Raging Against the LA Times Book Section cuts, an upbeat story about helping Foster Car kids get to college, a seemingly unnecessary court decision, a weird move by the City Attorney….and more.

RAGING AGAINST THE CUTS: TOM LUTZ CALLS THE LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW “FREELANCER” LAYOFFS FOR WHAT THEY ARE

It literature is important to you at all. Read this, damn it! Here’s a clip:

The Los Angeles Times proudly announced last week that it was as dedicated as ever to book coverage — “we have not changed our commitment,” said Vice President of Communications Nancy Sullivan. Sullivan was speaking to Publishers Weekly’s Wendy Werris, explaining that a new round of layoffs in the section and the cutting loose of the book section’s freelancers was not to be taken as a sign of what it clearly was: a further contraction of the section’s purview.

“Freelancers” in this case means not just those of us who have written the occasional review for the Times over the years but the new class of non-employees, the many people who used to be on staff and were laid off before being rehired as freelancers, like Susan Salter Reynolds; book columnists Reynolds, Richard Rayner, and Sonja Bolle were among those let go. Reynolds is a prime example of the new class of the gradually dis-employed: she has been writing succinct, insightful reviews for the Times for the last 23 years, usually three pieces a week, although often adding a fourth or even fifth in the form of a more in-depth review or feature (she is a woman who clearly does not sleep). For the first 21 of those years she was a staff writer, but for the last two she’s been a freelancer. The difference was a deep cut in pay, the loss of health insurance and a retirement plan, and the outsourcing of her office to her own house. The workload remained the same.

BREAKING THE CURSE OF FOSTER CARE TO HELP KIDS IN THE “SYSTEM” GET TO COLLEGE

This story by Martha Groves of the LA Times will both break your heart and give you hope. Here’s how it opens:

For foster children, the prospect of ever completing college is remote: 24% of the general population will someday wear a university cap and gown, but fewer than 3% of all foster children ever earn a degree.

But a privately funded pilot program at UCLA hopes to improve the odds.

The First Star UCLA Bruin Guardian Scholars Summer Academy is a 5 1/2-week program that sponsors and fundraisers hope will one day develop into a year-round boarding school for college-bound foster children in Los Angeles County.

On Friday, 14-year-old Thalia and 23 other foster youth celebrated their “graduation” from the program’s first session.

The incoming ninth-grader brushed up on math, wrote poetry, learned to meditate and visited Disneyland, Universal Studios and a Nickelodeon TV set. In the bargain, Thalia and the other participants each got a laptop computer, a flip cam — and four University of California college credits.

“This program took me to another place,” Thalia said….

Read the rest here.

SO WHAT REALLY IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN HOT WEATHER AND VIOLENCE?

Wired Magazine takes a look at what science has to say about rising temperatures and rising crime stats and how one may or may not affect the other.

A HIGHLY POLITICAL (AND POSSIBLY ILLEGAL) MOVE BY CITY ATTORNEY CARMEN TRUTANICH?

The LA Times’ Jack Leonard reports on Carmen Trutanich’s $2 million check caper and DA Steve Cooley’s reaction.

DEAD PEOPLE CAN’T BE SUED FOR PUNITIVE DAMAGES

Okay, this probably doesn’t rise to the level of a Must Read. Rather it is an interesting oddity that the Iowa Supreme Court got dragooned into having to render a ruling on this seemingly obvious issue. The Des Moines Register has the story. Here’s how it opens:

The Iowa Supreme Court Friday affirmed a long-standing prohibition on winning punitive damages from dead people and issued a two-month suspension to a Des Moines lawyer with a track record of mishandling clients’ money.

In the case of Estate of Johnny Vajgrt vs. Bill Ernst, justices ruled 6-1 to affirm a Marshall County court ruling that blocked Ernst from obtaining more than $2,300 from the estate of Vajgrt.

