Editorials from around New York

Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New York’s newspapers:

Staten Island Advance on Administration for Children’s Services reforms

Aug. 17

There are two things that everyone can agree on: We need to protect children from abuse. And the current system, under the aegis of the city Administration for Children’s Services, needs fixing.

So where do we go from here?

A series of stories in the Advance recently laid out many of the shortcomings in the system. ACS case workers are given ridiculously large caseloads to manage. Many of those workers come to the job fresh out of college, so they have little experience. The hours are long. The pay is low.

It’s not a pretty milieu. Case workers often see the worst of humanity. Parents who brutalize their children. Homes where drug abuse and domestic abuse are rife. Clients can be confrontational and violent. Some of the worst neighborhoods in the city are an ACS employee’s workplace. Gut-wrenching decisions have to sometimes be made to remove children from their parents.

It can be soul-killing work. The kind of work you bring home with you. It’s no surprise that the turnover among caseworkers is high. But that turnover is yet another problem with the system. It is instabilities piled on top of instabilities.

Here’s another, larger problem: The fissures in the system only come to light when there is a shocking event like the death or horrific abuse of a child. Then we hear the outcry for the poor innocent. There are calls for reform. There are promises from the city that things will be done better in the future.

We’re not saying that ACS’s job is an easy one. Think of all the families in the five boroughs. Think of all the houses, all the apartments. How is a city agency supposed to keep track of all the needles in the haystack and keep everybody safe? ACS investigates 55,000 abuse and neglect claims a year. It’s a huge job.

Hard though the job is, however, that’s ACS’s mandate: To keep kids safe. And the agency has to do a better job. One child falling through the cracks is one child too many. A recent series of high-profile child deaths have led to a shake up in the agency and the installation of a new commissioner, David Hansell.

Hansell has pledged reform. Improvements are coming or have already arrived: Increased staffing. Modernized technical support for caseworkers. Enhanced access to case information. A safety app for smartphones. Borough-based coaching for supervisors and managers. More money for preventative services, including 400 family treatment and rehab preventive slots and 200 general preventive slots in existing rehabilitation programs. New training methods for caseworkers. And more coordination with the Department for Homeless Services, an agency whose clients frequently crisscross with ACS. A metrics-based Child-Stat system has also been re-launched.

It all sounds good. Now Hansell and ACS must make sure they follow through and implement all the changes.

But it can’t end there. ACS then must go further. The agency shouldn’t act only when there has been a calamity, when the bright light of publicity is upon them because of a child death or some story of horrific abuse. The agency must constantly re-evaluate itself, judge how it does its job, judge how it serves children, the most vulnerable among us. And make changes if necessary It’s something that Mayor Bill de Blasio must also make sure he stays on top of.

Staten Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn), a former ACS child care investigator and union vice president, has another idea to improve things. Savino is drafting legislation that would unseal unfounded complaints of abuse against parents for groups such as Seamen’s Society which work regularly with parents at risk of losing their children to foster care.

Her legislation comes on the heels of the death Zymere Perkins, 6, in Harlem. An internal ACS probe said the death was the result of flawed agency investigation of Zymere’s case. Multiple complaints filed against Zymere’s mother were deemed unfounded, but agencies outside of ACS were never notified of the complaints.

More communication among agencies that protect children is a positive, but we’re concerned that parents could be unfairly tarred if unfounded complaints against them are too widely circulated. After all, a parent could be the victim of harassing complaints from a divorced spouse, an antagonistic neighbor, anybody. There have to be some safeguards.

But still, it’s good that the conversation is happening on this many levels. Real change is needed. The momentum is there now. It’s up to City Hall and ACS to make it happen.

Online: https://bit.ly/2vYGLhv

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The New York Post on tech firms shutting white supremacists

Aug. 20

After the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, some tech firms and social-media sites were quick to ban white supremacists - far quicker than they were when it came to scrubbing radical Islamic terrorists.

GoDaddy, Google and even Russian internet officials booted the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white-supremacist web site, after it published a despicable derogatory story about the woman killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville.

