Ruby Guillen is a social worker who has worked for LA’s Department of Children and Family Services since 1995, and she cares enormously about the wellbeing of the thousands of kids with whom she’s come in contact.
Part of this has to do with the fact that she grew up in foster care herself.
Ruby is one of the people who drives to a child’s home to check things out after someone has called the DCFS hotline to warn that a child is being abused or neglected.
Ruby is also a hacker, a super geek, a code ninja. Now it seems she’s put her two passions together in a manner that relates directly to the brave new world of big data, risk modeling and analytics that many in the field see as the necessary next step in protecting children, while others are not so convinced.
Holden Slattery of the Chronicle of Social Change has Ruby’s story.
Here’s a clip:
…Since she started this job in 1995, Guillen has assessed the safety of 6,000 children in their homes, she estimates. She’s also encountered and responded to domestic violence, homicides, drug trafficking and sex trafficking.
“Everything that has to do with child welfare—I’ve done it all,” Guillen said in an interview.
Like all of the other case workers at DCFS, Guillen uses her knowledge and experience, along with the agency’s risk assessment tools and protocols, to decide how to keep children safe and improve their wellbeing—one child at a time.
Unlike many of her colleagues, Guillen has a passion for computer science and technology that she channels into creating mobile applications for child safety and wellbeing. Her aim is to use technology to start helping all the county’s vulnerable children, all at once.
Since she started this job in 1995, Guillen has assessed the safety of 6,000 children in their homes, she estimates. She’s also encountered and responded to domestic violence, homicides, drug trafficking and sex trafficking.
“Everything that has to do with child welfare—I’ve done it all,” Guillen said in an interview.
Like all of the other case workers at DCFS, Guillen uses her knowledge and experience, along with the agency’s risk assessment tools and protocols, to decide how to keep children safe and improve their wellbeing—one child at a time.
Unlike many of her colleagues, Guillen has a passion for computer science and technology that she channels into creating mobile applications for child safety and wellbeing. Her aim is to use technology to start helping all the county’s vulnerable children, all at once.
Guillen fell in love with technology when she joined the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s. While working full-time for DCFS, she decided to get a degree in computer information systems, and after graduating in 2010, she kept taking online programming classes.
This year Guillen led a team of fellow techies to victory in two hackathons hosted by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Hackathons are events in which computer programmers and others involved in software and hardware development collaborate intensively on projects.
At her first hackathon, in February, Guillen’s team created an app to prevent and report child sex trafficking. At her second hackathon, in June, they created an anti-bullying app.
Guillen has another app that she created for foster care placement, and she is now finishing up her work on a fourth app for assessing risk of child abuse or neglect.
This past Wednesday, the county’s recently formed Office of Child Protection met to discuss the uses and implications of big data and kids.
More on all that soon.
MORE ON JUDGE KOZINSKY’S ONGOING CAMPAIGN TO START HOLDING PROSECUTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS
We wrote in Monday’s California Justice Report newsletter (to which, if you haven’t yet subscribed, you are woefully missing out) about Judge Alex Kozinski’s new article in the Georgetown Law Journal, on reforming the criminal justice system.
But now Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post has been selectively serializing Kozinski’s paper. (Volokh clerked for Kozinski a couple of decades ago.) In any case, we thought you’d be interested in this particular chapter of the serialization in which Judge Kozinski takes aim at his latest favorite target of choice: prosecutors.
Naturally, Judge K also has recommendations about what we ought to be doing about the situation-–namely do away with judicial elections and then do away with absolute prosecutorial immunity.
It’s well written and wonderful stuff.
Here’s a clip, but do read thing whole thing:
On March 8, 2015, A.M. “Marty” Stroud III, a Shreveport lawyer and former state prosecutor, published a remarkable piece in the Shreveport Times reflecting on the case of Glenn Ford, who spent 30 years on death row after being convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1984. Ford was released after the state disclosed evidence proving his innocence. Stroud offered a public apology for his conduct in the case. It is well worth reading in full, but here is the gist of it:
At the time this case was tried there was evidence that would have cleared Glenn Ford. The easy and convenient argument is that the prosecutors did not know of such evidence, thus they were absolved of any responsibility for the wrongful conviction.
I can take no comfort in such an argument …. Had I been more inquisitive, perhaps the evidence would have come to light years ago …. My mindset was wrong and blinded me to my purpose of seeking justice, rather than obtaining a conviction of a person who I believed to be guilty. I did not hide evidence, I simply did not seriously consider that sufficient information may have been out there that could have led to a different conclusion. And that omission is on me.
I did not question the unfairness of Mr. Ford having appointed counsel who had never tried a criminal jury case much less a capital one. It never concerned me that the defense had insufficient funds to hire experts ….
The jury was all white, Mr. Ford was African-American. Potential African-American jurors were struck with little thought about potential discrimination …. I also participated in placing before the jury dubious testimony from a forensic pathologist that the shooter had to be left handed …. All too late, I learned that the testimony was pure junk science at its evil worst.
In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning. To borrow a phrase from Al Pacino in the movie “And Justice for All,” “Winning became everything.”
What is remarkable about Stroud’s statement is not that he gained a conviction and death sentence for a man that turned out to be innocent. Or that that man spent three decades caged like an animal. That kind of thing is all too common.
Nor is there anything unusual about the confluence of errors that led to the wrongful conviction — failure to uncover exculpatory evidence, inexperienced defense lawyers, race-based jury selection, junk science, and a judge who passively watched the parade and sat on his thumbs. The same goes for a prosecutorial attitude of God-like omniscience and unwillingness to entertain the possibility that the wrong man is being prosecuted. These things happen all the time in case, after case, after case.
What is unusual — unique really — is Stroud’s willingness to accept personal responsibility for the calamity he helped inflict on Glenn Ford and his family — his willingness to embrace this as his personal failure, not just an unfortunate failure of the system. Most prosecutorial attitudes run the gamut from “that’s why they put erasers on pencils” to “they must be guilty of something.” Everyone else in the system, starting with trial judges, absolves himself of personal responsibility when a heinous failure occurs. We could do with a lot less of that.
In a sense, however, the system is responsible because it places a great deal of power and responsibility in young, ambitious lawyers, like Stroud, who have every incentive to close their eyes to the possibility of innocence, to testilying by police, to bogus experts and to suggestive eyewitness identification procedures.
So, sign up for the CJR Newsletter. Now!
WHAT YOU MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED IN THE SANDRA BLAND VIDEO
Eli Hager, writing for the Marshall Project, noticed something at the end of the Sandra Bland arrest video that he found interesting. So we’re passing it along to you.