The case involved a 2005 incident where Vajgrt sought and received permission from Ernst, a neighbor, to enter onto Ernst’s land and remove a fallen tree near the confluence of Burnett Creek and the Iowa River. Vajgrt removed both the tree, which he feared would serve as a dam and cause flooding on his land, and roughly 40 other live trees on Ernst’s property.

Vajgrt died in 2008, nearly five months before Ernst sued to recover damages for the diminished value of his property. A district court judge awarded $57.50 per tree but refused to grant punitive damages because Vajgrt had died….

Read the rest here.

Over the Weekend the LA Times editorial board ran a stellar essay that righteously slams the LA County Supervisors for their refusal to turn over reports to a state auditor examining the reasons behind the deaths of children in various counties who died while being overseen by the Department of Children and Family Services, their refusal couched in a preposterous claim of attorney/client privilege.

Here is a clip from the heart of the well-reasoned editorial:

The county’s in-house lawyers and outside law firm assert that child death files are protected by the attorney-client privilege. That absurd and outrageous justification for non-disclosure is laughable, or would be, were the consequences not so tragic.

First, many of the files are not privileged at all. The DCFS conducted internal reviews of child deaths, which were then forwarded for review and approval to the county counsel’s office. An after-the-fact sign-off by lawyers cannot and does not render a document privileged. Otherwise, the Board of Supervisors would be able to sit on every ostensibly public record in its possession simply by sending it to its lawyer’s office for a rubber-stamp.

Second, even files that arguably are privileged could and probably should be released. The privilege belongs not to the lawyers but to the client — Los Angeles County — which can waive its prerogative, and should do so, in the public interest. It is true that the county’s interests are articulated by the five elected supervisors, but those supervisors have increasingly focused on their own needs rather than those of the vulnerable children, grieving families, responsible taxpayers and hosts of others they are elected to represent. They too often ask their lawyers for advice on how to avoid outside critique and — surprise — are told that the matters they discuss with counsel are privileged and beyond disclosure. It’s a boot-strapping argument that locks the public and, in this case, the state out of their proper oversight role. It perpetuates the county’s continuing failure.

The actual rationale for stonewalling the state audit became apparent in a letter from the county’s outside counsel: “Further, your office’s demand that the county produce self-critical documents, and subject them to the bureau’s critique, threatens to destroy the very type of child protection — unfettered self-evaluation — that this audit seeks to promote.”

That says it all. The only evaluations of the county will be those it performs itself, and the results of those evaluations will remain known only to the county. Not since the days of Chief William H. Parker’s Los Angeles Police Department has this region seen an institution steeped in such arrogance, insularity and contempt for public accountability. None of the other counties being audited — not Fresno, not Sacramento, not Alameda — have objected to the state’s request for child death files.

Yet what was especially notable about the editorial is that it also subtly took to task its own coverage of these deaths with this surprising—and very accurate—paragraph:

Child deaths from abuse and neglect are fraught with emotion and can result in sensational headlines, in newspapers like this one, to which supervisors feel compelled to respond. One more study of fatalities, such as the state audit demanded after the killing of Seth Ireland, steeps policymakers in a swamp of exceptional failures and worst cases. It makes it easy to forget that data show overwhelmingly that outcomes are better for children who stay in their homes — even with families struggling with poverty, even in neighborhoods with inadequate schools — than for those removed by well-meaning or backside-covering county agencies. It makes it easy to forget that the county’s most effective and most economical response to children in trouble is to help their families with resources and programs to cope with their challenges….

This writing is especially appreciated by those of us who have long worried that the nature of the Times coverage of these terrible deaths of children would cause lawmakers to pressure DCFS to take more kids into foster care and to fail to help poor but essentially loving parents to strengthen themselves so that they and their children might thrive.

(It wasn’t too long ago that an LAT editor used the pages of the paper to attack me and journalist advocate Daniel Heimpel for making the very same point but in greater detail.)

