We have all been following the national protests regarding systemic racism and police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd, who died while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. Last week, nine out of 12 members of the Minneapolis City Council – a veto-proof majority – announced that they support dismantling the city’s police department. Lisa Bender, the council president, said, “our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.” She added that the council members are committed “to end policing as we know it and recreate systems that actually keep us safe.”

If Minneapolis follows through with dismantling its police force, it would not be the first city to do so. Camden, New Jersey did in 2013. The result was a drop in violent crime and improved relations between police and the communities they serve.

This got me thinking. Should the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch? It can certainly be argued that efforts at incremental reform have failed and that we need to recreate systems that keep children safe.

DCFS has been operating under the decades old B.H. federal consent decree. Under that decree, signed in 1991, DCFS promised top-to-bottom systemic reform of all of its operations. This is one of many consent decrees, court orders, legislative proposals, and bureaucratic efforts over the years to try to make DCFS work for children.

Notwithstanding decades of reform efforts and promises, consider the following persistent failures to protect children, many of which have been exposed by the excellent reporting by The Daily Line’s Hannah Meisel.

Children continue to die because DCFS missed red flag after red flag, warning sign after warning sign, that they were being abused. Some of the children are well known due to press coverage such as AJ Freund, Ja’hir Gibbons, and Semaj Crosby. Many other such deaths are not covered by the news media. DCFS’s Inspector General reported that 123 children died in 2019 despite involvement by DCFS.

Last year it came to light that DCFS was shackling children by their hands and feet, with no possible safety or clinical justification, to transport them to new placements.

Last year, dozens of children in DCFS’s care slept on the hard, cold floors of DCFS’s offices instead of in a warm, comfortable bed in an appropriate placement due to DCFS’s abysmal lack of placements. DCFS’s longstanding placement shortage continues to get worse, with DCFS having lost 500 residential beds in recent years.

On any given day, dozens of children in DCFS’s care are languishing in locked psychiatric hospitals for weeks and months after they are ready to be discharged because DCFS has nowhere to place them. Not only is this clinically devastating for the children, it is a curse for the taxpayers because psychiatric hospitalization is far more expensive than foster or residential care.

Every year DCFS sends dozens of children to faraway out-of-state residential facilities due to the dearth of placements here in Illinois. It is difficult to monitor these children’s safety and to maintain the children’s relationships with their families. It is also far more expensive than keeping the children in our state.

Two reports were released last year about the failures of DCFS’s child abuse hotline, including callers having to leave messages and then waiting days for a callback. The hotline is supposed to be the first line of defense to protect children.

With DCFS doing such a poor job protecting children, despite years of reform efforts, perhaps it is time to give thought to dismantling the agency and starting over like Minneapolis is considering for its police force.

To be sure, once the COVID-19 crisis is behind us there will be lots of work to do for our children. DCFS’s problems have not gone into abeyance because of the crisis. To the contrary, they have been festering and are getting worse.

As we start to reopen and move toward a sense of normalcy, we must redouble our efforts to protect our children. Whether we do so through dismantling DCFS and building a new agency, or through continued reform efforts, we can and must do better for our children, who are our most valuable resource and our future.

Charles Golbert is the Cook County Public Guardian.  His office represents some 6,000 children in abuse and neglect cases in the Cook County Juvenile Court.