by the Torrance case, county leaders and several large police departments are teaming up to prevent similar lapses in protecting children from drug or gang environments. Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, Long Beach Police Chief Anthony W. Batts and Torrance Police Chief James Herren plan to announce the program this morning.

The collaboration means that eight social workers will be assigned to various police and sheriff’s stations throughout the county. Instead of hearing after the fact about drug raids and search warrants, they will be involved in planning for operations that involve children and will be on hand to quickly retrieve them from police.

“The ideal thing would be to remove the children ahead of time,” said Supervisor Don Knabe, who represents Torrance and helped start the new program. “But it can’t be something like: ‘Oh by the way, we’ve got to remove your kids today because in three days the house is going to be raided.’ There needs to be an element of surprise.”

Since 1998, the county has tried a similar approach to investigating suspected methamphetamine labs, which are often concealed in homes. That so-called “drug-endangered children” program paired social workers with federal, state and local law enforcement agents to rescue more than 600 children from 250 meth labs, said Emilio Mendoza, the social worker who oversees the effort.

In April, the county started adapting the same tactics to gang probes, referring another 144 children who were living in dangerous conditions to the children’s department.

Police officers often stumble across children in the course of investigations. But because of the need to move quickly as they execute a search warrant or raid -- and the need to guard information from outsiders -- police often do not contact DCFS until hours, sometimes days, after they arrest adult suspects and remove children, Mendoza said. Sometimes, they simply leave the kids with a neighbor.

“They will not call us, for the most part, because there is concern that we will not respond quickly,” Mendoza said. “One officer will talk to another and say: ‘Don’t call children’s services, you’ll get tied down waiting for hours, you’ll be left baby-sitting.’ ”

In the Torrance case, police alerted the Department of Children and Family Services shortly before the Aug. 27 raid, but the reaction was sluggish.

“They did not arrive until four hours after the search warrant was done,” said Officer Dave Crespin of the Torrance Police Department.

“It’s hard for young children to understand what we’re trying to do,” he added. “They see us as taking them out of their house and away from their loved ones.”

It took police, complete with a SWAT team, to expose how dangerous and dirty the home had become. Fire inspectors later found broken smoke detectors and window bars with no release latch, according to the DCFS report. Inside the house, trash and soiled diapers littered the floor. Mold darkened the walls. There were not enough beds for the children, some of whom lived in a wooden shed in the backyard.

Ten children lived in the home, including one who wasn’t there when the raid took place. Most were under the age of 12; one was an infant. Seven of them were foster children.

“I never told anyone how many people lived in the house because no one asked,” the foster mother, Estella Estrada, told investigators. “I knew that my nephew ... was a drug dealer and I guess he shouldn’t have been living in the back house.”

Estrada, along with three other adults living there, now face misdemeanor charges of willful harm or injury to a child, said David Caceres, a Torrance city prosecutor.

The social workers involved in the case, meanwhile, have not been disciplined, according to DCFS officials. “I’m really trying to be careful not to blame individual workers,” said Sanders, the director. “It’s a systemwide problem.”