In any case, this important editorial was badly needed. A large thank you to the LA Times editorial board for their forceful and intelligent writing.

NOTE TO SUPERVISORS: This just doesn’t look good:

Here’s the deal: It seems that the LA County Board of Supervisors have thumbed their collective noses at a subpoena demanding records pertaining to kids who died while under the supervision of LA’s long-troubled Department of Children and Family Services. Moreover, in doing so, they ignored a warning from the state auditor that they were committing a crime by refusing to turn over the records, which have been requested as part of a statewide investigation into whether systemic flaws are at the root of many of these deaths.

Monday’s LA Times has the story by Garrett Therolf and it’s mandatory reading for those concerned about the health and well-being of kids in the county’s care. Here’s a clip:

The inquiry was launched by the Legislature earlier this year after reports in The Times that more than 70 children had died since 2008 of abuse or neglect after coming to the attention of county social workers. Many of those deaths, county officials have confirmed, involved serious case management errors.

The audit is intended to be the most comprehensive probe in years seeking to identify whether systemic flaws contributed to fatalities in Los Angeles and other counties across the state. Lawmakers said it probably would result in legal reforms.

A lawyer at a special firm hired by the county to handle the matter said officials had provided dozens of boxes of records and allowed auditors to interview social workers but would not turn over documents that they believe are shielded by attorney-client privilege.

Just to be clear: the “clients” in the “attorney-client privilege” cited by the Supervisors are….them.

In other words, if I understand the situation correctly the Sups are not holding on to the records to protect families or minors, but to protect their own legal backsides. They’re afraid if too many people have access to the facts, the Sups are likely to be sued.

Here’s another clip:

County attorneys have privately told supervisors that a judge is not likely to agree that the documents can be withheld, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations. A majority of the board nevertheless urged lawyers to fight the disclosure because of fears that the material could be used in lawsuits accusing the county of failing to provide proper child welfare services.

Perception of the Sups choice to stonewall is not helped by the fact that the Board has recently decided to take over supervision of the agency, which has over the years seemed depressingly resistant to reform.

It’s late at night as I write this thus, admittedly, I still have a list of unanswered questions on the issue. But based on what I’ve gathered from Therolf’s story, the Supervisors do not appear to be on the righteous—or winning— side of this legal tug-of-war.

On Wednesday, LA County’s Chief Executive Office (CEO), Bill Fujioka released a report reviewing the deaths of children in LA county whose families were under the supervision of or had been investigated by the Department of Children and Family Services—DCFS. Fujioka compliled the report in response to a motion authored by Supervisors Mark Ridley Thomas and Mike Antonovich, who asked for 10 years of figures on kid deaths, so that the causes might be better assessed and future deaths might be prevented.

[The full report may be found here, helpfully posted by Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Wexler's commentary on the report is here.]

The motion was, in part, a response to some articles in the LA Times (like this one) that suggested more kids were dying while left with their families after being investigated by DCFS. The Times implied that the increase in deaths could be due to a change in foster care policy called the Title IV-E waiver, that meant an effort to keep more kids with their families and provide support for those families, rather than removing them to the foster care system.

Many foster care watchers, myself included, questioned the Times’ conclusions and worried that a bad diagnosis might have the unintended consequence of more kids being damaged by being unnecessarily yanked from their families.

The CEO’s report helps to clarify matters by teasing out more details on those awful yearly deaths.

This is from Ridley-Thomas’s office’s statement regarding the new report:

It is particularly important to resist the temptation to exploit child deaths to push ideological agendas, the Supervisor said: “The CEO’s report shows we cannot honestly link child deaths to specific policies or the performance of particular government departments or individuals.”

In 2010, the total number of child deaths for children with DCFS histories was 175, in line with the annual average since 2000 of 166. “It would be negligent to be satisfied with any total more than zero; but it is also reckless to suggest there are quick fixes,” he said.