Facebook took hits for failing to remove the event page for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Even OkCupid, a dating site owned by Match.com, banned white supremacist Chris Cantwell for life for joining that rally.

“There’s no room for hate in a place where you’re looking for love,” tweeted the folks at OkCupid.

Yet the tech companies haven’t treated all “objectionable” sites equally. Even after the shooting attack that nearly killed House GOP Majority Whip Steven Scalise, or the violent rallies against conservative speakers, little if anything was done to shut down online violence-spouting left-wing extremists, such as the antifa thugs.

Which raises a key question: Can these mammoth custodians of information and public debate be trusted to fairly decide what’s objectionable?

True, as private entities, these firms may be within their legal rights to decide whom they’ll do business with, who gets to use their sites and how.

But given their near-monopoly status and enormous power to control thought and debate, that ought to make everyone nervous.

Online: https://nyp.st/2fXAEo4

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Democrat & Chronicle on vetting information before sharing

Aug. 16

Perhaps you were among the people in the greater Rochester area who received a Facebook message that read “Share now this just happened in gates” and included a cellphone video of two police officers struggling with a man during an arrest. Maybe you shared the unsettling video across your social media network as well.

As we now know, the viral video was incorrectly attributed to the Gates Police Department when in fact the encounter happened in Euclid, Ohio. Gates Police Chief Jim VanBrederode said the mistaken identity is understandable given that Euclid Police cars and Gates Police cars look similar and the departments’ uniforms and patches look similar, too.

Unfortunately, this misidentification led to very real ugliness on social media directed at the Gates Police Department: “I am not driving through gates just watched a video of cops slamming and beating the crap out of a guy they were arresting. Police brutality at its finest, can’t for certain say if the guy was white it would of went different. Teach your cops how to protect the citizen’s not abuse them.”

Given the historic and well-documented strained relationship between law enforcement and communities of color, the last thing this - or any - community needs is an incorrectly attributed viral video sowing more seeds of discord.

We all have a responsibility for what we share on social media. Tweets and Facebook posts have consequences, and if you’re spreading misinformation, however well intentioned, you are part of a growing problem.

Nearly one-third of Americans (32 percent) say they have shared a made-up news story; with 14 percent admitting they have shared a story they knew was fake at the time. Meanwhile, 16 percent of U.S. adults say they have shared made-up news that they later realized was false.

And thanks to echo chambers on social media, many people seek out information that supports their preferred beliefs, including false information.

We must do better. We must be better.

The next time a viral video lands in your inbox, before sharing it, ask yourself “is this real?” Google the video to see if there are other examples. Look for news coverage of whatever is contained in the video. Search for the original video and go directly to the source.

The viral video that misidentifies the Gates police could have sparked something worse than ugly commentary. To its credit, the Gates Police Department used the viral video and the difficult discussion it spawned as an opportunity to meet members of the community who may be suspicious of law enforcement by holding an ice cream social.

Everyone must help to stop misinformation from spreading and to do so, we all need to vet information before spreading it across our networks.

Online: https://on.rocne.ws/2xcBMsj

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The Post-Star on the need for immigration reform

Aug. 19

Our immigration system hurts good people - people driven to take great risks for the sake of their families, so their parents will have food to eat and their children will have opportunities.

Before we judge people who have entered our country illegally or overstayed visas, we should ask ourselves a couple of questions: Who are they hurting, and what would we do in their circumstances?

Our country is being helped, not hurt, by people who work at jobs that employers say they otherwise could not fill, who contribute to our economy and our culture, who pay taxes but, because of their illegal immigration status, cannot receive the same benefits as citizens.

On Sunday, The Post-Star concludes its four-part series on immigration issues in the local area. We have seen in the first three stories that hundreds of immigrants work in the local area - at horse farms and dairy farms, in restaurants and quarries - and some of them are here legally and some illegally.

All of them would prefer to be here legally, but our immigration system does not always offer a way. Workers who come to Saratoga Springs just for the racing season, for example, can sometimes get seasonal visas, but that doesn’t work for those who come to Washington County for employment on dairy farms. Dairy farmers require year-round workers.

