Working a Late Shift in the Urban Jungle : Dedicated Social Workers Are Helping Children in Safety-Threatening Situations From Emergency Response Command Post

It was close to midnight on Saturday when children’s services worker Litsa Dupont arrived at MacLaren Children’s Center. The blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms, a baby boy, was severely malnourished, his belly bloated, his arms and legs pitifully underdeveloped, his skin wizened like that of an old man.

Earlier, Dupont had removed the baby and his three siblings from an abandoned house that had neither heat nor lights, where the plumbing was clogged and the shattered windows did little to keep out the cold.

All-Night Operation

The tip-off had come in an anonymous call to the Emergency Response Command Post, an all-night operation of the county’s Department of Children’s Services, and Dupont had been dispatched from Emergency Response’s outpost in the Wilshire Area police headquarters.

She was not a welcome visitor at the house. Her persistent knock was answered finally by a woman who claimed to be “just visiting,” and insisted this was all a mistake--that there were no children in the house. “I saw the baby in her arms,” Dupont said. “She was trying to hide him.”

Dupont had quickly sized up the situation. There was an adult male in the house (she had heard his raised voice) and the mother was uncooperative and hostile. Suggesting that she had made a mistake, she drove off--and directly to the 77th Street police station.

A short time later, police forced entry into the house where Dupont found the mother, her male companion and four shivering children hiding in the basement. The baby’s nose was badly congested, his face smeared with mucous. His toddler sister’s filthy clothes were soaked with rain.

Safety Threatened

Minor children’s safety and well-being were clearly threatened. The police, and Dupont, acted quickly. At 77th Street station, Dupont bathed the little girl in a sink in the women’s locker room and dressed her in dry clothes provided by the police.

Within a few hours the older children had been placed in temporary foster homes, the two boys together, and the baby had been examined at Daniel Freeman Hospital before being delivered to MacLaren.

A nutritious meal would be a priority for all four. One of the boys told Dupont that their daily diet consisted of “a sandwich and potato chips” in the morning. The doctor at Daniel Freeman had concluded that the baby, an 11-month-old “preemie,” had been subsisting on milk alone and was marasmic, suffering calorie-protein deficiency that would probably cause some mental retardation.

Only six days earlier, the 29-year-old mother had received her AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) check but, when quizzed about the money, had insisted to Dupont that she had spent it on motel rooms, that she had brought the children to this abandoned house only after the money ran out.

Her story was inconsistent with that of the children, who said they had lived “for a long time” in the house, that they occasionally were taken to a motel but “we always go back to the cold house.” And the woman’s driver’s license, issued in 1982, gave the address of this house.

Detention Hearing

It was Dupont’s judgment that here was a mother who’s “got to take care of her own problems before she can take care of her children’s problems.” Within 72 hours, there would be a detention hearing in Juvenile Court at which time a judge would decide whether the children were to be detained pending further investigation.

Now, Dupont sat down to write her report. It was 12:15 a.m.

The Emergency Response Command Post, a 24-hour operation out of MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, was established a year ago to provide around-the-clock response seven days a week.

There are 47 night shift children’s services workers, seven superintendents and 12 clerical support staff, working four 10-hour shifts weekly, with two of the above workers on duty between 4 p.m. and 2 a.m. at each of seven outposts in police headquarters scattered throughout the county. After 2 a.m., a crew of five plus a supervisor works out of the command post.

“They’re real cowboys,” said Carlos Sosa, director of the Bureau of Protective Services, “independent, assertive. When you work at night it’s scary. That’s when people get drunk. That’s when people get violent.”

Workers are encouraged to ask for police protection when they go out on call--especially in high-risk areas, or when a potentially volatile situation is suspected. Sometimes tact is all that is needed. Social worker William Johnson said he always reminds himself how he’d feel “if someone was knocking on my door and it was about my child.”

In a given month, the command post fields 1,163 calls alleging child abuse or neglect and responds to 687, referring to the day shift others that seem legitimate but do not require immediate intervention. (During daytime hours, the operation is spread over 15 semi-autonomous regional offices.)

About 80% of the calls prove to be legitimate. The criterion, always, is whether a child is in imminent danger.

On a typical night, a children’s service worker will take two or three assignments, each lasting perhaps two or three hours. Among them, the workers speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Cambodian, Vietnamese.