“We must shun policy gimmicks that produce sound bites for news conferences but yield no true solutions. We must not trivialize the enormity of the challenge, and we expect that all in society understand this is a problem for all of us to solve.”

It is particularly important to resist the temptation to exploit child deaths to push ideological agendas, the Supervisor said: “The CEO’s report shows we cannot honestly link child deaths to specific policies or the performance of particular government departments or individuals.”

In 2010, the total number of child deaths for children with DCFS histories was 175, in line with the annual average since 2000 of 166. “It would be negligent to be satisfied with any total more than zero; but it is also reckless to suggest there are quick fixes,” he said.

“We must shun policy gimmicks that produce sound bites for news conferences but yield no true solutions. We must not trivialize the enormity of the challenge, and we expect that all in society understand this is a problem for all of us to solve.”

Yep.

And to demonstrate the complexity of the problem there was this saddest of facts in the report: Nearly one-in-five (17%) of the children who died in LA County in 2010 had a parent who had themselves been referred to DCFS as a child.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that basically asks whether fourth amendment requirements apply to social workers who wish to interview children about being possible victims of sexual abuse.

If the lower court ruling (made by the 9th Circuit) is upheld, the case, Greene v. Camreta, will set a significant precedent regarding the rights of children and the conditions under which they may be questioned when sexual abuse is suspected. Thus it has attracted an unusually high number of amicus briefs, supporting one side or the other—each side claiming that they are protecting the safety of children.

The majority of the amicus briefs, however, were on the side of protecting children from search and seizure.

Here are the bare bones of Greene v. Camreta as laid out by Education Week last fall when the Supremes first agreed to hear the case:

The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to take up a case involving the questioning of an elementary school student at school by a deputy sheriff and a state child-protective services caseworker about possible sexual abuse at home.

The justices accepted appeals from the two Oregon investigators of a federal appeals court ruling that they violated the student’s Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable search and seizure when they interviewed her at school without a warrant, court order, parental consent, or exigent circumstances.

The case has implications for school searches of students and cooperation between school officials and law-enforcement authorities, although claims against the school district in this case were dismissed at an early stage.

The case involves events in February 2003 when the caseworker and deputy sheriff went to an elementary school (unidentified in court papers) to interview a nine-year-old girl whom they suspected might be a victim of sexual abuse by her father, who had been arrested a week before in the alleged abuse of a seven-year-old boy.

According to court papers, the investigators arrived at the school and explained they were there to interview the student and asked for a private room. A school counselor pulled the student, identified as S.G., from class. The investigators talked to her for some two hours. Later, the caseworker pursued the investigation and the father was indicted on sexual-abuse charges involving S.G., although the charges were later dismissed. (The father did plead guilty to charges stemming from the abuse of the seven-year-old boy.)

The girl’s mother sued the caseworker and deputy sheriff over the interview that took place at school, as well as over later state actions in which her children were removed from her custody temporarily. The suit also named the Bend-La Pine school district in Oregon and the school counselor as defendants, but those claims were dismissed by a federal district court and were not challenged on appeal.

Yet, in reading the 9th Circuit’s decision, you get a much better idea of why this is an emotion-fraught and complicated case. For instance, in the two hours that the caseworker spent interviewing the girl (who is referred to as S.G., ) according to the girl’s own statements made much later, he would not accept her original answers and kept pressing her to repeatedly say something else that would implicate her father, until finally, exhausted and scared, she said whatever the interviewer wanted, according to S.G.

The interview so disturbed S.G. that she repeatedly threw up when she got home.

Also, the girl was subject to an unusually invasive and traumatic medical examination, including having her genitals photographed—without her mother or anyone else she knew present to comfort her.

Although no real evidence of the purported abuse was ever found, S.G and her sister were removed from their parent’s home and placed in foster care for three weeks.

(The girls were eventually returned to their family.)

SCOTUSBLOG has a good legal rundown of what to expect.