So people are faced with a choice: Help lift their families out of poverty through work that is hard but fairly compensated or stay in legal but hopeless circumstances abroad.

Enforcement of immigration laws raises questions of proportionality. Is it fair or just to separate husbands from wives and parents from children because, in an effort to improve their lives, they overstayed a visa?

Laws should be followed, but laws that are unfair and unjust should be changed. People who have proven through years of hard work and contributions that they are good citizens should have a path to citizenship.

Our series has shown that the immigration system is complex and hard to navigate. Sunday’s story tells of a man who is living in an uncertain limbo in the United States while waiting for word on his green card application. Meanwhile, as the months stretch on, he is not allowed to work. What is he supposed to do? If he leaves the country, he’ll never get back in, at least not legally.

The system is complicated, but the feelings that develop between immigrants living in this country, legally or illegally, and native-born citizens are simple and strong. People get married, have children. Lifelong friendships are formed. Employers come to value and rely on their immigrant employees.

In Sunday’s story, Jim and Sue Hooper, horse trainers, talk about how valuable a man from Peru has become to them, personally and professionally.

“He is like my brother,” Jim Hooper says.

Failure to provide a way for these valuable members of our community to become citizens does not hurt only them, it hurts us. It hurts our economy. It hurts individuals like Jim Hooper on a deeper level.

This series was meant to reveal that, here in upstate New York, immigrants are a substantial, if quiet, presence. We are not offering specific solutions - many improvements to our current system have been brought forward in Congress over the years, only to be defeated. We are pointing out the system isn’t working, not for immigrants and not for citizens, and for the country’s benefit it needs to be changed.

Online: https://bit.ly/2vpiiOK

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The Times Union on the North American Free Trade Agreement

Aug. 21

In the aftermath of the abortive attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, even Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters must realize that his claims that things would be “so easy” to do if only he were in the White House were empty boasts.

While repeal-and-replace is a promise most Americans are relieved to see fail, the stakes are quite different with another dubious effort that got underway this week on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Not only are high hopes for big successes probably unjustified, the American workers who pinned their hopes on Mr. Trump’s claims that he would bring back lost jobs may be in for some big disappointments.

This effort to presumably rewrite a trade deal more in America’s favor will require, for starters, persuading two sovereign nations to agree to provisions that might not be in their best interests. Mr. Trump has already alienated leaders of one of those nations with his attacks on Mexicans, his bluster about building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and his impotent claim that Mexico would pay for that fantastical barrier.

Now he’s been abandoned by some of the very people in this country to whom he might turn for expertise on the subtleties of trade. Following comments by Mr. Trump on the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, including his observation that “many sides” were responsible and that there were some “fine people” on all sides, Mr. Trump had to scrap two business advisory councils amid a wave of resignations by CEOs who clearly saw their affiliation with his administration as toxic.

Many governors, meanwhile, don’t want the “very big changes” Mr. Trump promised for NAFTA, according to a report by Stateline, part of the Pew Charitable Trusts. They see the benefits of NAFTA firsthand - in trade for farmers, manufacturers and other businesses in their states. For them, there is more to trade policy than the cheer meter at political rallies.

The reality is that in many ways, NAFTA has not been bad for the United States, and that job losses since it began in 1994 are more the result of increased automation, efficiency and globalization in general.

Are there U.S. plants in Mexico? Sure. Would renegotiating or scrapping NAFTA and raising tariffs bring them back? Would the almost certain rise in the cost of consumer goods help or harm the U.S. economy and American household budgets? Those and other complexities seem lost on a president who is gravely unstudied and uninterested in the finer points of international relations, global economics and seemingly anything involving facts, details and nuance.

Yes, NAFTA might use some tweaks. The bigger gains, however, lie not in wishing for jobs that aren’t coming back, but in developing jobs of the future, in high tech, green energy, and fields yet to even be seeded. And, perhaps, in tax reforms that encourage job creation here.

None of that is easy. America would better rise to the challenge if this president stopped pretending it is.

Online: https://bit.ly/2wyLUOP