In cases where children are taken into custody, 27% involve children already in foster care who are acting up or are runaways, 20% are physical abuse, 20% caretaker absence (death, abandonment or jailing of the parents), 17% sexual abuse (ranging from fondling to intercourse), 16% severe neglect. Criminal cases (usually cases in which the caretaker will be arrested) are responded to first by law enforcement officers, who then call in a children’s services worker.

A Last Resort

In criminal cases, the police turn the children over to the Emergency Respond Command Post for placement with a relative (always the first choice), in a foster home or, as a last resort, in MacLaren Hall, which at any given time has a population of about 300 children ranging from infants to age 18.

Because of the shortage of foster parents, 26% of the children removed from caretaker’s custody at night are brought to MacLaren. Some of these youngsters are behavior problems, have medical problems, need the protection of a locked-gate institution, or are runaways with a warrant out for their arrest. Foster homes are found for 46% of the others and 28% are placed with relatives.

Since the start of 24-hour services, said Eladio Sainz, who supervises the command post, the number being brought to MacLaren at night has dwindled from 226 a month to 141--”Before, the police would just pick them up and bring them in.”

“Many times,” said Sainz, a one-time priest who is now deputy regional services administrator for the county Department of Children’s Services, “I feel that we just do patch work, but the patching has to be done.”

It was 7 p.m. Friday and Children’s Services Worker William Johnson, working the 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift from the Wilshire station outpost, was driving his Datsun Z to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, responding to a medical social worker’s request to check out a mother whose 3-day-old infant had tested positive for cocaine, to decide whether the infant should be placed on “hospital hold.”

The computer at the Emergency Response Command Post had turned up the information that this mother was already “in the system”--her two older children had at one time been removed from her custody because of her drug abuse.

Johnson spends 90 minutes with the 25-year-old mother; for the entire time, she has the baby cradled in her arms. Confronted by the baby’s medical report, she denies that she was doing drugs, explaining that two months ago somebody at a party gave her a joint laced with cocaine but “as soon as I hit it, I put it down.” A nurse confirms that a small amount of cocaine can stay in the system for months.

The young woman says she is a “born-again” Christian, in rehab for two years and now “clean.” Johnson telephones the woman’s mother, who was caring for the other children, and the mother describes her daughter as a “good parent.” The worker assessed the situation further--the woman appeared healthy, not like a free-baser, and the child, though jittery the first day, now seems normal. He believes her story.

Habitual Runaway

She cries when he tells her he will not take the baby into protective custody. He feels good that he doesn’t have to do it.

Two hours later Johnson is on his way to the Firestone Sheriff’s Station. Sheriff’s deputies have picked up a 10-year-old girl, a habitual runaway, near the USC campus. They suspect prostitution.

The child is wearing stirrup pants in a tropical fruit pattern, new sneakers and a red sweater with black flowers. She is fretting about the red sweater--a “gangster color,” not safe on the streets--and she insists she will not return to her grandmother’s house, from which she ran away two days earlier, unless she gets new school clothes.

She is belligerent, uncommunicative. “Where’s your mama?” Johnson asks. Avoiding his eyes, she replies, “I don’t know.” He perseveres. “Where have you been?” “With a friend.” “What’s the address?” “I don’t remember.” “Where’s your Daddy?” “In jail.”

“We don’t want you running out in the streets and getting hurt,” he tells the child. “How many times have you run away before?” Maybe five or more, she tells him. “That’s too many,” he says. “On the streets somebody could take you away and we’d never see you again. You wouldn’t see your little sister again. You don’t want that, do you?”

Slowly, she opens up just a bit. She hates living at her grandmother’s because there are “too many people” living there, maybe nine, six of them children, and “I only get along with one. They hit me in my head and I forget things. My grandma just sits on the couch and closes her eyes and pretends she’s sleeping.”

Johnson telephones the grandmother, tells him the child is safe and he is coming over to talk to her. Once at the home, he quickly assesses the situation. The house is crowded, but clean. The grandmother appears to be a kind woman who is trying to do her best by the child, whose mother is a drug addict without a permanent address.

“I don’t whip her,” she says. Johnson believes her. But he wonders, is the little girl being taken advantage of on the streets, having sex for a couple of dollars? She has a little money and, asked about it, says only that it was given to her by “friends.” When Johnson wants to know what kind of friends, he is told, “people.”