Richard Wexler over at the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform has the the children’s advocate’s perspective: He writes:

Had S.G. herself been suspected of committing a crime, the caseworker and the deputy sheriff could not have conducted this interrogation without a warrant,” Wexler said. “Surely it is not too much to ask that, under the Constitution of the United States an innocent child receive the same measure of protection as a suspected criminal.”

Although those opposing Fourth Amendment protection for children have concocted a variety of scare scenarios, none of them holds up to scrutiny.

The 9th Circuit decision does not ban caseworkers or sheriff’s deputies from schools. Nor does it bar them from questioning children without parental consent. It requires only that they obtain a court order before doing so, something that can be done in a matter of hours. And in cases where that really would pose a risk to the child, they don’t even have to do that.

This will be an important case to watch.

AND IN OTHER SCOTUS BIZ, THE SUPREMES RULE THAT JURY CAN HEAR DYING MAN’S WORDS

Adam Liptak explains the ruling in Tuesday’s New York Times.

The case is tricky because those who opposed the ruling said it threatens to wreak havoc with the Confrontation Clause.

Just read it.

ALSO, KEVIN RODERICK SOUNDS OFF ON MEASURE L AND LIBRARIES

Roderick comes down on the side of libraries—and explains why. Listen to his podcast and then make sure you vote for Measure L.

A hearing is scheduled Tuesday for California State Assembly Bill 73, which would change state law to allow Children’s dependency hearings to be open to the public—unless the court determines that in a specific instance, that opening the hearing would be injurious to the child.

This is a long needed and important piece of legislation. Only by letting the sunshine into children’s court will we cure some of its ills. Let us hope that the state legislature has the good sense to pass it.

The San Jose Mercury News explained the issue very well earlier this month:

Marking a dramatic shift in the scrutiny of how California protects its most vulnerable children, the courts overseeing the state’s vast foster care system would be open to the public for the first time since 1961, under legislation now working its way through the Assembly.

Proponents, including the state’s most influential juvenile court judges, say the exposure will improve performance by allowing outsiders to view and evaluate the state’s dependency courts, which last year decided the fate of more than 58,000 children in foster care who were removed from their homes following allegations of abuse and neglect. The change would bring California in line with a growing number of states nationwide that have opened those courts.

“In the 17 states that have prior experience in the open courts, there has been no determination of harm to kids,” said the bill’s author, Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-West Hollywood. “There has, however, been even closer scrutiny, more accountability and more attention paid to the system.”

The bill comes more than three years after the Mercury News coaxed Northern California judges to allow a reporter into closed dependency hearings. The result, a 2008 series of stories following a yearlong examination, revealed widespread dysfunction in the dependency courts — including overwhelmed judges, and court-appointed lawyers who failed to meet even basic standards of adequate representation. In some dependency courts,

judges rule on more than 100 children’s cases in a single day, and lawyers for parents and children are so harried they have only minutes to confer with clients in the hallway before life-altering hearings.

The stakes are high: Accused parents face a permanent loss of their children, while kids taken from their homes are often consigned to a revolving series of temporary homes and shelters.

Feuer said in light of the newspaper’s findings, his bill would improve the quality of justice for children and parents, whose cases typically involve neglect due to poverty and substance abuse. “All the participants in the system, from judges to clerks to social workers to advocates will be more accountable,” Feuer said.

Read the rest.

In 2000 and 2004 similar bills were introduced, but they never made it out of committee.

This one needs to pass. No failures permitted.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals were busy little bees on Tuesday.

THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL CROSS

Earlier in the day the 9th ruled that the much-quarreled about cross at Mt. Soledad is in violation of the US Constitution’s establishment clause. But interestingly, the 9th didn’t ask for the cross to be taken down. Clearly they are looking for a third legal path to walk between constitutional concerns and the very real significance that the cross has to a great many people as a veterans’ memorial.

