Long Island is hoping former cops will become child services investigators

“It’s incumbent upon us to make sure these children are safe,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said at a press conference recently.“That’s job No.

1.” Blakeman launched a program in 2023 to hire more workers for child protective services in order to reduce caseloads at the Department of Social Services.But Blakeman’s January decision to bring on former police officers and detectives as special investigators to work on child abuse cases with DSS signifies that (unlike many policymakers and agency leaders) Blakeman has not lost sight of child protection’s most important function — protecting children. All over the county there is a shortage of workers at child welfare agencies.

A 2023 report from Casey Family Programs noted that “for about 15 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, child welfare turnover rates hovered between an estimated 20% and 40%, with an estimated national average of 30%.” The pandemic and ensuing labor shortage only made things worse; a recent study shows the 2023 turnover rate hitting 60% in New York in some residential facilities. The pay, of course, has never been great for these jobs.And the demands have gotten even harder — one worker in Texas told me she had to quit when her bosses asked her to stay overnight in the office with children who had been removed from their families.

And the public campaign in recent years to abolish child welfare or defund CPS has not helped.Who wants to work for an agency that is now referred to by advocates and politicians as the “family surveillance system”? One consistent problem, though, has always been the pipeline.

Who wants to do this work? Who is cut out for it? People go into this field expecting to solve problems and bring families together.But the reality of frontline CPS work is something else entirely.

Here’s how former ACS commissioner John Mattingly described the job to an audience a few years ago: You’re a 24-year-old woman.You have a degree in soc...