Finally, he confronts the little girl: “If I leave you here, are you going to run away again?” She doesn’t hesitate: “Tomorrow, or Monday when school starts.” “Tell me the truth,” he says. “I’m making a very important decision about your life.”

No Resistance

Johnson has made up his mind. For the child’s sake, he will take her to MacLaren Hall for the weekend. On Monday, a social worker will assess her case. The grandmother offers no resistance. “I wouldn’t want no bloodstains on my hands because my little granddaughter’s out on the streets,” she says.

In the back seat of the Z, en route to El Monte, she is as chatty as a child on her way to summer camp. She has been placed at MacLaren once before and, while she found the rules a bit strict, she liked the field trips. She is talking matter-of-factly about her relatives--”The whole family’s running in and out to jail, in and out to jail . . . “

It is 2:10 a.m. At MacLaren, the little girl sits down to a snack of cake and milk. Before calling it a day, Johnson will be filing his report. He will recommend that a SCAN (Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect) hospital team examine her, to determine whether she is sexually active.

At noon, he will begin his Saturday shift.

Glued to a file cabinet at the command post is a bumper sticker, “Children Should Be Seen, Not Hurt.”

Always, said social worker Lorraine Mosby, “Our primary goal is to get the child back to the parent” once a potentially explosive situation is defused. Few of these children are ever placed for adoption.

It is a stressful job, with a new horror story each day. A worker cannot become emotionally involved with one child, Priscilla Drew was explaining, because “you know three more cases may be waiting.” Supervising social worker Idell Jamieson added, “Your judgment may get clouded for a moment. That’s why we’re there for each other.” The operative word is teamwork. When a phone rings at the command post, everyone reaches for it. A takeout meal of liver and onions may be shared at 4 in the morning. Both Jamieson and Sainz will take emergency calls at home until 3.

Sainz is proud to point out, “We haven’t lost anybody to burnout yet.” There have been two permanent departures in the year--one worker left to get a Ph.D., another to open a sandwich shop.

Outside involvements may be the key. Among the social workers, one is an amateur sculptor, one is studying drama, another races cars, another raises pigs, another is a herbologist. Jamieson is a sailor. Sainz dabbles in carpentry and runs marathons.

‘Those Crazy Hours’

When the Emergency Response Command Post was established, Jamieson said, “We thought we’d never get people to work those crazy hours.” Some say they were motivated to sign on simply because they were fed up with rush-hour traffic. Most cite the crisis-response nature of the night shift work as the lure, as well as the minimal paper work. As one said, “Each night we finish our case.”

They do not do it for the money. Salaries for the social workers range from $16,000 to $28,000 a year, with a bonus of 50 cents an hour for the night shift.

Litsa Dupont, 28, says she likes the nighttime “subculture,” the fascinating and sometimes frightening tableau of life in the urban jungle. Once, Dupont was called on to place an 18-month girl, a “Jane Doe” found on a downtown street. “We had no idea who this little baby was,” she recalls. Then, a witness reported having seen a young woman stabbed 18 times only a few blocks away. The woman, hospitalized as a “Jane Doe,” lived long enough to identify herself and her child.

Jillian Niven, clipboard in hand, Birkenstocks on her feet, strode purposefully up to the small house tucked on a back lot close by a freeway in Baldwin Park. Ignoring the barking dog, she knocked. A little blond boy, barefoot and with a smudged face, poked his head out the door and said, “Not today.”

It was Saturday evening and Niven was responding to an anonymous call alleging that the two children in the house were “dirty, hungry and barefoot,” that there were drugs and that the children were left unsupervised while the mother worked in a nearby bar.

This was not what she found. A woman, who identified herself as the temporary baby-sitter, appeared in the doorway. No, she did not know the mother’s whereabouts or where she worked. Niven proceeded to the bar, where a barmaid feigned no knowledge of the mother. Later, upon returning home and learning of Niven’s visit, the woman would call the command post and explain that, yes, it was she working in the bar but she did not wish to identify herself to a stranger.

The tipster in the case, she explained, was a man who once sexually abused her children; now just out of jail, he was seeking revenge. Her story seemed plausible; this case probably would be terminated.