The LA Times has some of the details:

The 43-foot cross atop public land on Mt. Soledad in San Diego is an unconstitutional “government endorsement of religion,” a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, the latest twist in a two-decade legal struggle.

But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did not order the cross removed, as the Jewish War Veterans and other litigants, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, had hoped.

Instead, a three-judge panel sent the case back to a federal trial judge for “further proceedings” on the issue of whether the cross can be modified to “pass constitutional muster” as a war memorial, wrote Judge M. Margaret McKeown……

THE PROP 8 “STANDING QUESTION GOES TO SCOTUS

Later in the day, they made their most significant move, which had to do with the Prop 8 case. Specifically, the 9th’s three judge panel that heard arguments on the matter early December, has asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether those bringing the appeal of the lower court hearing have legal standing to actually file said appeal, since the state of California (Brown and Schwarzenegger) declined to do so.

The judges’ decision to lob this hot potato to the Supremes is an interesting development.

There was much talk after the three judge panel heard the case last month that the 9th circuit might end up not ruling on the substance of the challenge to Prop 8, as it must first deal with the “standing” issue. And if it ruled that those filing the appeal indeed had no standing, while that would be a victory for marriage rights in California, but there would be no potentially precedent-setting trip to SCOTUS for the case, which is what David Bois and Ted Olson were aiming for when they launched the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8 to begin with.

Thus, recognizing the far reaching consequence of the standing issue, the three judges from the 9th wanted to have that ruling come from the nation’s highest court. Thus is the Supremes say there is no standing, then that is that. Prop 8 is null and void. The lawyers pack up and head home. And the wedding planning may commence.

However, if SCOTUS opines that the appeal has standing, then the 9th can freely rule on the substance of the challenge, without having to worry about any pesky technicalities, thus paving the way for the next step along a potentially historic pathway.

The Atlantic and KQED have more.

INDIANA 12-YEAR-OLD GETS 25 YEAR SENTENCE IN ADULT COURT FOR MURDER

An awful and tragic crime, but please read the details. Sentencing this 12-year old kid as an adult simply shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the the US sentencing and prison system.

The Fort Wayne, Indiana paper has the story.

Max this kid out in a juvenile facility. Fine. But not this.

AFTER DCFS HALF MILLION $$ IN CELL PHONE WASTE, COUNTY SUPS WANT TO LOOK INTO ALL COUNTY CELL PHONE USE

Good idea. Here’s the original story about the wasted $512 thousand. And the new story about the County Sups….concern (and subsequently ordered countywide audit—both from the LA Times

The Pasadena Weekly has been reporting on a rather unnerving foster care story involving a troubled former prostitute named Mary O’Connor and her young son and daughter, 17-month old, Eamon, and 3-month-old, Maureen.

In Part One of this story, O’Connor had just gone into hiding in a safe house for battered women to avoid surrendering baby girl, Maureen, to DCFS.

Admittedly Mary is not the most stellar of moms, as reporter Carl Kozlowski describes her. But she is also plucky, according to the story, and wants to do what is required of her to be reunited with both her kids.

Here are some clips:

…..O’Connor hasn’t seen Eamon in more than 4½ months and lives in fear that he may soon forget who she is altogether, as DCFS officials have placed him in an adoptive placement home as preparation for letting a married couple of UCLA graduates adopt him. Meanwhile, O’Connor is hiding from the DCFS and police, keeping Maureen with her in defiance of a court order to hand over the infant or lose all parental rights completely.

If she is found, not only would she lose custody of the infant but also face jail time. What is most perplexing about the DCFS decision-making process is why O’Connor’s parents — her mother is a graduate of the elite University of Chicago and her father served in the military before launching a long career as a policeman — are not being given the option that normally exists in these cases, to adopt their grandchildren themselves.

[SNIP]

If she loses the right to reunite with Eamon, however, it could trigger a process that would terminate all her parental rights to both children within two months.

