Deniability

I came across this article on Huffington Post about a cop caught on tape beating up a special ed student in school. This sort of story is not hard to find these days, that of cops being caught on tape doing wrong. The problem I want to talk about concerns how agencies approach questions on their people.

Image there was no camera. Imagine the kid goes home and tells his family the story of being beat up by a cop in the hallway at school. The family then goes to the police and asks them about it. Can you imagine the response? They wouldn't do much more than ask the cop if he did it, and when he denied it that would be the end of it. Anyone with experience with the police can likely identify with this assertion.

And it's no different with HHS. Try to complain to any case manager's boss that they aren't doing their job, that they've misued their power, that they've NOT acted in your child's best interests and you will be marginalized and outright ignored time and again. But in the above case, it was caught on tape and can't be denied.

Which brings me to my point for the general public - every time you hear of a case like this one, there are many more that weren't caught on tape and so are simply denied. The talking heads at the top of these agencies can drone on about what a good job they are doing, but that doesn't mean the people trying to report the abuse are lying, it doesn't mean they're crazy, it just means that all systems such as HHS will act to cover their own behinds first and will act in the best interests of children and families second - a very distant second at best.

The current head of HHS in Nebraska, Kerry Winterer personally gave his card to Melanie after the afternoon conference and said he wanted to meet with FAM at some point. How he handles this meeting will tell us pretty much everything we need to know about his intentions. I can only hope he would rather deeply listen to the experiences of familes than try to blindly defend HHS.