Now, back at the command post, Niven is fielding a telephone call: “How old is your daughter? Did your daughter tell you who did this?” It was a distraught father, reporting that his ex-wife’s boyfriend had physically abused his 3-year-old daughter. “We see that every day,” with boyfriends, Niven observed. Why do these women stay with these men? Niven shrugged--”Sometimes it’s financial.”

Moments of Levity

There are, even in this business, moments of levity. Litsa Dupont remembers the caller who wanted to report strange goings-on in one of her apartments--why, a woman had just given birth to a baby at home, and there were visitors who wore robes, and they were vegetarians . . .

But most cases are heart-breaking. “We’ve had parents beat children to death,” said Drew, burn them by hot water immersion, break infants’ bones and skulls. Recently, she said, “When we walked in the door the mother was in the closet choking her little girl and throwing her back and forth. She was on drugs.” (Sainz says an educated guess is that 35% of all cases are drug-related.)

Single mothers will padlock their preschoolers inside the house “to keep them safe” and go off to work. When a job doesn’t pay enough to hire a baby-sitter, the choice can be “lose her job or lose her children,” said Drew. “If neighbors helped each other,” said Jamieson, “we’d have a lot less calls. We’ve developed this isolation . . . “

Lorraine Mosby, acting supervisor Saturday at the MacLaren command post, took a call, turned around and asked, “Who feels like salvaging a family tonight?”

The Monrovia police had called; they were detaining three boys who had walked into the station saying they had left home because their parents were fighting and they were frightened. It seems the mother and stepfather had lost $4,000 that afternoon at the race track. The command post would send someone out to assess the situation.

Sometimes, said Litsa Dupont, a parent accused of physical abuse “will walk right up and show you the belt and tell you, ‘Yeah, I’m potty training him. What do you expect me to do?’ ”

The social worker’s job in such cases is to determine whether the situation can be handled with follow-up counseling alone or whether, as social worker Herve Gordon put it, “Mom’s out of control.”

Only a few days ago, William Johnson had a case where a 4-year-old boy was being sexually abused by his sisters, 11 and 12, who had forced him to have oral sex and to suck their breasts. For the protection of the boy, the girls were put in probation and will undergo counseling before being placed back in the family.

In the middle of the night, with all the variables, tough decisions must be made by the workers. Said Gordon, “You’re the one who has to say, ‘I’m going to tear this family apart for its own good.’ ” That, he said, is stress.

“Our two commandments,” said Gordon, “are ‘protect the child’ and ‘reunite the family.’ ”

If the welfare check has been spent for drugs, and there is no food in the house for the kids, and the bathtub hasn’t been used in months, that is quite a different situation, workers point out, from a family sleeping in a van, or even a car, but well fed and clean.

Homelessness does not necessarily dictate that the children be removed. “And if you took every child whose parents are on drugs,” Gordon added, “you’d have to have every hotel in town tender a room.”

Dupont described the heartache of taking a child from a home: “You’ve got this traumatized little kid in the front seat of your car, and where’s mommy and does daddy have to go to jail. It’s terrifying to them. That’s the nitty-gritty of this job. You’re the one setting it up for how this child is going to react to being in a foster home. They ask, ‘Do you eat in a foster home?’ ”

Added Gordon, “At first the kid is apprehensive about you, but you win him over” in the car and “in 20 minutes, he’s bonding to you. Then you take him to the foster home. You wonder, have I done this child worse . . . “

Sometimes, said Dupont, “They see Mommy and Daddy led away in handcuffs. And they’re left with you.”

She carries a box of Crayolas in her briefcase, having found that sometimes children will draw what they cannot verbalize. She remembers asking a 4-year-old girl who had been sexually abused by her 13-year-old brother to draw a picture of what happened. The child drew her brother lying on top of her and, across her stomach, wrote S-T-O-P.

‘Too Traumatized’

Although occasionally a child being removed from the home may go berserk and become violent, for the most part, Dupont said, “The kids we take in are too traumatized to act out.”

The social workers have seen the unthinkable, cruelty and pain inflicted on innocent children, still they remain unshakeably optimistic.

Said Dupont, “You see a kid who’s really bright and sensitive and you just cross your fingers. This kid has a 50-50 chance. Maybe he’ll make it. Hopefully, the intervention will show these kids there are other ways of life.”