And then there’s Part 2, in which Mary tries to flee with her daughter, but is apprehended and baby Maureen is taken away as two Pasadena Weekly reporters—André Coleman and Carl Kozlowski—look on with undisguised alarm.

Read the harrowing tale in full.

I should stipulate here that I have talked to no one involved with this story, so I cannot entirely judge O’Connor’s plight. However, one thing that both Pas Weekly reporters have emphasized is that O’Connor has two able bodied and seemingly upstanding parents living in Illinois who have petitioned the court for custody of the two kids, but DCFS has turned them down, according to court documents. Instead, 17-month-old Eamon is to be readied for adoption by that nice couple of married UCLA grads.

And, while is no doubt true that the UCLA grads can give Eamon far more in the way of opportunities than Mary O’Connor likely ever can, let us hope we are not yet parceling out other people’s children on that basis.

This story is far from over, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, listen to Margaret Prescod on KPFK as she talks to mothers who are trying unsuccessfully to get their kids back from DCFS.

It gets one’s attention.

PS: Thank you to Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform for flagging this story.

Still light blogging this week, (although not as light as last week).

Back full force on Monday, Jan 10.

NOTE: VERY LIGHT BLOGGING THIS A.M. MORE STORIES AS THE DAY WEARS ON

Okay, here was the initial story, as reported Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times:

A Great Dane snatched a 6-month-old baby from her mother’s arms in Monrovia and ran with the girl in his mouth before dropping her in the street, authorities said Wednesday.

The baby’s mother was talking in the doorway of a neighbor’s home Monday when the 180-pound dog rushed out, slammed into her, snatched the baby with his jaws and ran off, said Lt. Michael Lee of the Monrovia Police Department.

The dog ran about 200 feet, carrying the baby by her right side, before dropping her in the street, Lee said. Police and paramedics found her there and airlifted the baby to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center after the 2:45 p.m. incident in the 600 block of Laurel Lane.

As of Thursday afternoon, according to the Monrovia PD, the baby is in stable condition and is expected to make a full recovery, even thought the entire situation was damned scary.

But, as if the whole horrific baby snatching incident wasn’t bad enough, there were these lines embedded in the story.

No criminal charges have been filed, but the Department of Children and Family Services is “pushing an investigation” into whether the mother did enough to protect her child, Lee said.

What??

Let me get this straight. A mother and baby are both traumatized, the baby nearly killed when a neighbor’s humongous, out-of-control dog lunges out from inside the neighbor’s house, snatches a 6-month old out of its mother’s arms, and DCFS plans to further traumatize all concerned by investigating the mom?

I called the Monrovia police department and spoke with Captain Jim Hunt about the whole DCFS issue. He was unequivocal. “There’s absolutely nothing that mother could have done,” said Hunt. “Nothing. The mother actually had a cut on her hand from trying to protect the baby.”

According to Hunt, it was someone at the hospital that called DCFS, meaning that social workers were honor bound to look into it.

“Hopefully family services will talk to officers and see quickly that there’s no way this is a case,” Hunt said, making no attempt to hide his frustration at the whole DCFS matter.

Yes, let us hope.

The dog attack was Monday. I talked to Captain Hunt on Thursday—enough time, one would think, to talk to police and witnesses and conclude that there’s nothing to see here, folks.

Anyway, a case worth keeping an eye on.

UPDATE: The National Coalition for Child Welfare Reform director, Richard Wexler, who pointed out the Great Dane story to me, has a post on the issue in which he expresses concern that DCFS may be more likely to wrongly pursue a case like this one, for fear of being labeled lax if they do not, because of the publicity around recent child deaths where social workers did not correctly read the signals.

BOEHNER CRIES, TOM LUTZ SEZ WHY

My very smart pal, Tom Lutz-–author of (along with other works) Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears“—has written an Op Ed on the matter of John Boehner’s tears that is by far the best of the essays on the matter that have been floated.